FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
IIRC, the Bundy standoff had no disagreement over the facts for the standoff itself, and the subsequent killing of one of the participants resulted in the FBI shooters being caught tampering with evidence. None of this changed the tribal split.
Rittenhouse was filmed from multiple angles, and the film was available more or less immediately. Evidence abounded that he had acted within the law, evidence of him committing a crime did not exist. In the subsequent trial, every significant additional piece of evidence broke in his favor. None of this, nor even his acquittal, changed the tribal split.
My assessment is that the BLM riots and Jan 6th followed similar patterns. Both are much larger scale and far more complex, but the pattern of the evidence consistently breaking one way seems to me to hold in both.
We are past the point where evidence is dispositive. People want results, not process. It's not even really a mystery why: people on both sides perceive government as ineffectual at securing their values, and perceive those values under existential threat from their tribal opposites. Under such conditions, the natural consequence is a loss of faith in institutions and burgeoning extremism in pursuit of a solution to the perceived crisis.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16hr ago
Not that amazing. We have numerous previous incidents demonstrating the American public's total incapacity for achieving consensus over tribally-charged law enforcement incidents. For at least one side, and perhaps both, it is "who, whom" all the way down. This has obviously not gotten better since the Bundy standoff, BLM riots, rittenhouse and Jan 6th. It is pretty obviously not going to get better in the foreseeable future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Tom Clancy was one of my favorite authors growing up; I read all his stuff up through Rainbow Six, and I'd say it definitely shaped my worldview, first in a "this is how the world is" way as a kid and teenager, and then contrasting the backlash as reality intruded as an adult. Favorite books were Without Remorse, Clear and Present Danger, and the Sum of All Fears. Even looking back without rereading them, there's a ton of passages that look very, very different from an adult perspective than as a naive kid, and I've often thought you could use his books as a pretty good example of why the political world he portrayed has collapsed so badly since.
You have a long, long history of describing yourself as:
- Severely disabled and destitute, with a dysfunctional family and no significant social ties.
- Terminally depressed, with little to nothing to live for and zero hope that things will improve.
- Incredibly frustrated that people you consider on your side are not committing acts of lawless violence and terrorism against people you regard as on the other side.
- Possessed of a profound, murderous hatred of your tribal opposites as a class, to the point of routinely mocking your allies for not murdering them already.
I personally have argued to you that it is in fact exceedingly obvious that individuals possessed of even minimal competence and resources can inflict such absurdly disproportionate harm to society that the culture war is a significant threat to our society's continued function. When I declined to provide you for specific details of how to do so, you spent some effort to call me out as a liar.
My assessment is that you resent what peace we currently enjoy and wish for nothing more than to see that peace drowned in blood. I think anyone who answers the questions you ask here is a fool.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Death cometh, soon or late.
All humans die, and relatively soon. If we can preserve treasures, our children's children can enjoy them as well. Losing them cuts the links between past and present, and that is a hateful thing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
But what common ground can you find with someone who will engage in a fascist distortion of truth in order to justify their violence?
...My confidence that the other commenters are correct, and that you are trolling. The part where you constantly hew to general statements and abstractions sort of gives it away.
What "violence" specifically are you referring to? Which "fascistic distortions of truth"? When I and others talk about such things, we have no trouble grounding the discussion in specific cases, and working toward general principles from there. You would be well advised to do likewise.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
Is it possible to share space with people who have evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints?
In some circumstances, observably, yes. You could examine how this happens. In some circumstances, observably, no, and this could also be examined. You could dig into what the breakpoints are, where one situation devolves into the other.
If the purpose of discourse is to arrive, together, at convergent notions of objective reality in the face of the vast impulse towards fiction and willful delusion, then when do you reject that which is demonstrably evil?
Not yet. Hopefully, not soon.
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
Alternatively, see here.
The purpose of discourse is to arrive at the truth. But once you arrive at the truth, discourse has served its purpose, and therefore ends. This place exists to promote discourse; to the extent that your questions have been answered and you have arrived at certainty, you have no place here. This is a place of charity, and without doubts and questions, charity cannot exist.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
Yes, I'm aware that if we assume a particular form of hard Materialism axiomatically, then Determinism or something much like it is a necessary consequence. But there is no actual reason to take that particular form of hard Materialism as one's axiom, and crucially, adopting it as an axiom appears, speaking strictly within the Materialist frame, to degrade rather than improve one's ability to make predictions about the material world.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
If better data arrives that goes against determinism, should we discard it? Because determinism has been a popular theory for a very long time, the various deterministic theories have been empirically tested, and they have been uniformly falsified. What you are proposing here is the final stage of Determinism of the Gaps, refusing to acknowledge all previous tests and all previous data, making no testable predictions at all, and relying entirely on, to put it succinctly, faith.
Sure, that might change in the future. Also in the future, the Son of Man might return on a cloud in glory to judge the quick and the dead. Also in the future, the stars in the night sky might be replaced by a high-score readout, and then reality as we know it gets turned off. But I have actually read a few of the old books, enough to know that what your argument is not particularly new, and what is relatively new is the part where you've (wisely) given up on making empirical claims or predictions entirely. I disagree that Determinism should be treated as the best available hypothesis when it now makes no predictions and all previous predictions it made have been falsified.
I do recognize that this is tangential to your main point, though, and my apologies. it's a bugbear for me.
Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.
...
Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics?
How does your belief in everything non-quantum being fully clockwork yield non-identical predictions to my belief in free will? I contend that in this case the answer is not mu, as my belief in free will delivers superior predictions about reality. My evidence for this is the way that every functional system we have relating to managing interpersonal interactions operate off the assumption of free will, zero functional systems for managing interpersonal interactions operate off deterministic assumptions, and every attempt to build such systems off deterministic assumptions (and there have been many) have uniformly failed.
But how could it be any other way?
Reality around us could not be baseline reality, and our minds have a connection to the actual baseline reality. It doesn't really matter if baseline reality is God or the simulation server in this case. Claims that our minds are deterministic must confront the fact that they do not operate in a deterministic fashion at any level, and most claims and even evidence to the contrary appear to have been falsified.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
I don't think they're capable of receiving and internalizing the message, unfortunately. It doesn't help that the creative talent pipeline is fucked as well. People chasing quality will find ways to produce quality in their small pockets; most of these large studios will probably just die. Welcome to the new Dark Ages.
But the market has more or less said, as far as I have seen, that it tolerates a lot of blue/woke design choices though?
You cite a bunch of correlated factors on the production end, all of which are accurate. It is indeed true that if all the major studios and all the major media outlets all adopt an ideological tack in the same direction, the industry as a whole will indeed move in that direction.
As for customers not buying a lot of new games or consoles anymore, that's gotta be partly down to the economy and due to publishers playing it too safe instead of creating anything very creative most of the time? They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.
There will always be excuses for why failure is the fault of nebulous outside forces and not the deliberate decisions of those in positions of authority. These excuses are not going to get Doctor Who another season. Take Star Wars in particular; they've just had a major triple-A game release within the last year or so. Searching for "star wars outlaws sales" gives me the following summary:
Star Wars Outlaws has sold approximately 1 million units since its release in August 2024, but it underperformed compared to Ubisoft's expectations. Despite receiving generally positive reviews, the game struggled in a competitive market and faced challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity.
...Why would it face challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity? Isn't the whole point of the Star Wars brand that it's about as close to universally-popular as you can get? Well, not any more, apparently.
They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.
Marvel released 21 movies leading up to Endgame, and I watched most of them. I watched I think two movies post-endgame. I'll never watch another marvel production again. I do not appear to be alone in this decision. Why is it that 21 movies = massive success, but 23 = dismal failure?
Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.
Bungie made a money printer with Destiny and Destiny 2. It's now in serious trouble. Destiny 2 is my hole, it was made for me! I got in as free-to-play, spent increasing amounts of money on DLC, evangelized the game to other players. When the Lightfall DLC dropped, I went all-in and paid a hundred bucks to pre-order the whole expansion package. How'd that go? ...I quit Destiny for good. A lot of other people did too. Bungie's done massive layoffs, game quality has dropped into the toilet with tons of bugs and bad design choices.
But it's cool, they've got a new game coming, a revival of their classic Marathon IP. It's now been delayed, its lunch has been pretty thoroughly eaten by Arc Raiders, and its current trajectory is pretty clearly toward total failure. Sony paid 3 billion for this company, right about the time their output turned to literal shit.
More broadly, was Tolkien overdone? Was Wheel of Time overdone? You're telling me there wasn't actually a market for big-budget fantasy TV, after the dismal collapse of Game of Thrones? Witcher was shaping up to be a hit; why did it implode?
If tentpole IP is a bad investment, why did everyone invest so hard into it, and where's the better path forward that they're missing?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
Were there particular cases you had in mind?
Bundy standoff versus CHAZ/CHOP seems like a pretty concrete example.
Concord is the example currently passing from myth into legend. A reported development cost of $400 million and most of a decade in development. The result:
Upon release, Concord failed to exceed 700 simultaneous players on Steam. Will Nelson of PCGamesN noted that compared to Helldivers 2, a multiplayer game released by Sony in the same year, Concord's player count was much lower than the 400,000 Steam players Helldivers 2 attracted at launch. Nelson attributed Concord's poor performance to a lack of uniqueness and a high price while competing in a heavily saturated market dominated by free-to-play games like Overwatch 2 and Valorant. One week after launch, on August 29, the game had 162 simultaneous players on Steam. It was estimated that less than a week after release, the game had sold a total of around 25,000 units, with sales of 10,000 on Steam and 15,000 on PlayStation.
Due to the magnitude of its commercial failure, it is cited by various publications, including The Guardian, PC Gamer, ComicBook.com, and Insider Gaming, as one of the biggest failures in video game history.
There's been a fair amount of competition for that title in the triple-A games market.
More generally, pick a popular media franchise and check how it's done over the last decade. The Witcher, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, superhero media generally. Willow got a revival as a streaming show that did so bad it's been literally scrubbed off the internet. Aliens, predator, terminator are in a bad way. Arguments over whether woke media were the future or a dead-end used to be quite frequent here, with reds generally arguing "get woke, go broke" and blues arguing "this is what modern audiences want". It seems to me that we don't have those discussions any more because the observed market outcomes have more or less settled the question. In fact, I would argue that the drop in quality has become so egregious and so widespread that it has had a measurable impact on customer behavior across the media landscape, with customers becoming significantly more reluctant to give new content a chance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
Speech is not inherently violent. Aesthetics are not inherently violent. The outrageous weirdness of modern culture has not yet given rise to 70s levels of violence. It's quite possible that they never will.
A good summary of my long-term participation here would be that I'm deeply skeptical that the assertion you lay out here fundamentally is or will remain true, but arguing it would require more space than is available in the present margin. Suffice to say, I think I have a good grasp of your argument here, and though I am very worried it is wrong, I can readily recognize that there's an abundance of persuasive evidence on your side.
To sketch out an initial sally, though, consider how you're approaching the concept of "violence" here. I assume you're referring to something like US homicide rate by year. I think the way most people look at that graph is that you have "US Society", and in the 1960s something goes wrong with "US Society" and a real murder problem develops, and then in the 90s "US Society" finally gets a handle on things and the problem largely resolves itself. So we look at the present situation, and we compare it to the 60s and 70s, and we say "by objective measures, this problem is not nearly as bad as what we had before, and what we had before was itself survivable, so we're probably going to be okay."
As I see it, a more accurate description would be that something went wrong with "US Society" in the 1960s, and a real murder problem develops... and over the next thirty years, that problem and the root causes giving rise to it pretty thoroughly destroy the previously existing "US Society" and replace it with a very different social order. The accumulated radical changes are eventually sufficient to get the problem being measured back down to a manageable level, but the old society is fundamentally and permanently changed in the process.
In the 1970s, we had tens of thousands of bombings in a world where dynamite and nitrogen fertilizer were available in hardware stores on a cash-and-carry basis. That world no longer exists.
In the 1970s, we had lots and lots of murders in a world with 1970s trauma medicine. Our current murder rate is not backstopped by 1970s trauma medicine.
In the 1970s, we had violent crime waves policed by cops filling out paper forms and relying on eyewitnesses. Now we have an automated surveillance state that would have given the East Germans wet dreams.
In the 1970s, we had a highly-cohesive and values-homogenous culture. Now we are polarized and atomized to an almost incomprehensible degree, and signs of broad-based values incoherence are rampant.
The question is, how should we frame current data? Is it the raw murder rate, or is it the murder rate versus the energy expended to suppress murder? The latter, it seems to me, gives a more sobering view.
Firearms culture, militarized policing, mass incarceration, pervasive surveillance, and radically advanced trauma medicine are among the bigger cards we played to get things back in line the last time social trends got going in the wrong direction. If they get going in the wrong direction now, we don't get to replay these cards; whatever we see is the trend with these adaptions already taken into account. I'm skeptical that many cards that big remain in our hand, and were such cards available, whether we would recognize a continuous "US Society" on the other side of playing them.
More generally, I'm not sure what is meant by speech and aesthetics not being "inherently violent". I observe a strong correlation between harshness of words and harshness of actions. Not a perfect correlation, certainly, but a much, much stronger one than we might infer from "...but words will never hurt me." Words have often gotten people killed. Words have often coordinated violence at every scale from the interpersonal to continent-spanning war. It does not seem to me that a clean demarcation exists where the words "those people are the problem, we should kill them" are totally fine, and it's only the mob actually coming together and killing those people that's the problem.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
And by contrast, the sexist/racist hiring for production of cultural products in the US has resulted in an astonishingly massive drop in content quality across the entire entertainment sector, and several of the most notable entertainment disasters ever seen.
My assessment of the current internet is that it probably has a far more significant population take-up of New Age religions, sex cults, exotic drugs, serial killers, and Godless communists than the 60s and 70s did. I'm not highly confident about the math, but it looks to me like what would be maybe a few dozen-thousand people in a handful of geographic hotspots is now multiple millions of people spread through every layer of society, fully normalized and monetized. See the seminal "toaster fuckers" meme for a straightforward description of the mechanism, then observe that the Trans movement we're now perhaps seeing the tail end of would not have been wildly out of place in the 60s or 70s, but there it would have been grassroots and confined to a neighborhood or two in each of a few major cities, and the current iteration has been nation-wide and received overwhelming support from most institutions of note.
I do not think our current era is winning the less-crazy game.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
Would it surprise you to learn that arguments about discrimination, concern over those arguments, and actions taken to address those concerns have been a notable driver of sociopolitical change in our society for at least the last century?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
Let me attempt to be more precise, then. Do you expect arguments against societal-level discrimination to continue to hold water?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
Do you expect arguments against discrimination to ever hold water in any context, ever again?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
23d ago
A very simple definition would go something like this: Modernism was the initial recognition that all the grand narratives of the old world have been smashed to pieces by technology and the War, Postmodernism is living in that "heap of broken images" and trying to have fun throwing the pieces around, and the "post-Postmodern" movements since then have been trying to will a grand narrative back into being.
Modernism drew deep on the coffers of civilizational history and set out to build a glorious cultural edifice.
Postmodernism noted that the work was not going well, but assumed that we might draw deep again so that the work might continue and something like the original goal might be reached.
We now recognize that the coffers are empty and that the work has failed, that the creditors are beating on the door and that there is nothing with which we might pay them.
Put another way, it seems to me that one of the notable features of Postmodernism was that, for all its critiquing, it appears to have assumed that the conditions in which it was born would obtain indefinitely, that the cultural assumptions and material realities it framed itself would ensure its own relevance. One might say that it did not take its own arguments seriously enough.
I direct your attention to the portion involving the following passage:
This is an entirely reasonable interpretation of Darwin's initial comment, and it seems pretty similar to the interpretation several of the posters went with when formulating replies, which were then ignored. I think what you wrote would have been a much better comment than what he went with, considerably less inflammatory, and somewhat higher in content. Unfortunately, the problem is that this is an argument you are imagining, not the argument Darwin actually is making. He absolutely is not claiming that Bezos or any other businessman has a right to sell whatever they choose. He absolutely is not arguing that private censorship is okay (or wrong), or even agreeing that state censorship is wrong (or okay). The argument you are imagining does not exist in that thread.
That may seem like a strong claim. Fortunately, I can prove it pretty solidly, because in that very thread darwin himself very explicitly said so...
[Insert lengthy quote from the comment under discussion]
...In other words, he doesn't actually endorse anything he wrote in that original comment. Nothing you described above was at all the argument he claims to be making, which is unsurprising since the argument he claims to have been making cannot be straightforwardly derived from what he actually wrote. Everyone in that thread who assumed he was speaking plainly and in good faith wasted their time, as you did just now, because he had zero intention of actually prosecuting the argument he implied he was making. His actual argument was that agreeing with BJ's position necessarily makes you either a socialist or a hypocrite, because the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it. That's the entire content of his original post, according to a detailed explanation by the man himself.
Welcome to arguing with Darwin.
Given that his own explanation of his comment completely contradicts your understanding*, it's worth looking at what he actually said in some detail.
Yes, if you completely ignore the difference between government coercion and private businesses.
Did the original essay ignore the difference between government coercion and private business? No, in fact, because the essay is solely about why "book burning" is a bad thing in the abstract, not about whether people should be prevented from doing it, much less how this prevention might be accomplished. His final conclusion is that "book burning" is a loser strategy anyway, so there's no point in worrying about it. Darwin completely ignores the argument BJ made, preferring to substituting an argument that he himself finds more convinient. He does this, by his own admission, because he was annoyed that BJ was saying something negative about his preferred ideology.
Of course, it wouldn't be very persuasive for him to straightforwardly say "This abstract question is dumb, let's talk about a different concrete issue instead". What he does instead is frame his comment as an accusation: "you completely ignore [x]", rather than as a statement of his own views: "I think [x]". Because he does this in as inflammatory a manner as possible, people are too busy reacting to his snarling tone to notice he's pulled a switcharoo on the actual argument being made. Further, the frame of the discussion is now whether the OP did or did not ignore something important about an issue the OP did not even address; meanwhile, in darwin's mind, he has not even offered an opinion of his own at all, so he has zero reason to respond to those like yourself who "misinterpret" him as having done so.
I would be interested to hear how the above is best summarized as me "not liking his arguments".
No, he could not, and you suggesting this demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of both the mechanics and the legalities of employing firearms in self-defense.
"Shooting to wound" or "shooting to disable" is not a technique law enforcement officers are taught, because it is, to a first approximation, not a real thing. Self-defense shooting training universally focuses on firing center of mass and as rapidly as possible, because this is by far the best, safest and most effective way to shoot in a self-defense scenario. The next-best target is the head. Limbs move around a lot more than bodies and heads, hitting them is not "non-lethal" by any reasonable definition due to the arteries involved, and missed shots can easily continue on to strike bystanders behind the target.
"Firing to intimidate", "warning shots" and so on are, to my knowledge, flatly illegal in all jurisdictions. Firearms are lethal weapons, and to legitimately discharge a firearm in self-defense requires you to believe you are beyond the point of warnings. Law Enforcement Officers give warnings by shouting them, not by discharging firearms.
In this specific case, the officer firing through the windshield was presented with a target consisting of the driver's upper torso and head, at close range and on minimal timing. The doctrine-correct response is to aim for center-of-mass or the head.
If you want fewer things like this to happen in the future, the obvious way would be for Blue Tribe to stop demonizing legitimate law enforcement and those conducting it, for Blue Tribers to stop attempting to disrupt legitimate law-enforcement operations, for Blue Tribe to create general knowledge that attempting to interfere in legitimate law enforcement operations by driving an SUV into the middle of them is not a good idea, and finally for Blue Tribe to internalize that if you are being ordered out of your car by officers of the law approaching on foot, the proper response is not to put your vehicle in drive and attempt to drive away.
It is obvious that Blues here and in the public at large desperately want this to be Law Enforcement's fault, but in fact the officers made zero observable mistakes, and the "protester" did everything wrong. She participated in a mob attempting to disrupt law enforcement. She blocked the road with her vehicle. She refused to comply with lawful orders. She attempted to drive away, struck an officer in the process, and in the process of this was shot dead. Every one of those actions was a profoundly stupid choice. Make enough stupid choices in sequence, and it is easy to get dead. The solution is not to provide additional protections to people making stupid choices, it is to teach people not to make stupid choices.
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