FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
I am willing to listen to people who claim they understand how the universe works when their explanations allow me to make testable predictions, and those predictions are verified. This holds true even when only some of their explanations are testable; the testable ones increase my confidence in the non-testable ones.
Most people appear to do likewise.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
In that case we're all meatbags about to be ground to dust by an uncaring universe in which all conciousness exists only for a brief flash of hospitable conditions in between eternities of lifeless desolation and oblivion.
What testable predictions does this claim make? Is it falsifiable?
The usual response I get is that this is just Materialism, and materialism is science, and this claim lets us do science. Only, that is very obviously not true, because you can do science without this claim, and also this claim doesn't help you do science better; it has no actual connection to science. Further, if it makes no testable predictions and is not falsifiable, in what sense is it materialistic?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
After Psycho-Pass I had a brief "this man is a genius" phase, and tried to look up anything he ever did. Somehow Madoka Magica never clicked for me, and I ended up giving up after a few episodes.
My guess is that you quit roughly one episode too early. The series was recommended to me by a friend, I started watching the first episode, and thought, "okay, this is fairly standard magical girl stuff, I'm not even remotely interested", and then shelved it. He kept bugging me, so a couple months later I watched the first episode again, okay, nothing too crazy, watched the second episode, sure, whatever, watched the third episode... and I think it's episode three or four where the story is done winding up, and starts throwing punches.
It does. Just not in the way I was taught it did, and not in the way many people appear to claim it does.
We reason from axioms. Axioms have a shape. That shape allows some evidence to fit inside, and excludes other evidence. Or to be more accurate, it fits specific interpretations of evidence and rejects others. Axioms sufficiently specific so as to be useful generally reject significant amounts of evidence, but this is ignored because they organize a much more obviously significant central mass of corelated evidence, and this evidence-mass is central to the focus of the person adopting the axiom, so they are motivated to ignore the outliers. If the outliers become sufficiently relevant, they might switch to a different axiom that accommodates them, but evidence in and of itself does not cause this to happen.
That's my understanding, at least.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
But how do you believe?
In my understanding, digging into how Belief itself actually works helped a whole lot. It appears to me to be trivial to observe that the consensus narrative about the nature of belief is pretty clearly wrong, and it is that an ingrained acceptance of that consensus narrative that causes people to be "unable to believe". They "believe" that beliefs are forced by evidence, and that the evidence is all on one side on this issue, so the choice is between rationality and irrationality, and they are already strongly committed to rationality, so the cognitive dissonance eats them up.
But in fact, beliefs are pretty clearly not forced by evidence, and the relevant evidence is not all on one side on this issue. People are believing what they want to believe, always have and always will. "Belief" is not a deterministic result of evidence, it is a prerational act of the will. Once this is understood, belief becomes much, much easier to control.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
What fruits did you expect not believing in a god to bear?
I can't speak for them, but in my case I guess I'd describe it as "a more effective interface with the realities of life and human existence." Various portions of my life and mind that had not been working well under the Christianity I was raised with got much worse when I became an atheist, and then much better when I returned to being a Christian.
I just know that life is meaningless and we're all just atoms, and nothing happens after we die. Whether I benefit from that or not is irrelevant, it's just how I think things are.
I'm skeptical people believe much of anything because "that's just how they think things are", mainly because I've observed that it's not why I've believed things in the past or present. I think pretty much all reasoning is motivated one way or another.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
This user has requested that I give them a one-month ban for personal time-management reasons. This ban is not a response to their posting quality and will have no bearing on future mod decisions.
Enjoy the break, @Iconochasm.
You mention civil war.
I'm a fairly big fan of Lincoln. In the actual civil war, Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus. That was a very explicit violation of rule of law, and by no means the only one Lincoln committed, and the courts simply let him do as he pleased. How do events like that fit into your conception of the rule of law? How does "Justice Marshal has made his decision, now let him enforce it"? How does "the switch in time that saved Nine"?
In the hypothetical, I imagine a civil war follows between the loyalists and the traitors.
Aww, don't just skip to the executive summary. You really ought to show your work.
The traitors refuse to follow the law. They push meritless legal arguments to the hilt, and then when those arguments are struck down, they flip a few clauses around and resubmit, all the while insisting that they're following the law to the letter in perfectly good faith, and the fact that they're still doing the stuff they were told not to do is just a misunderstanding because they weren't really told to not do it. They claim the courts are illegitimate, and threaten retaliation through various legal methods, from impeachment to court packing, against judges who rule against them. Faced with such broad-based opposition, the courts are faced with a choice eroding their own authority by issuing orders they know will not be followed and they cannot enforce, or declining to issue rulings and allowing the defiance de-facto in a hope to preserve their influence long-term.
When attempts are made to enforce the law, the traitors riot on a massive scale, coordinate assistance and support for rioters, run PR for them and cover their legal fees. When rioters murder innocent men, women or children, the traitors support such murders and vociferously attack anyone who resists or attempts to hold the murderers accountable.
The traitors constantly claim that the Loyalists are traitors themselves, and claim that it is the "loyalists" who have abandoned the Constitution. Any mistake or conflict with the law on the Loyalist side, and there will always be some, will be held up as evidence that the Loyalists have abandoned any right to claim rule of law is illegitimate.
The conflict steadily escalates, with political norms and long-standing traditions toppling in a steady cadence. The traitors openly support mob violence against Loyalist targets, and assassination of Loyalist leaders. Failed assassination attempts are publicly mourned. Successful murders are, again, publicly celebrated. Such attempts gather steam and begin popping up more and more frequently.
At some point, the killing begins in earnest.
Any part of that sound unlikely to you?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
If a significant portion of the country wishes to violate the constitution instead of working within the framework to change it (a framework we know exists and can be utilized as it's been done so before multiple times) then they are to be frank, un-American and un-patriotic. They are rebels to the system our founding fathers created and the existing laws and process that have served the country for a few centuries.
Correct on all points. What follows?
I'm just gonna address this part since you fundamentally misunderstand how the legal system works in the US.
One of us certainly does.
The judicial branch are not "the Democratic party" or "the media", they are judges selected through a wide variety of processes (depending on the court and jurisdiction).
You misunderstood me. There were two parts to my statement: a rejection of social consensus as binding to questions of law, and a skepticism of whether formal legal authority de facto exists.
You, the media, and the Democratic party represent the social consensus aspect. The actual courts represent the legal aspect. Your assessment of legality does not make something illegal; the courts do that. But even when the courts do that, I question whether that necessarily means anything, since I have seen numerous examples of court decisions being flouted or ignored, and can point to the specific mechanisms by which this process is conducted.
The supreme court especially are the ones granted power by the constitution under article III
Yes. And what happens if large numbers of people coordinate their power to defying such orders? Does lightning rain from the Heavens to smite them? Does the earth open up to swallow them and their families whole?
Over and over again, you appeal to the words on paper. But the words on paper are nothing until they are interpreted by human minds and implemented by human hands. Human minds and human hands make mistakes, and sometimes are malicious. The words on paper do not and cannot account for this reality, but we must, every minute of every day. There is no substitute for good judgement, but your argument appears to hinge on judgement being unnecessary, because the system works. Well, I disagree. I note that there is an exterior to the system, that significant amounts of work are conducted in this exterior space, and that so long as you confine yourself to the interior alone you will neither understand nor be capable of utilizing the system in question.
And let's roll in the other tail as well:
If someone truly believes that every conservative justice on the Supreme Court has been compromised simply because they rule for Trump to respect judicial authority, then I'm going to go in the opposite direction and say it is them who is likely compromised.
I have no idea who you are referring to. Certainly this does not match any argument I have advanced at any point in this or any other discussion.
Anyone whose idealogy appears to be based around "Trump can not be criticized or pushed back on, even by fellow conservatives lest they are effectively traitors" is a person who lacks a meaningful idealogy.
I am happy for people to criticize Trump, or push back on him. You have constructed a strawman in your mind to avoid dealing with the argument offered to you, which is quite simple: You are arguing for rule of law against Trump, and I am pointing out that the principles you claim (correctly!) that Trump is violating have already been violated to the point of uselessness previously. This does not make what Trump is doing legal or correct. It raises the question of why anyone should care about legality or correctness, when those standards have not applied in hundreds of previous cases.
Ok but even if we accept that all the conservative justices who have been conservative for longer than Trump has even been a republican for and some longer than many of us have been alive, it is still a truth of the US that the Supreme Court is granted judicial power to "all Cases, in Law and Equity".
We can and have directly observed this supposed power being nullified by lesser courts and subordinate institutions. The mechanisms to do so are readily identifiable.
Their authority remains enshrined in the Constitution, and if the argument extends so far to claim that their authority is invalid because they are in one man's opinion "compromised", then it seems to simply be more evidence that it is them who has shifted radically away from classic American values.
"“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”" -Lysander Spooner.
And again, you may assert that I have abandoned "classic American values" to your hearts content. I am much more interested in highlighting the absurdity of your arguments than I am in securing your affirmation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
My understanding is that the mod team has a lot of overlap with folks from rDrama. The Motte's underlying code is a fork of rDrama's.
I am certainly not an /r/drama type. I am an actual Christian, not merely a cultural one, and I match the rest of your description on middle America pretty well. I do not think that Trace trolling LibsofTikTok was peak comedy; I think the prank itself was fair enough, but all the conclusions I've seen drawn from it were bogus, and I continue to believe that LibsofTikTok serves a necessary function.
We actually have rules for commenting here. We actually do attempt to enforce these rules, and to do so fairly. @Amadan is in fact routinely accused of unfair moderation to advance his preferred side, and these accusations do in fact come from all sides. I have seen the behind-the-scenes deliberation, and there was no attempt underway to shape the discourse here in favor of any particular faction.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
I can not control the actions of others, especially not in regards to vague and nonspecific events.
I don't expect you to control the actions of others. I do expect you to recognize that the actions of others exist, and account for the results of those actions in your argument. I disagree that I have referred to "vague and nonspecific events"; I have been referring to broad events, but if greater specificity is needed, say so and we can drill down into the details of specific cases.
In any case, can you at least agree in principle that selective enforcement of the law is a valid concern, and that arguments for rule of law need to account for how selective enforcement will be prevented? Can you further agree that if selective enforcement is abused, those abusing it lose the right to appeal to rule of law as a justification for their actions?
This is rather normal in politics, and if the Trump administration wishes to proceed with their goals they are free to find all sorts of clever ways to do it so long as they don't defy the judicial branch.
My observation is that "clever ways of accomplishing political goals" are generally the first portion of a Russel Conjugation: "I find clever ways, you bend the rules, he violates the clear standards of the law".
Any appeal to a system of rules relies on the assumption that those rules will be enforced and interpreted fairly, because there is no law that can protect from sufficiently motivated enforcement and interpretation. I don't disagree with you that Trump can try different things. I do disagree that you or the media or the democratic party get to decide which actions are "clever" and which are illegal, and further I disagree that something is required to happen even if we agree that the action is in fact illegal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Hence violations not cancelling each other out.
The claim is not that violations cancel each other out. The claim is that sufficient violations invalidate the construct, by destroying the trust necessary for it to operate. "but it's the rules, you have to follow the rules" is not a workable answer to "no one else is following the rules, why should I?"
Is "you" in reference to me, specifically, or a rhetorical device?
It's a reference to the arguments you're presenting here, irrespective of any personal details or history of yours beyond these arguments in particular. You specifically are arguing in support of our existing social systems. I am pointing out that the actual history of how those social systems actually operate seems to badly undermine your arguments.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Interesting how you and "others" know me well enough to know that I've apparently never pushed back on left wing activists or government officials ignoring the courts.
I am very specifically critiquing the arguments you are presenting here, nothing less and nothing more; I make no claims about your previous behavior or positions; they are entirely irrelevant to me.
I am not claiming that you've never pushed back on left-wing activists or government officials ignoring the courts. I am observing that the material outcome of that pushback was zero accountability in any significant form for the left-wing activists or government officials in question, across a very large number of issues and specific cases. I am entirely willing to accept as much pushback as you and others wish to provide against my side, provided that this pushback is similarly ineffectual. As I said above, frown away.
But your position seems to be that this time is different, and that this time, something must be done. And I and others are asking "why now? What changed"? Why does frowning no longer suffice, such that you expect actual accountability all of a sudden? Why can we not agree that this is "totally unacceptable" in a way where absolutely nothing will be done about it, as is the long-established norm stretching back decades?
That doesn't make any sense given the rest of your argument is "it's ok to ignore the rules".
I'm simply trying to communicate on your level. I'm willing to agree that we're "ignoring the rules", if you'll account for the evidence that we are, in fact, ignoring the rules significantly less than Blue Tribe has for decades, and then explain why their violations of the rules were acceptable but ours are not. Likewise, if you believe that Blue Tribe has not been "ignoring the rules", fine, neither are we.
If your argument is that their violations of the rules were also unacceptable, I ask that you define what "unacceptable" means. If it means negative consequences for the rulebreakers, I ask that you show where these negative consequences were in fact implemented. If they weren't, then in what sense were they "unacceptable" if they were, in fact, accepted?
If on the other hand "unacceptable" means that you frowned real hard about it, well by all means, frown away.
And look, I get it. I and others pointing out your isolated demands for rigor makes it much more difficult to employ those isolated demands for rigor, and that's probably pretty frustrating. But maybe the solution is to not base an argument on isolated demands for rigor? Maybe, if you're arguing for "rule of law", you should actually put some effort into demonstrating how law has in fact been ruling in some meaningful sense previously, and why people should regard the present situation as discontinuous with what has gone before.
It's also an interesting question in general, if one is so willing to abandon a principle simply because they believe others don't follow it, then was it really a principle of theirs to begin with?
No, it isn't. I do not hold "rule following" as a terminal goal. Neither do most other people, and I'm highly skeptical that "principled" people such as yourself are the exception. I am not going to accept "rules for thee but not for me". Neither are most other people. If your model of the world is based on the idea that people will generally accept being cheated without recourse indefinitely, well, it seems to me that you're going to be routinely surprised by real-world outcomes.
Perhaps those people are simply against the classic American values to begin with and they are seeking an excuse to abandon it.
"I've been cheated" is a pretty good excuse to stop playing with a cheater, especially if one has proof of the cheating. We tried to keep the game going for decades, but at some point one must face the realities of the situation. In any case, shaming is quite a bit more effective when employed against people who seek your esteem. If you want to conclude that I'm a mean person who just hates good things, while repeatedly ignoring every gesture toward evidence that I offer and supplying no evidence of your own, I'm comfortable allowing third parties to draw their own conclusions.
Law is a social construct, and as a social construct it depends on consensus and common knowledge for its function. It works if people believe it works, that "rule of law" actually functions in some reliable fashion.
Undermine that belief sufficiently, and people stop believing in it, and "rule of law" stops functioning in specifically the way that you are now observing: people stop honoring appeals to the rules, because they've seen those rules bent or broken in too many other cases and so no longer trust them.
I do not accept your appeals to the rules, because I have long since observed that my appeals to the rules are systematically ignored. I do not expect the rules to protect me when I need them to, so I have no incentive to expend effort or value to ensure the rules protect you when you need them to. I too used to make appeals to "rule of law"; I did so for many years. Now I don't do that any more, even when the law is purportedly on my side, because I understand that it is pointless.
Enforcing the law is costly. People bear the cost willingly when they believe that all bear it equally. When they no longer believe this, they generally stop being willing to bear the cost.
Yeah if you just make up stuff about all the evils the "enemy" is doing where they're just straight up ignoring court orders over and over then I guess it would look like the country is dead.
And if I have a large amount of evidence showing Blue states and federal regimes have in fact made a habit of ignoring court orders and otherwise flouting rule of law, then would you agree that the country does in fact appear to be dead from your perspective as well?
Hey if Americans agree with you on this specific point, start pushing for politicians to write a new amendment!
What would be the point of such an approach?
I used to argue that the Constitution was whatever five Justices said it was, but now it is not even that. We won multiple Supreme Court decisions on the Second Amendment over the past few decades. Blue states and their circuit courts ignored the rulings, and then we got to observe how unified defiance from "subordinate" legislatures and courts shapes Supreme Court jurisprudence, as the Justices refuse to take cases or deliver decisions that would spark further defiance. And it's not as though Federal law worked any better. We decided that Tribal interests should be protected by law. We won elections, drafted laws, and passed them by the legitimate process. Then Blue Tribe simply ignored them, and the courts have let them do it.
Start a movement to electorally challenge politicians that won't cooperate with it. We're in a democracy, use your voice and convince your fellow citizens. If they don't agree, then tough shit.
Blue Tribe could have done this with immigration. Red Tribe offered them a compromise, an amnesty for existing illegals, paired with actual border enforcement. They took the amnesty and then not only failed to deliver any border enforcement, but spent decades actively undermining what enforcement existed and thumbing their noses at the law. They did the same with narcotics laws. They did the same with laws aimed at protecting freedom of religion.
The funniest part, though, is that you don't recognize that we are in fact following your advice. We have not rioted nation-wide. We are not actively fomenting assassins. We are not burning down the homes and offices of people we don't like. We organized and won an election, and now we are playing the game according to the existing rules.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
We have a permanent mod log, so the longer one participates here, the more likely one is to accumulate warnings and even bans. If we operated only off negative mod actions, the expectation would be that likeliness of a permaban would scale in proportion to quantity of participation; it would scale slower for better posters, but unless a person was absolutely perfect all the time, they would still accumulate warnings and then bans of increasing length.
AAQCs provide a balancing effect, a positive to counter the negative. They also give a way for users to impact the process indirectly, since AAQCs are drawn from user submissions. If someone gets a couple warnings, and then produces a bunch of AAQCs, and then gets another warning, this shows us a pattern of corrected behavior, which gives us confidence that they will correct their behavior based on a warning now. This means we probably don't need to go right to escalation of consequences, since warnings worked previously and might well work again. We also attempt to at least consider the nature of the warnings/bans, rather than just treating them as blunt integers, which is why many people get multiple warnings before a ban, and why some peoples' bans escalate faster than others. Some people do appear to be attempting to follow the rules. Other people apparently don't understand the rules. And some people understand them perfectly well, but hold them in contempt.
That's my understanding, at least.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
Then you recognize that we have not in fact been operating under "rule of law" previously?
Do you believe that enforcing "rule of law" here will increase its enforcement elsewhere? If so, why do you believe that?
If you do not believe that, why is one form of selective "rule of law" preferable to another?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
...what's the delta between the transferability of MS Flight Simulator skills versus a fighter jet? I have no idea. I'd probably go with the fighter jet pilot, on the assumption that MSFS is sufficiently streamlined that it transfers less.
"until the courts rule the exact way I want, I shouldn't have to respect them" is to be quite frank, anti-American.
Many of us have spent a considerable amount of time and effort cataloguing the ways in which Blue Tribe has done exactly this for literally decades. Guns, illegal immigration, and drugs have all demonstrated the pattern of victory through sustained refusal to recognize rule of law. The comment you are replying to is pointing out that multiple Supreme Court victories over more than a decade were categorically ignored when Progressives found it convenient to do so, and so appeals to lesser court decisions in favor of progressives hold no water.
When a Tribe systematically breaks the rules, they don't get to appeal to those rules any more.
"America" is dead, and has been for some time. The current situation is not America dying, but the rotting of the national corpse.
Not just in disrespecting our legal system as a whole, but in disrespecting one of the fundamental values America and western democracy is built on, the rule of law and proper legal process.
This is probably a very persuasive argument for people who do not have an extremely long catalogue of previous "rule of law" violations to point to, and who do not have a working understanding of the phrase "manipulation of procedural outcomes" or "isolated demand for rigor".
I do not believe that Blue Tribe can credibly offer "rule of law" because I have observed them violate the principle too many times without significant consequence. Guns, drugs, illegal immigration, "no justice, no peace", tenure for communist terrorists, a long history of government corruption... the list of objections is quite long. You are appealing to phrases that lost their meaning for many people a long time ago. And maybe you are the sole remaining principled Progressive, but you are not the Pope of Blue Tribe, and if your bespoke principles do not generalize at the population level, of what use are they?
People have been pointing out for a long time that the principles you appeal to were not sustainable without significant reform. Reforms were rejected, and now those principles are no longer being sustained.
Eisenhower despite his different views on racial segregation still agreed in this fundamental principle of the American system and faithfully executed on the rulings because of that, not because he was a chump.
You will not get any more Eisenhowers, because post-Eisenhower events built durable common knowledge among Red Tribe that Eisenhower was, in fact, a chump. None of this is new; we've been debating this for about a decade at this point, and the point of view you're arguing against is supported by quite a bit of solid evidence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
Maybe I am inclined to believe that those who seek truth for the sake of truth do tend to come out with a "liberal" bias.
Are you aware that at least a majority of the people arguing right-wing views here used to be doctrinaire liberals?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
I think "Senile" comes into its own when you're talking about more complex weapons systems. A senile weapons system might work just fine, and in fact it might be the best system available for the job it does. The problem is that to do the job, the system requires ever-greater expenditure of effort and resources. As long as the effort and resources can be provided, it keeps working, but at the cost of cannibalizing a greater and greater portion of the procurement budget. And of course, the more resources a system and its auxiliaries consume, the more valuable they are, and the greater the need to protect them, so the more spending on additional complexity and auxiliaries is justified...
I have not, had never even heard of it. Should I?
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