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FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

29 followers   follows 3 users  
joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

				

User ID: 675

FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

29 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 675

I'm no neocon, but successful interventions are easily forgotten, botched ones never area.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria are the four major interventions prior to Ukraine. All four were complete disasters, and the two we committed hardest to did meaningful long-term damage to America in the form of trillions in additional debt and eroded social cohesion.

I can see why maybe you felt that previous years were like the cultural revolution, you probably felt censored and I can get that.

Suppose senior members of the Academy violated federal law by using taxpayer money to develop a novel pathogen, leaked that pathogen out into the world, caused a pandemic killing somewhere around seven million people and uncounted trillions in economic damage, conspired to cover this fact up, and then coordinated the largest, most widespread and most egregious violation of human rights in at least the last fifty years, based on fraudulent scientific claims that their colleagues refused to oppose them on. In this crazy hypothetical scenario, what would the impact of these events be on your cost/benefit analysis of what's currently happening?

Traditional monogamy is very advantageous for average men, who might not be able to get a partner in a polygamous society where the richest/highest status men have multiple wives.

Why have wives at all? Prostitution is the oldest profession, after all, and is another example of pursuing male sexuality "without having to deal with women". And yet, monogamy.

...My point is that large portions of the male population have, for a long time and across a wide area, not optimized for maximizing sexual expression "without having to deal with women." This makes them notably distinct from male homosexual behavior, at least in our present context.

I’m bisexual and if your love for your partner is founded on monogamy and raising children, then fair, it’s not the same as mine.

My love for my partner does not begin and end with monogamy and raising children. Rather, monogamy and raising children are two emergent properties of our love. I likewise feel "deep affection" for my partner, am "committed to them through thick and thin", and "feel comfortable revealing our most intimate parts to each other". But these are just words, and I did not use them because I am not confident that they convey the essence. Caring for them if they become ill is more concrete. Continuing the relationship even if we never have children would likewise be more concrete, but my wife's desire for children is considerable, and I went into the marriage with the full understanding that if we could not have them ourselves that we would adopt or foster. But then:

even if we agree to have an open relationship (although I’m personally more monogamous, it might change say, 5y+ into a relationship).

We are committed to not changing in this way. We are committed to working, daily, to ensure that this does not happen, to binding our future selves to our present decisions. And again, it seems to me that there is a fundamental difference here. I think we would each agree that sex is not a small part of a relationship, but it is obvious that we do not agree about what sex is, how it works, or what consequences flow from it. I intend to be married to my wife for as long as we both shall live, to cleave to her and to no other. My community has an abundance of couples who have been married 30, 40, 50 years, and more whose marriages were ended only by death. Is that the sort of relationship you believe you have? Is it the sort of marriage common within your dunbar number?

According to this survey, 53% of gay men were in a relationship, and 14% of gay men were in a strictly monogamous relationship. I don’t see why the numbers matter, even if there was only a single homosexual couple out there we should still accept them.

The numbers matter because we are, necessarily, speaking in generalities. The gay community is not typified by two men in a committed long-term relationship. It is typified by, to put it mildly, extreme promiscuity and a degree of sexual license that would horrify the average American if they were aware of it. That is why so much effort was expended to ensure that the average American would instead form the belief that Homosexual relationships were functionally identical to straight ones, when this is in fact not true.

I would agree that to the extent that homosexual relationships conform to my understanding of what a good relationship is, my objections to them decrease.

That’s not what I personally heard, the messaging I got was that it’s fine for gay men to have relationships and to raise children together.

Yes, in a context where "relationship" is assumed to be, at worst, serial monogamy. The large majority of gay men are not participating in this sort of relationship, and likewise (mercifully) are not raising children.

Gay men have been having anonymous promiscuous sex even in the most repressive societies.

And Christians have continued practicing Christianity in even the most repressive societies. It is becoming increasingly clear which of these is preferred, and by who.

What would you gain by removing the social acceptance of homosexual relationships and gay marriage?

What do they and their supporters gain by removing the social acceptance of Christianity? I was all for tolerance, when I still believed that tolerance was a moral precept. Now that I understand that it is not, and now that I understand that many of them very clearly believe that coexistence is neither desirable nor possible, it seems proper that I and people like me should organize to better preserve our values and interests. Part of that is acquiring and communicating a clear understanding of who is across the table from us. To bring this back to the comment that brought me into this discussion:

Love wins.

"Love" is underdefined.

People are born that way.

No, they probably are not.

Queer people just want to be tolerated.

This may be true for specific individual queer people. It is certainly not true of the ideological movement claiming to speak for them. That ideology has moved past toleration to approval, and past approval to attempting to force participation.

They don't want to shove it in our face.

Again, the ideological movement very clearly prioritizes "shoving it in our faces" at every possible opportunity.

They just want to love their partners the same way that straight people do.

Speaking in generalities, no, "they" do not. Gay sexuality bears little to no resemblance to straight sexuality, in practices or in consequences.

They definitely won't try to convert kids.

This one is the real kicker, and where much of the debate centers. Let us say, at least, that they are very, very interested in securing and exercising as much control over children's education and understanding of sexuality as possible, and that the more kids begin identifying and acting in LGBT ways, the happier the movement is, without apparent limit or restraint.

I have seen claims that America would escalate to nukes if China succeeded in sinking a CBG with conventional ordinance. I am not highly confident that those claims are inaccurate; I can easily imagine many Americans, including Americans in positions of leadership, reacting to a serious naval disaster with an instinctive desire for a reset button.

It is entirely plausible to me that Russia would use nuclear arms in a tactical role as a response to loss against enemy conventional forces on their borders. It is my understanding that Russia has straight-up stated that this is their plan in such an eventuality. Your assessment, as I understand it, is that this is a bluff.

If a nuke wipes out an American division, is it your position that we should nuke Russian forces in reply, presumably in a similar tactical fashion?

If they continue to escalate, at what point do we cut our losses, short of full MAD?

I'm on the record as considering the nuclear annihilation of America's coasts as not quite the worst-case scenario imaginable, but I still consider it a very bad case. I do not want to play global thermonuclear war today. The impression I get from most Ukraine-boosters is that there is no appreciable risk of global thermonuclear war no matter how far this escalates, but I notice that they have been steadily pushing for escalations for years now, those escalations have not actually delivered the results they promised, and that they don't actually seem to have a plan other than "escalate until we win".

If you are wrong about Russian capabilities and commitment, it is distinctly possible that a lot of people are going to die, and the world that comes out the other end is not going to have much resemblance to the one you have known to date. I think you should take a moment and consider that maybe the juice is not actually worth the squeeze, particularly given that the country you're counting on to prosecute this war is itself coming apart at the seams.

Are they going to nuke over that? Seems unlikely.

And if they nuke ukraine over that, are we going to go full-MAD? Also seems unlikely.

That has more to do with the fact that they’re men than the fact that they’re gay.

How do we reconcile the concept of the Patriarchy with evident longstanding social norms of enforced monogamy?

Male homosexuality is simply male sexuality that doesn’t have to deal with women. How many straight men would practice monogamy if they could have unlimited sex on demand simply by going on an app?

I'm also a man. My "love for my partner" is founded on monogamy and raising children. I agree that "male sexuality that doesn't have to deal with women" is probably a pretty good explanation for many of the features of male homosexual norms that we can observe. But the fact remains that my relationship with my partner is in fact built around "dealing with women", and one woman in particular, and that as a consequence their "love for their partner" and mine do not appear to be the same sort of thing at all.

Despite that, there’s still a sizeable proportion of gay men that choose monogamy and raising children, hence the demand for gay marriage and surrogacy.

What proportion? 51%? 25%? 10%? 5%? less?

I would contend that the previous effort was to try to create the impression that monogamy and raising children, among other signifiers of "normality", were in fact 50%+. That this was only achievable by lying shamelessly is my point.

I mean, guess in my view, the American Red Tribe vs The American Blue Tribe + The entire rest of the world is not a winnable fight.

Whether it's winnable is questionable, but more questionable is the basic polarity of the situation.

The American Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe + the entire rest of the world was the situation we were previously converging on. Red tribe cooperated with and funded the creation of an international ideological alliance controlled and directed almost entirely by Blue Tribe, which directed American tax money in vast amounts to Blue Tribe projects designed more or less explicitly to increase Blue Tribe power both at home and abroad.

We are now attempting to dismantle that system. If we succeed, the result will not be "Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe + the entire rest of the world", because the international ideological alliance will break up and die. Then it will simply be Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. You've already stated your personal view of the stakes of that conflict; we'll see how it goes in practice.

Those wars don't count.

Ok.

Nobody in the world will ever think the US are a reliable ally unless the enemy is Iraq and Afghanistan, and even in the later case the US did not win...

Given how our alliances have worked out over the last few decades, this seems to be an acceptable outcome. I am tired of being a "reliable ally" to "allies" who offer nothing in return but ever-increasing demands, recrimination, and interference in our internal politics to my tribe's detriment.

Not at all. I do believe in religious freedom.

It would not surprise me if you did have a conceptual package of things you approve of and are willing to tolerate that you've labeled "religious freedom". I see no reason to believe that this package has sufficient overlap with the package I maintain under that label, nor to believe that you are in fact committed to this package in any durable way long-term, such that I should base my plans for the future on the assumption that it will protect people like me or work in our favor. When the new arguments about how things which were previously normal are actually weird and harmful and need to be suppressed, or why things which were previously abhorrent suddenly are the purest reflection of human liberty and must be defended, I expect the model "liberal" to update cleanly and arbitrarily in favor of withdrawing tolerance from those who disagree.

Again, the part where Progressives were absolutely in favor of mass-importing radical muslims on the assumption that, in your words, they would "be converted to secular values." "Conversion to secular values" isn't gravity. It's a socially-constructed mechanism that the Progressive tribe built and maintains at considerable expense, and it is and always will be innately hostile to people like myself. Tolerance is not a moral precept; the idea that it was was something between a delusion and a deliberate con.

We have just come off fighting a continuous war in multiple countries for the last two decades. I am pretty confident that most serious people in the world understand that the US is, in fact, capable of prosecuting wars when we find it necessary. The question is not whether we can fight, it's if we should in this instance. And the answer is a hard no.

Is it your understanding that the median male homosexual is monogamous and interested in raising children? Is it your understanding that Homosexuality is genetic and fixed? Those seem like two obvious factual questions to start off with.

Of course Europe is not a bastion against muslim extremism, but I think that's simply a failure of Europeans being too optimistic about letting in highly religious immigrants, hoping they would be converted to secular values.

I am highly religious, as are many Americans. I am not interested in helping to build a system for suppressing Muslim extremism when it is self-evident that such a system will be used against people like me first and worst. Not when countries who don't want Muslim extremists could simply choose not to import Muslim extremists, and especially not when I strongly suspect that the enthusiasm with importing them is at least partially motivated by the hope that they'll form a reliable voting block against people like me.

Russia, however, openly sides with dagestani warlords and invites them to rape and pillage Europe.

I have no idea what this refers to, but would be willing to read up on it if you had a link. Meanwhile, we allied with child-raping drug dealers for twenty years in Afghanistan.

If I had my way, Europe and the US would be completely rid of both christian and islamic oppression. That's not possible right now, but it could happen someday. Defeating Putin's barbarian orc army is a start.

Yes. And then you wonder why I, as a Christian, am not enthusiastic about facilitating this process with my nation's blood and treasure.

You hate people like me. You'll harm us if you can. You are not a friend or even an ally. You are just as bad an enemy as Russia, and much more dangerous to me that Russia ever could be.

If I am Europe and I had the option to side with China to kill and humiliate a large number of American Red Tribers during or post Trump during a conflict, I can't imagine why I wouldn't take that opportunity at this point.

Yes. We Red-Tribers understand this quite well, which is why things have gone the way they have gone. Common knowledge of the nature of the Red/Blue conflict is what has driven the Culture War escalation spiral, and is what will continue to drive it in the future until that spiral exceeds the tensile strength of our existing social arrangement.

Russia is an authoritarian regime that doesn't respect secular liberal values, allies with muslim terrorists, and oppresses its own people.

I do not share your "secular liberal values", and am not interested in maintaining them. The median European neither shares my values nor respects my inalienable rights, and are both willing to coordinate meanness against me and has a long history of cooperating with efforts at such coordination. Any claim that Europe is a bastion against Muslim extremism seems laughable on the face, given Europe's obsession with importing as many people from extremist Muslim countries as possible and their evident failure to actually suppress the extremism of their new citizens. Europe as a bulwark of "Oppression" is likewise laughable; the median European would prefer me to be imprisoned than living as I am.

"Western Civilization" does not, I think, have a definition that we share in common, so I decline appeals to it.

For one example, my understanding is that the median male homosexual does not practice monogamy and is not interested in raising children. Is your understanding otherwise?

My understanding is that the median male homosexual does not "love their partner" in the same way that I do. It's now been admitted that "born that way" was a convenient lie which will now be discarded. LGBT as an ideological movement definitely wants to shove their ideology in my face. And they will in fact try to convert kids; at a minimum, "an unspecified but large percentage of kids are actually LGBTQ+ in their core nature, and helping them discover this through incessant, inescapable indoctrination from every level of society is a good thing". I understand that others might disagree with these statements, but I'm confident I can back all of them with solid evidence.

Even from within an entirely materialistic frame, even stripped entirely of any reference to specific religions, "the wages of sin is death, but righteousness preserves and sustains life perpetually" seems to me not only evident, but unavoidable.

Have you ever had a close personal relationship with an addict, or with someone suffering from serious trauma? An abuse or rape victim, for example? Have you observed the consequences of serious cruelty or selfishness in detail over time? Do you have personal experience of despair?

it is possible to both observe and to experience the destruction of the self from an entirely materialist frame. Likewise, it is possible to observe life that transcends individual mortality: there are vital parts of me that did not come from me, but which live on as an extension of my ancestors, physical and memetic, and which I hope will live on long after I am gone in both my children and in those whose lives I influence.

Against this, it seems to me that you are offering warmed-over 90s-era tits-and-beer Liberal Atheism: people just need to be free to follow their bliss, and anyone saying otherwise is just an uptight square. There's a reason that meme has largely died out, even among Atheists, in favor of increasing recognition of some sort of moral frame with enforcement mechanisms for violations, and that reason might be encapsulated in the observation that Bill Clinton, the avatar-champion of tits-and-beer liberalism, was in fact a rapist.

We tried "follow your bliss". It did not lead to Bliss, but to misery and wretchedness. Tits-and-beer Liberal Atheism carried the field when it was novel and when no one knew for sure what the consequences would be. Now we see the consequences.

If american culture isn't dominant and ascendant then what the hell am I watching, listening to, and reading all the time?

What are you watching, listening to, and reading all the time?

I've pretty much completely stopped watching movies and TV shows. I've stopped reading American comics, and even webcomics, which used to be my jam, and most of my favorite artists have been canceled one way or another. I've stopped buying and playing Triple-A games.

We used to discuss the culture war fight over TV and movies; mostly we don't any more, but my observation is that looking back on those discussions, the critics of SJ have pretty much run the table. TV and Film have been reduced to bombed-out shells, with cratering audiences and cauterized fan-bases. How's The Witcher doing these days? How's Marvel? Star Wars? Star Trek? Disney generally? In the games space, we see former titans of the industry absolutely imploding; Ubisoft, Blizzard, Obsidian, Bioware, the list goes on and on. Comics aren't looking so hot, but I'll admit I mostly stopped paying attention years ago. My musical tastes are eclectic enough that I don't really have an opinion on how that field is going; maybe it's still rocking along in fine form? But in the fields I pay attention to, American culture seems dead as Dillinger.

Yet I see more FUD than I want to here. Somehow the whole profession is discredited by covid, even though quite a few doctors would happily tell you that the way the pandemic was handled was far from perfect.

We agree mistakes were made.

What follows? And then what?

One option is that people just straight-up stop trusting experts. You don't like that option, for what seems to me to be a number of fairly solid reasons. What's your proposed alternative, and where do you see it being implemented?

We're several years past Blue Tribe presidential candidates running on taxing religions they don't like. And of course, Japan successfully suppressed Christianity in the 1600s, Russia in the 1900s and China in the 1950s. In the more limited context of this forum, one of the things that beat the liberalism out of me was the multiple iterations of the circumcision argument, where my opposites argued that religions have conformed themselves to society before, and therefore there's no reason not to use state power to force them to conform arbitrarily in the future. Nor is my opposition to this attitude principled; I'm happy to argue on behalf of the Jews, but I would not be willing to extend the same toleration for the more extreme forms of female genital mutilation, much less Aztec blood sacrifice.

It is entirely obvious that there is no secular, materialist reason not to ban a given religion. We ban harmful things all the time, always have and always will, and there is no objective definition of "harm" for people to resort to in situations of disagreement. It is trivial to generate a definition where conservative Christianity (or drinking alcohol, or playing video games, or teaching women to read, & etc) are serious threats that require the power of the state to suppress.

More generally, tolerance is not a moral precept. There are many good contingent arguments why suppressing conservative Christianity would be a poor idea; Christians are pretty near the core of good citizens, at least under a standard of "good citizen" that has prevailed until recently, and also they are a very old and thus fairly well-understood phenomenon, so there's an argument to stick to the devil you know, as it were. Ultimately, however, toleration is a question of value, and values observably change over time. If your values have changed sufficiently that toleration of conservative Christians no longer seems like a good idea, that's sorta the whole ball game, isn't it? It's sort of like architecture: at the point where you have to expend constant effort to keep the building from falling down, it's probably coming down one way or the other.

Liberalism was built on the assumption that the values held by its founders were something approximating a universal constant, that all humans would hold something approximating those values more or less indefinitely. This assumption is false, and once that realization settles in, Liberalism becomes completely incoherent. Moreover, it is likely that its development and influence were necessarily path-dependent, that it only worked as long as it did because no one had really tried it at scale before, and so the results were unknown. The results now being known, it seems unlikely that it will persist, much less revive.

"God of the gaps" cuts both ways. The cached Materialist narrative has some very large holes in it that are bridged through unexamined axioms and predictions that never update when falsified.

In that case, I think the term "porn-brained" is misleading, as it implies that men behave a certain way because of excessive porn consumption.

Urge to consume sugar, salt and fat is natural, cultural oversupply doesn't just make people fat and unhealthy, it makes people who think being fat and unhealthy is a good thing.

Urge to mate as much as possible with a variety of women is always there, cultural oversupply inflates this drive out of proportion, and some people think the overinflated drive is the natural state and a good thing.

In this matter, I speak from personal experience.

My wife works in payroll. It's amazing how many people try stuff like this. I can't wrap my head around "I'm going to break the law in writing in a way that directly motivates people to report me."

The specific claim was "men are bad at sex and women are better off pleasuring themselves", so that seems pretty constrained to the sex act itself. Broadening it to "general dissatisfaction with men" seems like goalpost-moving.

I think you're dramatically underestimating the bully power of a president with full regulatory authority over the corporations and therefore culture of the united states.

We have already had corporations coordinate economic warfare against Red States. We have already had the Federal Government use regulatory power to turn corporations into tools of repression against Red Tribe power centers and interests. What we lose in additional power used against us, we gain in legibility, in additional ability to coordinate common knowledge that we are, in fact, being repressed by unaccountable state power, and that we should escalate further until that repression is defeated for good.

I bet with my life choices, and my bet is that my side will win and my children will inherit a better world than the one we have now. You should do likewise.