FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
Yup. The arguments in favor of the guys attempting a "citizen's arrest" involving chasing a man on foot in a car while brandishing longarms never made any sense.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
You appear to have deleted your OP post. You've been specifically warned that making and deleting posts is egregiously obnoxious, as it removes context from the subsequent discussion. You asked if you could have an exception out of unspecified concerns over "privacy", and were told that no exception would be granted.
It's a shame, because while I strongly disagree with the positions you take in this post, I think it was an entirely fair post and it seems to have generated good discussion. I don't know why you are determined to keep engaging this way, but we are not going to allow it. I'm setting the ban at a week; other mods feel free to adjust up or down as seems appropriate. If you continue this behavior, the bans will escalate rapidly. If on the other hand, you're willing to abide by the rules of this forum, we're happy to have you and hope you will continue to contribute in the future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
Is this an example of the introduction of aesthetics into political life? How about this? I'm pretty sure I could provide additional examples, but let's start with these two.
Setting aside Benjamin's socialism, it seems to me that the important aspect of this definition is the dislocation of politics from materiality, and its fusion with aesthetics.
Could you lay out a general case for what the "dislocation of politics from materiality and its fusion with aesthetics" means? My understanding would be that politics stops being about concrete facts and rational analysis, and instead becomes about nebulous, likely irrational beliefs. Would that be accurate?
Put another way: Trump just says shit that he thinks will sound good, and then the ideological apparatus that's grown up around him rushes to rationalize and actualize it, even when that makes no fucking sense.
It seems to me that this perfectly describes a large majority of politics for as long as I've been paying attention, which is decades, plural at this point. I strongly dispute the claim that any of this is a novel creation of Trump or his supporters, and assert that the reason you are noticing it is some combination of less-polished execution and a more acute situation.
I understand that my claim here is isomorphic to a low-effort dismissal, but that is not my intention. To the extent that this is an accurate description of a real problem, the problem did not even remotely stop with Trump, and it certainly will not end with him.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
I don’t understand what you mean by “consensus on these points”.
You listed a bunch of bullet points for specific policies. Your argument seems to be that most people, or possibly everyone, will converge on opposition to these policies were they actually implemented. When TB above argues that actually he supports your list of policies, your answer is that their belief that they support such policies is mistaken, and in fact they would oppose such policies, correct? And this is a general claim that least a supermajority of people actually do not really want these policies implemented, even if they currently mistakenly believe they do, correct?
But I believe a dive into the logic behind why they believe so will reveal they, in fact, are.
Would you care to do such a dive, at least for a hypothetical person if not for TB themselves? I think it would be interesting and useful to lay out the chain of logic as clearly as possible. The claim as I understand it seems pretty implausible, but if you're going to make it wouldn't it be useful to lay out why you believe it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
Norms are still dropping, monotonously in sequence. It's entirely possible that Trump and the MAGA movement will fail. If they do, it doesn't seem likely to me that we simply return to the status quo ante.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
To the extent that "maintaining public order" is compatible with normalized widespread criminality and the dispensation of justice becomes more and more evidently an afterthought, one notices that the justice system's capacity for performing this function declines precipitously.
It seems at least possible that sustainable maintenance of public order necessitates a lot more punishing bad people than we're currently doing.
Yet he did not start any new wars, and actively worked to withdraw from existing ones, with the deep state likely violating black-letter law to successfully resist those efforts.
Increased military spending is almost certainly necessary, because it is increasingly evident that our military is clapped out and obsolete. Our navy in particular appears to be in a particularly dire state.
And since Trump has pretty thoroughly rejected the Neocon agenda, most (all?) of the prominent Neocons have found themselves unwilling or unable to support Trump. They instead support the Democrats, who have largely signaled willingness to adopt their policies. I remember people claiming that John Bolton's involvement in the first Trump administration was proof that nothing had changed. And yet, Bolton got no policy wins that I'm aware of, and now he has written a tell-all about how Trump is a monster and everyone should vote Democrat. There is a proverb about judging someone by the quality of their enemies; this seems to be an example of that.
If you disapprove of the neocon agenda, then the fact that the Democrats are inviting the Neocons in should worry you. If you support the Neocon agenda, then by all means say so. Claiming that Red Tribe is still aligned with the neocon agenda, though, is simply not factual. Again, you may not like how that turn happened, and you may even think it was dishonest to change policy without explicitly admitting error, and it is at least arguable that you would be correct. None of that changes the fact that Trump is by far the least warmongering president we've had since at least Clinton, and likely much earlier, and that this lack of warmongering is in fact one of the things his base explicitly endorses.
Would you say your argument is that there's a consensus on these points, even if a few people disagree?
I think another answer can be that people think they aren't infuriated by those things but, in fact, are.
What's the logic here? Are you arguing that people like @TitaniumButterfly are lying when they claim to not be infuriated? Is it some form of false consciousness that would be dispelled were these bullet points implemented locally?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
Iraq was a failure of the establishment and also a failure of the anti-establishment.
...I don't know if you're old enough to remember the events of the 2000s first-hand, but in that era, rural, working-class, no college degree, salt of the earth white people believed that they had their own elites. George W Bush was president, and was at least attempting to implement policy at the federal level in direct service to Red Tribe and its values. The anti-establishment of the time would be the grass-roots antiwar types.
The modern Right is incapable of telling those people they are wrong on any issue, so we know what they'd do if the war happened today.
Then why are Liz Cheney and John Bolton urging people to vote Democrat?
You may be reluctant to recognize it, but the last ten years has been one long campaign within Red Tribe to purge the neocons. That effort has been wildly successful, to the point that the neocons attempted to defect to the Democratic party, and now with the defeat of Harris appear to have collapsed as a coherent faction. It is true that Red Tribers are not giving speeches about how the 2000s hippies and Noam Chomsky were totally correct, but what they have actually done is change their policies and their coalition on a fundamental level.
Blue Tribe, by contrast, absolutely smothered its peace movement the moment Obama was inaugurated and is now the party of imperial wars and armament corporations. The fact that you have not received emotional gratification from the Red Tribe public should not outweigh the concrete changes that have in fact happened. The most significant break from this pattern, Biden apparently forcing through an Afghanistan withdrawal, also appears to be an example of the deep state resisting the lawful authority of the President.
What are the lies you accuse the establishment of?
"Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
"We are building a democratic society in Afghanistan."
"Our test grades are low because we don't spend enough on education."
"Race-based caps on school discipline will lead to better outcomes."
"COVID was not a lab leak."
"Police routinely kill unarmed, compliant black people."
"Joe Biden is mentally competent."
"The laptop is Russian disinformation."
"Insurrectionists murdered a police officer on Jan 6th."
"Rittenhouse is a white supremacist murderer."
"The BLM protests are mostly peaceful."
"Antifa is just an idea."
"Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist."
...Off the top of my head. There are plenty more where those came from.
Because if you look a little deeper I believe you will see that they aren't lies but a shaping of the truth and that's a massive difference.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "shaping of the truth"?
A mistake in government? It can literally kill, it can have dangerous long term ramifications on both the lives of the citizens and the future of the country as a whole.
This is true, but also we have had government for some time. As a calibration measure, can you give some examples of what are, in your opinion, the top five or ten worst mistakes in US government since, say, the year 2000?
Formality is how standards are maintained, and I understand the basic nuance just fine. I am not claiming that the post in question was a good post, much less that the argument it made explicitly was a good argument, and even less that the argument it implied was a good argument. I am claiming that it is fair play by the rules of this forum as I understand them, and that the reply I modded was not.
You are not allowed to call someone a Nazi out of the blue here. If they say that they're a huge fan of Hitler, you are allowed to say "I think you're a Nazi, because of the statement you just made." If they say things that imply they're a big fan of Hitler, you're allowed to say "your statements indicate Hitler fandom for these reasons." You can even do this here while being objectively wrong, so long as you appear to be actually trying to make an effortful argument backed with evidence. Yes, this means that pretty much anyone can, with sufficient effort and hedging, call pretty much anyone else here a Nazi. The solution to this is to give consideration to those who argue well, stunt on the ones who argue poorly, and to ban those who don't bother to argue at all.
And sure, this applies to accusing people of wanting Red Army soldiers to gangrape German women too. But you have to actually make an argument, show your work and bring evidence. A bare accusation doesn't cut it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
People are allowed to draw unpleasant comparisons between arguments made here and arguments made elsewhere. Even if you or I think those comparisons are obviously wrong, we do not mod people for being obviously wrong because being obviously wrong is not against the rules. "paraphrasing uncharitably", "straw-manning", and generally putting extremely repugnant words in other peoples' mouths is very explicitly against the rules.
They've already been warned about deleting top-level posts, their excuses were rejected, and if they continue to do it they will be banned.
No part of this interaction involves anything resembling "affirmative action."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
No, the post above is not as uncharitable. @upsidedownmotter is drawing a comparison between a post written here and arguments elsewhere, and provided a link to the argument in question. You are free to disagree with that comparison, and you can think their argument is wrong, and you can make an argument in reply, but "the argument above seems similar to this other argument I've seen elsewhere" is comfortably within the rules, and "I suppose you probably think that Red Army soldiers gang raping German woman was a good thing too" is very far outside them when the person being responded to has not mentioned anything about soldiers, rape, or German women.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
That is not an accurate assessment of the content of the post in question. It may be a accurate assessment of the poster's intention, but they did not actually demand that anyone shut up, they did not (directly) call anyone a Nazi. They drew a comparison between positive descriptions of Apartheid South Africa and positive descriptions of Hitler elsewhere, and they offered a link to make it clear what they were talking about. It's not a particularly good post, but it is a fair one.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
I suppose you probably think that Red Army soldiers gang raping German woman was a good thing too.
Supposing this is an example of being uncharitable.
Assume the people you're talking to or about have thought through the issues you're discussing, and try to represent their views in a way they would recognize. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Beating down strawmen is fun, but it's not productive for you, and it's certainly not productive for anyone attempting to engage you in conversation; it just results in repeated back-and-forths where your debate partner has to say "no, that's not what I think".
If any poster here believes that Red Army soldiers gang raping German women was a good thing, they are more than capable of expressing that thought plainly themselves; your assistance is not required.
You've been getting better at acquiring AAQCs rather than warnings lately, but this sort of post is flatly and egregiously against the rules. I'm giving you a one-day ban. Please do not post this way in the future; ban length will escalate if you do.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
I'm no military analyst, so I couldn't tell you the exact details of what aid is appropriate. But I can safely say that "none" is not in the right ballpark even while lacking the expertise to give you those exact details.
The position I really resent is "more", endlessly, with no self-conscious awareness that this is in fact the position being taken. I strictly prefer "none" to an endless "more", for a whole variety of reasons. I strongly resent conducting "limited" wars where we burn endless resources and lives just to keep the fight churning. A decisive end, even if it is not the end we wanted, is better than that. I would be very happy if South Vietnam had survived, but the Vietnam war ending, even with a victory for the North, is still a better outcome than another decade of warfare.
A Holocaust denier could ask the same question.
That's a hell of a thing to say.
Are you familiar with Friedman Units? At every point during our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, we were told "The next six months are crucial" and how we needed one more troop surge or clearing operation to get things stable so we could finally see some durable results. Sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a drug. If what is needed is American troops, say so, and we can discuss whether the juice is worth the squeeze. If what is only needed is arms and money and intel, say that. But either way, I do not think it is too much to ask for those arguing for more support to clearly identify what results we should expect from that support, and where they're willing to draw the line if the results they predict are not, in fact, achieved.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
I would continue to provide intelligence sharing, weapons, economic aid. I would not involve our own military. Continue to strike as many deals as possible to economically isolate Russia as well.
Presumably you don't want to involve our own military because of escalation concerns, correct?
What happens if Ukraine starts losing, either because the intel, weapons and economic aid were insufficient, or because Russia starts getting their shit together, or because Ukraine's forces are bled white? Do you accept their loss and call it a day, or do you escalate? If you escalate, what with?
Slowly and annoyingly bleed out Russian resources until they get exhausted and go home.
This strategy seems likely to maximize Ukrainian casualties, and it seems at least possible that Ukraine simply runs out of soldiers before Russia becomes exhausted enough to have to go home. If that happens, the choice becomes whether to accept a Russian victory, or to escalate. From your description, it seems to me that you are inclined to escalate. What with?
Make it crystal clear that there's a rules based order and if you just cross boundaries in a war of conquest we will not make it easy.
In 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. We deployed our military to destroy his, forced the survivors back over the border into Iraq, and fomented an uprising against him. The uprising failed. We put in place ruinous sanctions and a no-fly zone, and leaned on him with all the pressure we could bring to bear. He stubbornly clung to power, and continued existing as a thorn in our side. So after 9/11 we invaded, toppled his government, hunted him down and hung him, kicked everyone associated with him and his Ba'ath party out of power, and tried to rebuild the country as a democracy. We tried for eight years, and the results were fairly disastrous. It does not seem to me that the "rules based order" was enhanced by this chain of events. In fact, it seems to me that the Iraq war and its knock-on effects did serious damage to America's internal cohesion and to international order as a whole. Ditto for our interventions in Libya and Syria.
You speak as though we are in control in some meaningful sense, that we have the capacity to impose our will on other nations. When I look at our history over the last few decades, I see little reason to believe that we actually possess such a capacity, and many examples of how a belief in such a capacity lead directly to disaster.
I contend that our willingness to simply surrender Afghanistan to the Taliban because we got bored is likely what contributed to the Ukraine invasion.
We spent twenty years and trillions of dollars occupying Afghanistan. We now know that the people running the occupation were systematically lying to the public about the occupation's prospects and achievements for most and perhaps all of those twenty years, because in fact the occupation was achieving nothing of identifiable value. You describe withdrawing after twenty years of occupation as "growing bored". How long, in your view, should we have stayed? Another twenty years? Another forty? What goal would staying longer have achieved?
I am opposed to supporting Ukraine because I do not want to go to war with Russia, and because I am extremely skeptical that "limited" aid will in fact stay limited. I think what will happen with Ukraine is what happened with Afghanistan and Iraq: the next six months will always be crucial, the next surge will always be the one to win it all, the next escalation will always be the one that's going to turn things around. This does in fact appear to me to be how Ukraine is going already, and I think conducting war in this fashion is obscene.
A world where we didn't defend Ukraine is a lot more volatile.
We didn't defend Armenia from Azerbaijan. We didn't defend Georgia from Russia. We didn't defend Ukraine when all this kicked off a decade ago. Did that make the world more volatile than a steadily-escalating European land war?
If this causes WW3 and we all die in nuclear armageddon I would say it was a bad idea. But to some degree it would be unavoidable if Russia is that suicidal and that expansionist.
You are arguing for a limited war. What I am looking for is some indication that the war you are advocating does, in fact, have meaningful limits. What I suspect is that your support for Ukraine is "limited" in the sense that "just one more step forward" is "limited"; after all, it could be two steps, or five, or a hundred. But in fact no matter how close to the precipice we are, I suspect you will always be in favor of "just one more step forward". Your flippant disdain for ending the Afghanistan occupation certainly lends weight to this impression.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
the Bucha massacre moves me deeply, apparently enough to push me out of my wise mind.
I actually had never heard of the Bucha massacre until it got brought up here, and still don't know the details.
I have heard of a lot of massacres over the years, and have expended some effort to not let them move me deeply any more, because I've had the repeated experience of being "moved deeply" by atrocities to support something that turned out to be a disaster. This is not a claim that your reaction is less valid than mine; only an attempt to illuminate a difference in perspective. I would guess that you see being moved by atrocity as a good thing, because it means that the sword of justice will be drawn against the wicked. I see it as a bad thing, because I've seen the sword of justice be drawn against the wicked, only to be swung blindly and stupidly to terrible ends.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
There's been a fair amount of discussion of America's military aid to Ukraine, and no few condemnations of those of us who have opposed that aid. I am informed, in fact, that this forum is overrun with Russian Propaganda, such that some no longer wish to participate. This is lamentable if true, so I thought it might help to prompt some elaboration of the pro-Ukraine case.
People who support aid to Ukraine, in whatever form, suppose that you personally are given complete control over the US government, and can set policy however you wish. What would your answers be to the following questions?
-
How much aid would you provide? Weapons? Money? No-Fly Zone? Air support? Troops on the ground? Nuclear umbrella? Something else?
-
What is the end-state your policy is aiming for? A ceasefire? Deter subsequent Russian invasion? Restoration of Ukraine's original borders? The Russian army destroyed? Putin deposed? Russia broken up? Something else?
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Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
...Reading comments from those arguing for Ukraine, I've noted from the start that many of the arguments presented in favor of aid appear to be mutually-exclusive. In this most recent discussion, I've seen some people arguing that we should be sending in US or NATO troops, and other people arguing that of course no US or NATO troops are needed and that sending them would be obviously crazy. This is a natural consequence of many people arguing many points of view in one forum, but it seems helpful for people to lay out their own views when possible; often, these positions are just stated as though they should be obviously true.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
It’s interesting, this is similar to my impression of the 2024 film Civil War. A lot of ink was spilled speculating about the degree to which it was an anti-Trump or anti-right-wing film, and criticizing the implausibility of the different coalitions in the civil war. (“Why are Texas and California allied? Don’t these dummies know that California and Texas are politically opposed to each other?”) When to me the film clearly seemed to want to capture the sense of fish-out-of-water befuddlement that journalists experience covering foreign war zones.
My impression on Civil War was that the director understood, quite wisely, that most people wanted a movie that flattered their partisan identity, where what he wanted to show was what an actual civil war would mean for America on a concrete, day-to-day level. He makes the factions a nonsense hodgepodge because he doesn't want people to frame every single thing he depicts as "their wretched villainy/our righteous triumph." By invalidating everything we know or suspect about America's actual geographical fault-lines, he throws people into a limbo where, while groping around for some sense of what's going on, they might actually view the events he depicts with something approaching objectivity.
If that was the plan, though, it didn't seem to work for most people I've seem commentating, who were mostly upset that they didn't get the partisan propaganda they were looking for.
No, but it seems to me that most descriptions of Transhumanist Heaven suffer from suicidally-naïve faith in progress, and Lena demonstrates succinctly why it is suicidal. It seems to me that a lot of Transhumanists have been dreaming of and actively working toward Lena without comprehending the reality of the scenario, and that this constitutes a disqualifying failure of imagination and reasoning. I readily slot myself into this category; I used to be a transhumanist, and I did not write Lena, for reasons that I have spent some time contemplating. Uploading your mind means boxing yourself. It is not immortality or transcendence, it is a level of imprisonment and vulnerability so utterly profound that no human has ever experienced the like.
Those that dodge this pitfall usually do so by appealing to a God analogue; CelestAI or Coherent Extrapolated Volition-aligned superintelligence, and thus converge on the Christian model.
The Good Place tries to thread the needle, and collapses into number-go-up banality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
Only because Christians rarely bother to spell out what day-to-day existence in heaven actually means. When they do, it ranges from the boring (eternal rest and praising God) to the pedestrian ("Heaven is a city 15,000 miles square...") to the horrifying (profound joy at being in the glorious presence of God is just religiously flavored wireheading). Transhumanists sometimes write about what heaven on Earth might look like (Star Trek, The Culture, Friendship is Optimal, etc.) and if we fall short, I don't see the Christians doing any better.
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
I would say that the more thoughtful transhumanists either converge quite closely to the above, or else diverge in ways that seem to me strictly inferior (The Good Place, Lena). This is because the above, as your own comments indicate, is the best we can concretely imagine; as you say, "simple solutions to simple problems".
Those Christian writers both capable and willing to engage in speculation are forced to appeal to abstractions (The Great Divorce being my favorite), but I for one find those abstractions intriguing, and clearly preferable to the Transhumanist offers; if I accept the most plausible of the Transhumanist assumptions, they indicate to me that Transhumanism's capacity for creating Hell vastly exceeds their capacity for creating Heaven, much less God.
[OP is breaking the rules by deleting top-level posts, removing context from the discussion. Here is their post's original text]
Richard Hanania with a new article: Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks to Lobotomize.
Basically, something has happened to Musk in the last two years that has caused his brain to haywire and now he appears incapable of separating truth from fiction. For example,
Similarly, "savings" reported by DOGE are often incorrect and need to be revised.
Increased drug use is one suspected reason, but I think it might just be brain rot from being on right wing twitter too much. It should be noted that left wing social media contagion has similarly destroyed rationale thinking in the last ten years.
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