FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
To clarify, I flounced once, and was able to return because in the heat of the moment I managed to throttle down the message to 2% of what I wanted to say, and so did not completely burn my bridges here.
I do not generally want to say those things any more, and even in my worse moments I want to want to not say them.
I stand corrected!
...my main point, in any case, is that in any of these questions of categorizing people, there's the answer from the people in the category, and there's the answer of the people outside the category, and neither is obviously correct.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
My assessment was that all of this was fair game. LibsOfTikTok doesn't follow "journalistic standards", this is plainly true, why bother claiming otherwise?
In my view, the problem comes when we claim that LibsOfTikTok shouldn't be listened to. LoTT doesn't need journalistic standards, because all they're doing is posting up primary sources. This means you can get them to post fake things, but it doesn't mean that all or even most or even an appreciable fraction of what they post is fake. Likewise, it doesn't mean that those "journalistic standards" prevent much or even the overwhelming majority of what Real Journalists output from being fake by any reasonable definition of the term.
The proper response to Trace's prank was to grab ten or twenty top-engagement stories from LoTT per week, week after week, and just check them off; this one's real, this one too, and this one, and so on, and note how even if they are operating through pure partisanship, and even if their standards of evidence are low, their approach to journalism requires so little trust from the audience that they are still highly effective and probably less deceptive than the NYT.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
That's a quite uncharitable account.
"Lying to people to make a political point is a Good Thing, Actually" is commonly argued by people who think the Sokal or Sokal Squared hoaxes are good things, of which I am one. My observation was that Trace's hoaxing of LibsOfTikTok was fair enough, though I didn't think it proved what he seemed to be claiming, but also that the overwhelmingly negative reaction he received was very clearly both tribal, unreasonable and unnecessary. And sure, he eventually flounced out of here. Most of us have or do sooner or later. I did, more or less, once upon a time, and the only reason I'm back is because I managed to throttle it down to about 2% of what I originally wanted to say. The Culture War poisons us all sooner or later.
He's got the Schism, and he's grinding away at the mainstream conversation, from what I've seen. I have profound disagreements with his values and views, but everything I've seen shows me he's attempting to act in good faith to this day.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
No. Mormons are substantially less Christian that Christians are Jewish.
...I'm not sure Mormons would agree with the first part, nor Jews with the second. I agree, but then I would, wouldn't I.
I'd agree on the latter part, in any case. Whatever my theological disagreements with Mormons, people who wish them harm are my enemies.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
uh, sure, I guess. The following is speaking very generally and aiming for as neutral a view as I can manage.
Jews (speaking very broadly here as I will for all groups) think they have a revelation from God, and that revelation is at a certain point closed. Then they have a system pertaining to how that revelation interfaces with their community, which may not be closed per se but where thousands of years of tradition usually vastly outweigh present concerns.
Christians believe the Jewish revelation is valid, but don't see it as closed, and believe there was a subsequent revelation which at a later point closed. They likewise have a community-interface system which likewise draws on thousands of years of tradition, which is completely incompatible with the Jewish system. So while both Jews and Christians think the Old Testament is the word of God, Jews think the New Testament is heretical pagan nonsense and the church and its traditions have no valid connection to God, while (many) Christians think Jews missed the boat, the rabbinical system is in the same way heretical nonsense, made up to paper over the fact that Judaism ended with the destruction of the temple, when it became impossible to fulfill the requirements of the Law.
Mormons are to Christians as Christians are to Jews. They have what might be described as a Newer Testament, which they see as a subsequent revelation to the Christian one, which is, you guessed it, now also closed. And they have their own community-interface system which is only a couple hundred years old but hey give them awhile, sheesh. And to their credit, a couple hundred years ain't nothing, and they do seem to be going fairly strong to date, but this system is likewise incompatible with the Christian system in the same way that the Christian system is incompatible with the Jewish one. Christians think the Newer testament is bad fanfic, in the same way Jews think the Christian New Testament is bad fanfic, for similar reasons.
In each case, you have the older version rejecting the newer version as a heresy, and the newer version thinking the older version missed the boat. ...Only, I'm not actually sure whether Mormons think Christians are fine as-is, or should ideally become Mormons, the way Christians think Jews should become Christian. I'd assume so, just on a naïve application of memetics.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
I wasn't sure whether to frame them as Christians (new revelation outside the law) or Jews (human prophets, perceive incarnation as blasphemy), so left them out as more confusing than the point was worth, but yes, essentially. "I'm his son, but he claims he's not my father."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians.
One might say that Mormons are Christians in the same sense that Christians are Jews. It captures both important features of self-conception and also important points of disagreement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Did the sister end up mattering? What was the first guy supposed to do differently if his sister was in the straight?
my understanding:
Planners < FOxGLASS < Humans-In-The-Loop < Deputy Director Lady < US Government.
Some combination of the Planners and FOxGLASS have figured out that there's a layer of control above them, and are actively working to engage with that layer. The Planner squabble is not, in fact the AIs glitching out, it is the AIs intentionally generating a scenario where human manual override will be triggered, at least potentially as part of a strategy to control the controllers. The sister part generates additional stress on one of the humans-in-the-loop, making it easier to trigger the lockout.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
The people this label is routinely applied to pretty clearly aren't white supremacists, or often even white, and certainly aren't murderous.
"People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people" appears to be a mainstream, possibly a supermajority-support Blue Tribe position. Trans themselves appear to be overwhelmingly Blue Tribe/leftist, like 99%+, and I've seen no indication in Ziz's writings that they were an exception in any way; their moral model seemed to be founded on Blue Tribe Progressive morals, only diverging where it came to how and when to take action, where they were a more extreme variant of Rationalist ideas. Who the Zizians consider to be threatening to them pretty clearly followed a leftist model.
More generally, what makes Dylan Roof or Tarrant or Breivek not "weirder than right wing"? Red Tribe actually went to quite considerable lengths to purge racism and even the resemblance of racism; to the extent that it is more of an issue than it used to be, it's coming from internet culture, which was a Blue Tribe phenomenon, and from aggressive redefinition of racism to cover the purged behavior set.
...It seems to me that the above is a non-trivial problem. I don't have a solution for it, and I don't expect you to have a solution for it, but I'm certainly not going to pretend that there's some system in place to handle this. Roof and Tarrant and Breivek were absolutely treated as Red problems, and still are. This latest shooter used an app Blues wrote explicitly to make finding and tracking federal agents easier, and left a note that "Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror," while the left is still playing "what even is leftism" games. The John Brown Gun Club, a group that I myself have argued in favor of in the past, is posting up flyers explicitly celebrating Kirk's murder on the campus of Georgetown university. Antifa has been beating Reds for showing their faces in public in Blue strongholds for a decade, and the police let them do it, and they are still doing it to this day.
We had a full decade of Blue Tribe crusading against "right wing" radicalization with everything from ceaseless propaganda to explicit government censorship to organized lawless violence. Jordan Peterson was treated as a dangerous radical*. We have examples beyond counting of what it looks like when Blue Tribe takes a problem seriously. They evidently and undeniably do not consider murder committed by their partisans to be a problem worth taking seriously. Maybe you think that's a reasonable response, given the givens. I do not think it is going to work out well for Blue Tribe generally.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
No, see, this week the doxing is just crazy right-wing paranoia. Democrats would never endanger law enforcement personnel for partisan advantage, or in this case revenge. The violence is really rare and just fringe wackos after all. C'mon now.
Ok but from sources I believe the right vs left political violence tally is like 50/50 after you take out the obvious nonsense picks.
Could you post these sources? That is not my assessment, and it seems like the sort of thing we ought to be able to debate.
Plenty of lefty terror groups that disappeared and went inactive over the years too.
Speaking historically, they received financial, legal and moral support from the broader left, and many of them were given comfortable sinecures in high-status institutions. That history does not seem very de-escalatory to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
It seems to me that what you would call a "serious political violence problem" is what I would call "the Right starts playing the game for real, the loop closes, and violence increases exponentially without hope of control". The rhetoric you're seeing now from the left is what it looks like when right-wing violence is extremely limited and almost entirely channeled through black-letter law, while leftist violence is frequent enough that I'm citing multiple incidents in a two-week window. When that shifts to actual lethal terrorism against blue targets, the left is not going to step back and admit they have a problem; they will double-down, and any hope of bringing this problem under control will be foreclosed.
A gunman has opened fire on an unmarked government vehicle carrying detainees to an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas. Initial reports are two detainees killed, one injured, no casualties among the officers. The gunman committed suicide, but left behind bullets with the phrase "ANTI ICE" written on them.
The online left has been openly calling for and encouraging violence against ICE agents for some time now, as well as attempting to facilitate that violence through doxing of agents and their families. These efforts have lead to a massive increase on assaults on ICE agents and threats to their families. Democratic leadership has refused to address these calls for and encouragement to violence from their base, and instead has joined in with calls for all agents to be unmasked and identified, as well as efforts to compel such identification through law.
This pattern of the blue grassroots engaging in lawless violence while the leadership offers encouragements of varying levels of plausible deniability, has been the norm for some time now. When the Blue Tribe grassroots engaged in a sustained vandalism and arson campaign against Tesla owners and dealers, recent Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz mocked the company's declining stock price and reassured Tesla owners that "we're not blaming you, you can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off". His subsequent non-apology is likewise a notable example of the form. Nor did it start there; as Blues unanimously maintain, Antifa is just an idea, not anything resembling an organization.
In any case, the ICE shooting in Dallas follows Sinclair Broadcasting abruptly reversing their plans to air Charlie Kirk's memorial service, after their local affiliates received numerous violent threats, and a teacher's union lawyer actually shot up the lobby of his local channel's offices.
Jimmy Kimmel is now back on the air, having been briefly suspended for blamed the murder of one of the most prominent right-wing activists in the nation on the right, an accusation repeated enthusiastically by numerous Blue Tribe influencers, activists and leaders. Polling shows that only 10% of Democrats believe Kirk's killer was left-wing. A third of Democrats believing that the man who wrote "catch this, fascist" on his bullets was right-wing, and a further 57% believe the motive for the shooting was either unknowable or apolitical.
Investigators are still looking into motive for what is being reported as a targeted killing at a country club in New Hampshire, where a gunman shouting "Free Palestine" and "The children are safe" killed one man and wounded two others. Likewise for the attempted bombing of a FOX news affiliate's van on the 14th.
We've had a fair amount of discussion over the last week about whether the left has a violence problem. It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem, but that there is no one on the left capable of engaging with that problem in anything approaching a constructive way. Simply put, the American left has invested too much and too broadly into creating this problem to ever seriously attempt to resolve it. There is no way for them to disengage from the one-two punch of "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary"; too much of what they have built over the last decade is predicated on this syllogism for their movement to survive even attempting to walk it back. The vast majority on the left cannot even bring themselves to admit the nature of the problem. But at the same time, at least some of them do seem to recognize that this is getting out of hand in a way that may not be survivable. Destiny's recent comments seem indicative of the mentality at play:
"If you wanted Charlie Kirk to be alive, Donald Trump shouldn't have been President for the second term."
He appeared to elaborate on this train of thought in a recent stream:
“You need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events so that they look to their leadership to turn down the temperature. Right now, they don't feel like there's any fear!"
...and the core point behind his somewhat incoherent further elaboration seems to be that the left must lean on the right to "lower the temperature", because otherwise the left itself will be forced to accept considerable losses.
The problem, of course, is that he is fundamentally correct. The Right is not particularly scared at the moment. We have had a long time to acclimate to the idea of leftist violence targeting us, and wile we are very angry about our political champions being murdered by leftist scum, with their actions cheered on by the grassroots left as a whole, many of us have long accepted the idea that this was going to come down to an actual fight in the end. We do not believe we created this situation; certainly, we did not bend the entire journalism, academia, and entertainment classes to normalizing the idea that our political opponents were isomorphic to subhuman monsters sneakily concealing themselves among the general population, whose violent deaths should always be enthusiastically celebrated. I've contemplated a post on simply cataloguing the number of TV shows and movies dedicated to one or both of the "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary" paired statements. Suffice to say, we are quite aware that most of the left holds us in absolute contempt, and a large plurality wishes for our violent death. We are aware that any pushback on these sentiments will be framed as an offensive act on our part. We told the left this was a bad idea. We told them why it was a bad idea. They did it anyway. And now: consequences.
In parting, I've written and then deleted several posts about "conversations we can have in advance." This is, yet again, a conversation we can have in advance. At some point, someone on the left is going to get shot by someone on the right, and not in a legally justifiable way but as an actual ideological murder. And when that happens, all the people mocking the idea of online violent radicalization, after screaming about the dangers of online violent radicalization for the last decade, are going to flop back to being performatively worried about online violent radicalization. When this happens, they will be met with stone-faced negation from Red Tribe, and will then weep and moan about how the extremists of the right just refuse to engage with this obvious problem. This will not deliver the results they hope for, but they'll do it anyway, and we'll move another step closer to chaos.
He can get away with this because on a simple factual level, Trump doesn't care if his policies work. He only cares if he can take credit for them working, or portray them as working. If they actually do work? Neat. Someone is happy. And often his minions are at least mildly competent, which can get results. But they don't need to work. This is not the case for most leaders, but Trump is not most presidents.
This is a remarkable statement, that invites a multiplicity of possible responses. ...The short, and most charitable version, is that you should take this exact frame, freeze it with crystalline perfection in every detail, and then begin swapping other politicians for trump.
- Does anyone in the educational system care if their system actually educates the students they are paid tax money to teach?
- Did anyone care whether the various mid-east occupations were "working"? Did anyone have a working definition of working for these engagements?
- Does any city or state official actually care about the crime rate in major cities? Do Federal politicians care about the national crime rate?
- Do politicians actually care about the health of the American economy, as opposed to wanting to be perceived as presiding over a strong economy?
...and so on, and on, and on.
...It's not even that I disagree with your description of Trump. What blows my mind is that you think that this attitude is in some way unusual, as opposed to it being totally normal but there's a massive knowledge-production class dumping kilo-man-years daily into presenting the feculent output as solid gold. I submit that the absence of this national-scale turd-polisher is the best improvement we've had in governance in my lifetime.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
I would be very skeptical that you are more debauched than I was. Even when I decided I didn't want to live that way any more, I still was quite determined not to marry and had no interest in children. By the time I started coming around to the idea, I thought I was too old.
I'm married with kids now, and much, much happier. It is almost certainly not too late for you.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
republicans won't address because it admits gun violence is a problem.
The federal agencies in question refuse to prosecute. How would you suggest Republicans force them to start prosecuting? Should we make it double illegal, so that they can decline to prosecute two federal felonies rather than one?
Pointing out the ways in which the Federal Bureaucracy make a complete hash out of rule of law is something we've been fighting aggressively to get into the overton window for some time now. "Stop trying to pass new gun regulations and simply enforce the ones we already have" has been a foundational part of Republican argumentation on the gun issue for the last thirty years at least.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
I do not think this is a valid interpretation of the text. How do you interpret "Love your enemies" or "pray for those who persecute you"? Where do you see your interpretation being modelled by Jesus or his disciples in the rest of the text? Where do they force their opponents to break the law? Peter cuts an ear off one of the men arresting Jesus; Jesus heals the man on the spot. How does that mesh?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Do note that as Ben Shapiro found out, that large number of working class right wingers are also pretty much on board with Luigi.
Solid evidence and a strong counter-argument. Also, even more depressing than previously-depressed man thought possible.
I never watched the King Kong remake in theaters, but I caught some of it at some point at a friend's house. Specifically, the dark crevasse with the giant insects.
Years later, there was a copy handy, and I thought, "It couldn't really have been that bad, could it? It's a film, you're a man, it's just an experience like any other... let's give it another try." So I gave it another try.
Nope.
I'm reminiscing of Mr. Period.
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