FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Well spoken and well reasoned. I'm curious what of the above @JeSuisCharlie would disagree with.
If I were to disagree with @Soteriologian's thesis, I think I would start with this part:
The right, in contrast, has no Movement, especially not one that compels moral authority over the state to any relevant degree in #currentyear. There are two wings of the right: the actual tradcons (which look like this), and the Nazis (which often LARP as tradcons and look like this). If you bomb an abortion clinic or a migrant detention center, there will be no rallying to your defense by women with hundreds of thousands of likes inquiring when the conjugal visits will begin in your prison, there will be no photographer taking Renaissance photos or featuring your drip in Time magazine. Now, I know Luigi is unusually attractive, and the Clavicular worldview is to attribute the fanfare to that. But let's be real: if Luigi had shot a leftist figurehead, this is not the reaction he would have received. Luigi's cuteness is useful to the movement: the movement is not subservient to the actions of the most cute, as the Clavicular model would contend.
The basic nature of the problem he's pointing out here is undeniable. Blues are mobilized, organized, and integrated into an overwhelmingly powerful machine. Reds are none of these things, and thus their ability to secure or effectively wield power is appallingly limited.
On the other hand, I think there is incontrovertible evidence that this reality is visibly eroding over time, as Reds do in fact mobilize, organize, and integrate for the purposes of fighting for and wielding power in a serious fashion. I think Reds' position is better now than it was two years ago, better two years ago than it was four years ago, and so on, in a pretty clear straight line back to the eruption of the current culture war in 2013-2014.
@Soteriologian gestures at the enormous power of the Media, and in fact the media is enormously powerful... only, that power is a bare fraction of what it once was, and is pretty clearly sliding toward zero.
Blues used to brag about their ideological stranglehold over the entertainment industry, but that industry has become a laughing-stock being actively scavenged by a new industry of not-Blues.
Blues continue to revel in their ideological stranglehold of the education industry, but that industry is in serious decline, and I hope to live to see its expiration.
Blues reveled in their political dominance, but that dominance appears to me to likewise be coming apart. The Overton window continues to expand beyond the narrow constraints they attempted to enforce. @Soteriologian is correct that Reds as a collective are not to the point of embracing real conflict theory toward Blue society, but it seems obvious to me that we have been moving significantly and steadily in that direction for years now, and that this trend seems unlikely to me to stop for the foreseeable future.
It also seems clear to me that these significant improvements in the Red situation were not driven by "Overminds" like Yarvin or Hanania, but rather by exactly the sort of slow, grinding, tedious, grass-roots common-knowledge-generation @Soteriologian is dismissive of:
All it can do is appeal to the existing laws and say, "See, the immigrant with a knife stabbed somebody! That's against the law! The police should ARREST him, and and... maybe even DEPORT him."
He is correct that pointing out the unworkable hypocrisy of Blue social systems is unlikely to secure short-term tactical victory. What it can and has done, I think, is generate steadily increasing capacity for meaningful resistance to those systems, by building a long-term shared understanding of the fractal wretchedness of the system that currently rules us. A good example of this, I think, is Spencer Pratt's run for mayor of LA. One might argue that such a run is quixotic, as he is almost certainly not going to secure the office. On the other hand, what his run offers is a stark reminder, from this day forward, that things might be otherwise than they are, a spotlight on the responsibility of those he ran against and those who voted against him for the continued misery and filth in which they cocoon themselves. One might argue that Red resistance is currently insufficient to turn the tide because of the failures of previous generations to do what was necessary; I think it will continue to be insufficient right up until it becomes decisive.
As for "Overlords", Hanania in particular seems constitutionally incapable of recognizing and cooperating with this process, apparently due to being too enamored with the existing formalities of power as they have heretofore been arranged. I would level a similar critique against Yarvin, but he appears to me to employ somewhat more humility and ideological flexibility than Hanania, who seems more inclined to picking a hill to die on.
Consider the following:
In fact, I'll go so far as to say a lot of the Overminds they do have are false, in the sense that I think incidents like Jan 6 are setups to get rightoids to clown themselves into getting arrested. They think they're crossing the Rubicon with Caesar, but they're really just being goaded into making fools of themselves by agents more intelligent than they are running circles around them in their fog of war.
Do you agree with this assessment of the events of Jan 6th? If you had a magical button that could erase the events of Jan 6th from the timeline, would you press it? I'm confident Hanania would, and if he would not it would be because he thought it was a net-harm to his populist enemies. I would not, because it seems to me that the outcome has been and will likely continue to be of net-benefit to Reds. Reds as a tribe did not abandon the J6 protestors, and many of the Red leaders who did do so have subsequently been coordinated against by the tribe as a whole. In fact, J6 looks an awful lot like exactly the sort of "real power" discussed above in the reactions to Mangione, doesn't it? And where did it emerge from? Certainly not from Hanania and his ilk.
Angela Davis probably thought she was "crossing the Rubicon" when she provided material support in a terrorist action that resulted in the murder of a federal judge. Was that a wise move on her part? Under most normie analysis, it shouldn't be, but can we argue with the results? @Soteriologian scorns "rightoids" "getting themselves arrested" while "agents more intelligent than they are running circles around them", but isn't this exactly the sort of action you seem to be arguing for?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
How many wealthy and influential Royalists lived in the Colonies before the Boston Massacre? How many lived in the Colonies after the revolution?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
If you think my history and sequences of statements is that of a troll/shit-stirrer then I recommend for your own sanity and mine that you block or just ignore me.
Naw. I occasionally find your comments annoying, but my impression is that you are pretty clearly the good kind of annoying. That is, I may disagree with what you say, but my expectation is that what you say now will be at least roughly congruent with what you've said previously and will say in the future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I can civility express an opinion to matter how distasteful you feel it is, and that constitutes normal behavior here.
True.
"Following around" on a forum means dragging the content of one thread into another.
This forum runs on a reputation economy. People can remember the things you say, and use sequences of statements to build a working model of your behavior and goals, and steer their interactions with you thereby.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Capacity to accept extreme sacrifices helps whether you are fighting or not fighting. I agree with you, I think, that such a capacity does not in and of itself guarantee victory, peace or prosperity, but the good life runs on sacrifice, and if individuals or collectives are not willing to make those sacrifices personally, they will sooner or later run out of other peoples' sacrifices, in a similar way to how socialists inevitably run out of other peoples' money.
Horatius accepts dying well with a spear in hand, facing the foe. Christian martyrs die well, refusing to fight on principle. Either of these are, I think, valid expressions of accepting sacrifice, of the sort durable peace and prosperity are built on. But what you seem to be pointing to in this thread is that there is a sort of illusory sacrifice, where mere indolence masquerades as principle: "not organizing and not compromising is my principle. How about a fruitless gesture instead?" I would point out that there's also a similar illusory sacrifice pursuing violence-for-its-own-sake; CatgirlKulak and the Israel-Palestine conflicts seem like good examples of this failure mode.
Sacrifice is necessary, but waste is not sacrifice, and an inability to distinguish the two leads to disaster. Are we not fighting because it is not time to fight, or are we not fighting because fighting would be scary? Are we not fighting because fighting is wrong, or are we not fighting because we are too comfortable?
I have a chronic argument running with @CapitalRoom and @The_Nybbler on this subject for some years now. They argue that the time to fight has passed us by, and seem to want either fighting now, or an admission that fighting will never happen. My position is that while the current position is miserable and undignified, we are in fact moving in the correct direction, and endurance continues to be the correct choice.
In your opinion, what does organizing look like? What does compromising principle look like?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
And I think that's very beautifully polished bullshit. "Free to die" is a very different kind of freedom from "Free to live a happy and prosperous life doing all the stuff you (plural) think I shouldn't do".
The latter is built on the former. Without the former, the latter disintigrates.
Jerking off to softcore videos of photorealistic AI-gen women seems extremely lame to me, lamer than watching live-action porn featuring real women (which is already pretty lame). On the other hand, is watching photorealistic AI-gen porn lamer than watching hentai, animated furry porn, or similar?
Gabe: Wait. What are you doing?
Tycho: Putting my Lancer up here, with Frostmourne. I assumed this was where we were putting our epic weapons.
Gabe: No, no, na-no no. This is where we put rad things. Not bullshit, like your pretend gun.
Tycho: Frostmourne is a pretend sword.
Gabe: No, it's a real sword, based on a pretend sword.
Gabe: That is a fake gun, based on a pretend gun. It's fake twice.
Tycho: You teach me so much, Gabriel. You teach us all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
To be fair, this claim is significantly more plausible if you've seen UK fences.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Drejka cannot be the aggressor, because McGlockton initiated their altercation with a brutal physical assault that caught Drejka completely unawares and laid him prone on the ground. This does not mean that Drejka was subsequently justified in shooting him in response; it was a very iffy shoot, and as I argued at considerable length at the time, Drejka's conviction was an acceptable outcome. It's actually a fairly interesting case, and I reference it often to provide illumination on the subject of personal defense with firearms.
Drejka's subsequent conviction and its justification are irrelevant to the point at hand, though, which is that Drejka was not the aggressor, which is one of the criteria you were looking for when selecting this example.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Why it fits your request partially: It’s a self-defense claim used by a white aggressor against a Black victim, showing how police initially accepted the shooter’s framing of events.
Here is a video recording of the McGlockton shooting. It clearly shows that McGlockton is the aggressor. If you disagree, I would be quite interested in hearing your argument as to why.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
People who are upset by this appear to want the old sociopolitical system, wherein there was a strict division of labor between the people who cranked out images of shit being dumped on the hated outgroup by laughing cartoons of tribal champions, and the actual tribal champions who directly benefited from those images while standing solemnly before a podium in a very expensive suit extruding the blandest possible word-product into an array of very official microphones. If one is going to argue for this previous system, one should argue for it as it actually was, not as it might be imagined to be, particularly in the imagination of the side employing a large majority of the old shit-pouring cartoon experts.
Also, Hideous Hermaphroditical Character, same as it ever was.
I remember Trace running his prank on Libs, what'd he do with DataRepublican or Barnaby?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
what about kids making content on social media, ie youtube?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
a week and a half to two weeks for me. It ate up pretty much all my free time over that span, though.
damn opsec....
I'm currently using Midjourney, and I'm only just dipping my toes in the shallow end. Here's what I've learned so far:
Midjourney does not seem capable of generating a clean sprite sheet, nor tiling textures. If there's a way to do it, I haven't found it yet. What I have been able to do is to generate good-looking pixel-art images of terrain, then chop chunks out of that terrain and compile them into a sheet of raw chunks. My plan is to process these chunks using photoshop magic (desaturate to greyscale, clamp number of colors to a small value, gradient map to recolor with a consistent pallete) and possibly some cleanup by hand to eliminate rendering artifacts and inconsistencies in the chunks, and then use the chunks like lego pieces to assemble production-quality sprites. Creating tiling textures is fairly trivial in photoshop using filter > other > offset and fill > content-aware or minor editing.
I've started experimenting with re-rendering of images I've painted myself, but so far the results have been unusable. I think this is probably just lack of knowledge on my part, so I'm gonna keep digging on it.
I've also started testing generation of monster sprites. So far the results for that have also been unusable, but did have some interesting bits. I'm hoping the re-rendering might help a lot here if I can get it working properly.
You got some examples of the kind of pixel art you're going for? any details on the sorts of sprites you're trying to make?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
On my tank game, I got a simple grenade-throwing enemy working using unity's Behavior system, my collaborator got his messaging system working, and we got a bunch of old systems cleaned up and working properly again. He's working on engine and transmission mechanics, while I've had to hop over to another project where I'm trying to build a pixel-art environment tile set for another collaborator's RPG. After much experimentation for painting techniques for high-detail pixel art, I caved and got myself a midjourney subscription. The plan is currently to use midjourney to generate chunks of terrain detail, which I will then cut out into raw sprites. I will then clean up and normalize these to remove generation artifacts and inconsistencies, then use them to assemble the final terrain sprites. So far, it's working pretty well, and is the first time I've used AI for serious art production.
@Southkraut, @ArjinFerman, how go the projects?
It depends on your understanding of the problem, I think.
If the problem is "blacks are statistically distinguishable from whites at a population level due to worse outcomes", probably.
On the other hand, the Mississippi Miracle and similar data points indicate that we do know how to secure significantly better outcomes for black people in a variety of ways, and my tribe at least is actively being prevented from fixing the problem.
Bukele in El Salvador is another example of the difference between the three. El Salvador's murder rate was absolutely intractable, right up until the moment it was promptly tracted. One of my strongest objections to the general thread of HBD discourse is the pretense that nothing can be done, when in fact it is highly probable that we could significantly reduce many of these gaps and then reassess. Maybe if we can't completely erase the gap, all the problems will persist... alternatively, maybe they won't be as bad, and maybe significant improvements in one area will lead to better outcomes being possible in other areas.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
"we can't fix this at all"
vs
"everything we've tried to fix this has failed"
vs
"actually, we have a way to fix this, but solutions are being blocked by specific actors for specific reasons".
The difference between these three positions really matters.
That being said, I do not consider mastectomies to be that irreversibly life-altering. If you change your mind, you can still get implants, and we have the tech to prevent any kids you might have from starving to death (and arguably had the tech for 10k years or so).
Are mastectomies more or less irreversibly life-altering than anorexia or bulimia? If schools were actively encouraging their students to pick up these habits, and hiding this fact from the students' parents, would that be more or less acceptable than the current status quo?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
For my money, ACAB is/was a major social justice meme, and Blue-aligned politicians can be relied upon to endorse all ascendant social justice memes for the cameras.
I've been repeatedly and regularly told that Wokeness in general and the BLM/Abolish Police memes in particular are dead, dead, dead since at least the 2024 election. How can they be dead, and also a major political candidate repeating them is too normal to comment on?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
This is a topic I've written on at some length, but rather than extrude the usual word-product, would you mind if I asked for a bit of detail in what you would consider a good response?
On the theory end, the short of it is that there's a couple prongs:
- "Don't be ruled by people who hate you" is the first and most important rule in politics, and Reds and Blues really do hate each other.
- "Manipulation of Procedural Outcomes" is incompatible with law or institutions generally, and is how things actually do work now.
- "Tolerance is not a moral precept", and we all, like Ozy, love John Brown.
On the practice end, there's tracking of things like selective prosecution, obvious rule-of-law violations, sequential breakdown of core civil society functions, interlocking hostility between legislation, social norms, and official and pseudo-official process, all backed by evident grassroots social sentiment, which I and others have been discussing here for some time.
So we could approach it from the theory/model-of-the-opposing-tribe end, or we could approach it from the observed outcomes end. The conclusion of both is that it's a very bad idea for Reds to try to live under Blue rule, both in terms of the outcomes of the Reds who might be in such a situation getting ground to extinction, and in terms of everyone, given that Blues do not, in fact, have a biological monopoly on lawless violence as a response to perceived injustice.
So what are you looking for?
Selective rigor is not a marginal problem that you have the luxury of ignoring.
It really sucks to see both sides engaged in an arms race to see who can be worse.
This is a war. How do you expect a war to operate?
[EDIT] - My estimation of your reasonableness and sincerity has been trending upward of late, so let me put a little more effort into this.
If you offer people a choice between "laws are enforced against you, laws will not be enforced against your enemies" and "laws will not be enforced at all", some people will choose the former and some will choose the later. The people who choose the former will die out, and you will be left with only the people who choose the latter. When this happens, the problem is not that people aren't upholding the law, the problem is that there is no law to uphold. A lot of people, myself included, believe this is the situation we find ourselves in. Appealing to the majesty of the law is not going to shift us, because we do not observe majesty of the law, but rather fractal deceit. You can think such an assessment is foolish in the extreme, but at some point you should probably consider explaining why it is foolish. Just for starters, I note that Trump does not appear to have used the FBI to censor conversation of and cover up evidence of his alleged corrupt activities, as we now know the previous administration absolutely did. In your view, does the Trump administration get points for not engaging in this particular "arms race to see who can be worse?"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17d ago
Seen this thread, out of curiosity?
One day ban, cool off and please refrain from this sort of outburst in the future.
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