FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
In particular, I would argue that outside your odd lizardman, none of the smarter MAGA people believe the narrative. I think it highly unlikely that Charlie Kirk thought, in his heart of hearts, that Biden was committing treason for which his countrymen would sent him to the gallows if they knew about it. But the narrative played really well with the idiots, so he spread it.
...How closely have you been following the revelations about Russiagate/Crossfire Hurricane/Hillary's email server/Biden's Corruption/Hunter's Laptop over the last year? My working understanding of that mess (and it seems to me there's a fair amount of evidence that it is a coherent, single mess) is that we now have solid evidence that Obama, Hillary and Biden worked together to suborn the national security apparatus and turn it into both a partisan weapon against their political enemies, as well as a shield to their own serious malfeasance. As with, say, Watergate, but amusingly never ever with any Democrat scandal, the initial crimes seem vastly overshadowed by the institutional corruption used to cover them, which at this point appear to have run so deep and for so long that they put the viability of our political system itself into question.
More generally, there's this amusing pattern I see, where people are very willing to discuss things under a frame where Trump and MAGA are fascistic white supremacists who must be stopped by any means necessary, as we did here for years, and are also willing to discuss things under a frame where actually there's no difference between the parties, everyone's corrupt so none of the details really matter, but certainly are not willing to discuss under the frame where, no, actually it's the democrats who are uniquely, intolerably bad. Maybe it's just bias speaking, but it seems to me that this excluded third option is going to get harder and harder to exclude the more evidence accumulates. And while within the context of debate and one's own mind denial might be an invincible shield, it's less effective in the real world if sufficient numbers of the public simply stop being willing to cooperate with your tribe in any way ever again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
No, we cannot officially throw out the principle of charity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Nobody is expressing that idea. You are making an unwarranted assumption.
Most of human communication operates through these sorts of assumptions. Why would they be unwarranted? Are books not inanimate objects? Are letters and the written words we assemble out of them not inanimate objects? When someone waves a rainbow flag or a hammer and sickle flag, Are they not specifically inviting everyone watching to infer their message? If not, why wave the flag? And sure, this can be abused by assuming a message that was not the signaler's actual intent... and yet, flags exist as a tool of communication because such malicious interpretation is orders of magnitude less effective than the primary signal.
If your standards of rigor are that communication should be happening with no assumptions being made either way, I'll note that no actual human communication works or has ever worked this way.
Not just to be able to state an idea, but be able to defend it in open debate.
Can a book defend its ideas in open debate? I mean, sort of. It seems to me that a flag can as well. Who's invoking the message and its associations, and how?
Moreover, I can put a flag in my store for trolling purposes, or just as a freedom of speech prop. Why are you assuming intent from inanimate objects?
I'm not assuming, I'm inferring. Inference is a necessary and irreducible part of human communication, which is necessarily lossy, compressed, and unreliable in the best of times.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Snow flakes are not susceptible to social contagion.
An avalanche seems very similar to to a social contagion that snowflakes are susceptible to, if we're accepting metaphors in the first place.
An Aryan Bakery has nothing to do with Open Ideas, because there's no idea being expressed or defended.
"Swastikas are cool" isn't an idea? "I stand with the people who use the Swastika as a symbol" isn't an idea? Where would you get the idea that abstract symbols aren't routinely freighted with meaning by humans, and thus used to communicate ideas?
The fact that you believe an Aryan Bakery has anything to do with actual freedom of speech shows the need for Open Ideas.
How so? what's the argument?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
I don’t like this, and we should not trust every word the mainstream media says, or even trust ANY of it blindly, but it’s a damn right more preferable than loads of far left and far right crackpots producing their own propaganda and all of it being given equal billing with FT, BBC, NYT, Economist etc.
Why is it preferable? Because such propaganda might lead to people believing absurdities and following them off a cliff?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
For one, they seem very interested in ruling you.
"Interested in ruling me" would imply they take actions likely to make this happen. They mostly are interested in doing their own thing on the other side of the world.
It is true that you have little to gain from ruling them. However, you have plenty to gain from the $72.25 trillion in oil they possess (total value of Middle Eastern oil reserves, per ChatGPT), or any of the other resources they control, or simply the land they inhabit.
We are not as rich as we once were, but we are not so poor as to require banditry, and we certainly are not in need of additional desert.
A lot of black men would not be in prison right now had they simply realized that crime is a bad idea and they should stop doing it.
Sure, and there will likely be serious consequences for Europe for the mistakes they're making. I, however, am not a European.
To the extent that your enemies' values are a proxy for the values of non-Europeans/East Asians, the threat they pose is a paper tiger.
...My enemies are a threat because of their values, not because their values are a proxy for those of non-europeans/east asians. I am not worried about Africa or the middle east. I am worried about people who live in my country and don't want me to keep living in it.
None of these arguments are persuasive on why attempting to rule the world is a good idea. Leaving other people to do as they wish elsewhere is simpler and both morally and physically safer.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
We can't agree on what constitutes murder, or child abuse. We can't agree on what Rule of Law means. We can't agree on what the Constitution means, or what laws require generally. We can't agree on how to run a Justice system. We can't agree on what is valuable, honorable, decent or depraved. We can't agree on who should be protected or venerated, or who should be disgraced or shunned. The disagreements and others like them cut deep through every facet of our culture, and that culture is visibly coming apart at the seams as a result.
Yes, there is always the danger that enlightened centrists like yourself will be so disgusted by our behavior that they will side with the tribe that has been engaging in such behavior without consequence for a decade. At some point, one must accept that such enlightened centrism is indistinguishable from Blue partisanship, shrug, and proceed with the best strategy available.
Aren't you supposed to be patriots?
The Constitution is dead. America is dead. Loyalty is for the living, not for rotting abstractions.
Having mutually incompatible values doesn't mean that we disagree about the value quality of literally every single thing.
True. I'm focusing on the marginal cases. To the extent that our values are mutually incompatible, cooperation is harder, especially in pursuing those values. To the extent that the gaps in values are small and isolated, only small amounts of separation are needed to avoid significant value loss or conflict; maybe the normal separation we have between people, families, social groups, churches and so on is sufficient. The larger the gaps, the more separation is needed, until it's more separation than our society can reasonably accommodate in its current configuration; people start moving to different areas they perceive as lacking the gap, change jobs or careers maybe. As the gaps get bigger and available separation can't keep up, fighting over power becomes increasingly attractive.
Perhaps, but this just looks like a restatement of the supposition "tolerance can't work due to human nature."
Rather, "Tolerance is not a general solution to human nature." It works great over a very wide range, but there are edge cases where it stops working. If you can't cooperate on a few things, maybe you can cooperate on other things, and the value is still net-positive. But there's obviously a point where cooperation just costs too much value on net and it's not worth it any more. Further, we can see these points coming, and act in advance of their arrival, and we can respond to others doing likewise, with the usual caveats about the dangers of acting on predictions.
I just don't think that's always the case, and I also don't think that's the case today in most of the West, or at least America.
Things like this seem over the line to me. Also things like this. ...I'd prefer not to do a large-type airing of grievances, but there have been a lot of things Blue Tribe attempted or executed over the last ten years that seem to me to amount to irreconcilable differences. It doesn't matter if some of the things didn't work, or others were reversed when cooler heads prevailed; the knowledge these incidents generated about what Blue Tribe is willing to commit to means that it does not seem to me to be a good idea to trust them to have power over me ever again. Maybe that's partisanship talking. Maybe it's really not all that bad. Maybe nothing ever happens.
...I think there will be a backlash to the things my side is doing now. While that backlash is predictable, it does not seem wise to refrain from doing those things to forestall it, and it will almost certainly be a good idea to generate a backlash of our own when theirs arrives. It is hard to imagine the point at which I will conclude that there's been enough conflict, we should make peace instead. Objectively, it is hard to imagine the other side reaching that point either. We will each perceive what the other has done as reason to double down, and our own actions as justified. The difference, of course, is that I perceive my side to be correct, and their side to be insane. And sure, I would, wouldn't I? This is how tribalism works, we can always retreat into abstractions until there's no difference between right and wrong, good and evil, cue the Dril tweet.
Here in the real world, there's not much of an off-ramp I see. When we cannot agree on the definitions of basic terms like murder, child abuse, rule of law, treason... it seems wiser to me to admit that the problem is beyond us, and pack it in before we really hurt each other.
That said, I'd still insist on tolerating them, as long as they stay within the bounds of agreed upon mechanisms of power struggle.
If I convince you that I intend to coordinate unsurvivable meanness against you, your willingness to abide by the bounds of agreed-upon mechanisms of power struggle are likely to decline precipitously, especially when those bounds are nebulous and poorly defined, and playing border games puts me in a progressively-stronger position for clearly violating them to get what I want without paying the consequences.
All these systems are fragile. That doesn't mean they don't or can't work, it means they work when used properly and don't work when misused.
But if they just want to write essays and films about how awesome it would be if we just committed civilizational murder-suicide, in an active effort to recruit more people to their cause, then, well, live and let die. Just don't let them kill.
Do you expect them to respect this principle the other way? When it's my side saying that the soap, ballot and jury boxes have been expended and it's time for the ammo box, are they going to agree in principle that only the people who actually act on it are culpable, and not those of us encouraging it? There are principles I'm invested in enough to uphold even alone. If free speech worked the way I was taught it did, if it worked the way I used to believe, it would still be one of them. But after what I've seen this past decade, I'm much more skeptical on the value of the principle, and even the sheer possibility of getting net-good out of it at all under even slightly adverse conditions. Again, this does not make me a censorship enthusiast, just a pessimist on what we're paying and what we'll get in return.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
I find this hard to believe; it is expected that one might want to eliminate threats to oneself.
There's a bunch of Islamic extremists on the other side of the world. So long as they stay on the other side of the world, why should this be a problem to me? They are far away, they do not rule me, I have nothing particular to gain from ruling them. Why not just leave each other alone?
Europeans in particular have a habit of attempting to eliminate values that pose no threat to them but they consider repugnant.
They should recognize that this is a bad idea and stop doing it. No one has a strong enough claim to moral clarity to impose their morality over the whole world, and if this is a thing people think needs to happen, I agree if and only if it's my morality being imposed. The flaws with this idea should be obvious enough that we can coordinate an end to the practice, even with a considerable amount of values-incoherence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
All good, all good. Just giving you the new user speil. Welcome, make yourself at home!
Why would it trade off directly with the things that make cooperation valuable?
Because we cooperate to gain value, and if our definitions of "value" is mutually incompatible, then when the cooperation is aimed at one of these spaces, it's at best burning value for nothing for the side whose values aren't being aimed for, and at worst burning value to lose value.
If we share living space and power mechanisms with people whose values are incompatible with ours, as long as the power struggles between groups with mutually incompatible values stay limited to the agreed upon power mechanisms, we're at least able to keep the living space a living space instead of a killing field, which seems valuable.
Bolded for the crucial bit. Power struggles cannot be so limited. People are always going to want more good things and fewer bad things. They are never going to want to perpetuate or multiply bad things at the expense of good things. Once the values get far enough apart, they are always going to recognize that if the bad things can be eliminated, the value that went to producing the bad things can instead produce more good things, and then try to make that happen.
America tried detente between slave states and free states. Slave states wanted more slave states, free states wanted more free states. Slave states wanted to perpetuate and spread Slavery; Free states wanted to abolish it. The result was spiraling escalations as both sides realized that amassing and wielding power was instrumental to maximizing goodness and minimizing badness on their own terms. Laws and norms could not contain the pressure, and failed in sequence until large-scale fratricide broke out.
Non-Communist populations could not figure out how to cooperate with dedicated Communist populations, resulting in numerous rebellions, revolutions and wars. Eventually a cohesive territory of Communist states formed, with a hard border to the non-communist states outside, and this mostly kept the peace until Communist ideology collapsed from its own contradictions. Borders worked.
If this sort of spiral is to be prevented, you have to exert energy to maintain values-coherence, which involves policing the fringes and forcing them back to the center, which is not itself tolerant. Absent such enforced coherence, values drift apart, and the further apart they get the less value cooperation can deliver relative to defection or coordinated meanness.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
There's a new-user filter, and you were in it. it goes away when you get a certain number of cumulative upvotes. No, we can't turn it off. Yes, we'll manually approve your posts until you're out of it so long as they don't break the rules extremely egregiously. Yes, this is dumb, we're sorry. Please just ignore it and comment freely, and hopefully it'll go away fairly quickly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Yet the argument remains just as valid as ever, and so I still insist on being tolerant of values that are are foreign to mine and especially tolerant of values that are hostile to mine.
Define "tolerant".
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine. I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict. If "tolerance" means sharing power mechanisms and living space, my argument is quite simple:
- The range of values humans can actually hold is wide enough that some points are mutually incompatible with other points.
- Sharing power mechanisms and living space with the values-incompatible trades off directly with the things that make coordination/cooperation valuable.
This is not me trying to generate an argument for why purging anyone who is different is a good idea. Not all or even most values-coordinates are mutually incompatible. There's a wide range of compatibility. Values-incompatibility is not an "I win" button or a tribal superweapon, it is net-loss for everyone involved, we should not be seeking to maximize it. We need to cooperate, because that's where all our good things come from. But if we can't recognize where the cooperation breaks down or isn't possible, we burn value for no purpose and open ourselves up to disaster.
If toleration isn't possible, the alternative isn't annihilation, it's separation. People who can't get along should endeavor to leave each other alone; that's strongly preferable than attempting to exterminate each other. There are values-modification mechanisms other than one group stomping on another; humans observe outcomes and modify, ideological structures that adopt bad values adapt toward better ones over time, even without hard outside pressure, and then maybe in the future reproachment is possible.
But right now, we're at a place in the culture where weaponizing the legal system and organizing lawless violence against the outgroup are on the table. That is, to me, past the point of no return. There is no credible way to un-tolerate these things, to re-establish a taboo, at least not one that I can see.
Recognizing the nature of the problem is the first step to finding a solution.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
It’s just devolved from “I don’t agree with you” to “I don’t agree with you and you are subhuman for even entertaining a different idea, and in fact should not be allowed to speak.”
It seems obvious to me that the thing producing this slide is a slide in core values between the tribes. As median tribal values diverge, as the gap between the median positions widens, the basis for mutual toleration disappears as well. We tolerate and cooperate with people because doing so is seen as an obvious net-positive. Lots of people on the right celebrated OBL's death at the hands of US forces. Lots of people on the right celebrate the idea of killing pedophiles.
It likewise seems obvious to me that we are not short on manners or etiquette. Progressivism invented entire new fields of manners and etiquette. The problem, again, is that no amount of manners and etiquette is going to cover fundamental incompatibility of values.
Human cooperation is based on shared values. Without the shared values, "cooperation" becomes incoherent. Cooperating for what purpose, to what end? If we can't agree that the ends are good, then cooperation with evil is an act of insanity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Then find some other way to solve the Culture War before it comes to that. Coordinated Meanness without limit pointed at half the country is not survivable long-term.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
So an obvious way to observe the credibility-burning you're claiming would be Hegseth's unpopularity with the troops, right?
Or is it a scam? Are its promised rights lies?
Whether we have a right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, guns, free speech, or whatever else seems pretty clearly to be an axiomatic moral argument, not a factual one. Ought, not Is.
This comment from two years back lays out what I think is a pretty solid argument for the nature of the problem:
Do you believe that it's practical to build and enforce a set of rules that ensure acceptable outcomes so long as they're followed, regardless of the behavior of those operating under the rules? Put another way, do you think loopholes are a generally-manageable problem in rule design?
And the answer elaborated in the rest of the comment comes down to explaining why loopholes are in fact not a generally-manageable problem in rules design. The lie and scam comes from the idea that you can write down a legible definition of rights, and then right down a legible set of rules about how to adjudicate disputes over them, and then by following these rules the rights will be secured, and thus the processes and outputs we observe are simply The Way The Rules Are. Our society is built on the idea that rules work this way, but they really don't.
You can make a set of rules that work when people generally want them to work. Making a set of rules that work when people don't want them to work is probably impossible. Incompatible values results in a lot of people not wanting the rules to work any more, so they don't. There's a term that Moldbug came across awhile back: "manipulation of procedural outcomes". It's one of the most perfect political terms I've ever encountered, and the perfect encapsulation for the nature of the problem. Rules, procedures, exist to secure outcomes, but can be manipulated. Once you grok that, everything else follows with the crushing inevitability of a glacier.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
As an alternative, how about we simply stop funding universities that have been spending public money on things as ridiculous as creation science? They can even keep the tenure, so long as they fund it themselves.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
As a classic liberal, any kind of intolerance with an outgroup is very offensive to me.
And yet, divisions and categories exist, and are both useful and necessary.
It’s trying to make an entire group of people an outgroup, just as the illiberal left is trying to demonize Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian.
The illiberal left demonized Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian, sure. They considered him and Christians generally to be enemies. Christians do not generally consider Mormons to be enemies in this way, any more than they consider Jews to be enemies. Religious differences can exist without holy war.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
I'm reminiscing of Mr. Period.
{commenting on "where everyone is gay"} This might not be necessary. If these are indeed the Gayzor Mountains, we can safely assume that the inhabitants share certain customs.
Because it has been established that blues ignore laws they dislike or find inconvenient, and that this is one such law. There is no reason to believe that making illegal immigration double-illegal will result in Blues actually enforcing laws they don't want to enforce and perceive great advantage in not enforcing. This is an invitation to waste political capital on "process" that has already been subverted.
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