FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Why do you care? You are convinced the afterlife is entirely fictional. How can claims about fictions harm you or anyone else? Why is anyone's belief about the existence or non-existence of an afterlife, or any details of that belief, something you feel the need to make and enforce rules about? And if we grant that expressions of belief related to the afterlife deserve to have rules made about them, why is it your preferred rules that should be enforced?
This is not supposed to be a topic of debate in Western culture. The rule was supposed to be that people having metaphysical beliefs different from your own neither broke your leg nor picked your pocket. If mutual tolerance is not good enough for you any more, however, I for one am entirely happy to go right back to enforcing specific beliefs through force of law, and further fighting over which beliefs get enforced. Would that please you better?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
The American Revolution was, by most accounts, based on the principles of classical liberalism; principles that I imagine Hlynka and his fellow travelers would endorse wholeheartedly. Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution?
I've argued yes in the past, and would do so again. Likewise I've argued at some length that the "principles of classical liberalism" are fundamentally flawed, and they've failed in the ways we observe for clear, predictable reasons.
Does it have to be denounced?
More or less. More precisely, it should not and probably cannot be repeated, and its problems were identified early on. The ideological amalgamation of the American Revolution was a one-shot thing; it worked as well as it did the first time around due to ignorance in the form of an absence of specific elements of common knowledge. Now that those specific elements of common knowledge exist, large portions of the project no longer work and cannot be made to work again.
Were the founding fathers necessarily committed to a certain "top down rationalist" view of human nature that true Red Tribers would have to reject?
There was a strong element of this, yes. It was moderated by contrasting, competing worldviews that were absent in, say, the French Revolution, and I believe that these moderating influences explain why it worked as well as it did for as long as it did. The French Revolution provides excellent contrast, as I've argued previously.
I argued this point with Hlynka back in the day, and my recollection was that the dispute came down to semantics; IIRC we both agreed that it came down to Hobbes vs Rousseau, and what label you apply to each of them. Likewise the argument I just linked: The American and French revolutions were very, very different, such that if both were "Enlightenment" revolutions, we should be able to say which was the more "Enlightened" than the other. It doesn't really matter which a given person picks, because the point is that if the term covers both perfectly equally, the term is actually meaningless, and by choosing, one reveals one's own definition. The American Revolution did contain a heaping helping of "top-down, rationalist" thinking, and the structures that resulted have failed us badly, and failed us the worst when we approached them from a top-down rationalist mindset.
You are currently discussing an example of what strongly appears to be the Left breaking the social contract in a way that makes "reactionary" political violence inevitable. They whipped themselves into a frenzy over Trump, and now someone has actually tried to kill him, and for many on the left there is no actual way to walk it back, nor ability to recognize the realities of their position. All they know how to do is double-down, which makes further incidents inevitable, which in turn makes reciprocity from the Reds inevitable.
The Left actually rioted nation-wide. They actually have used national security assets to persecute their political rivals. They actually have inflicted lawless violence on Reds in particular and on the nation generally. They actually have made two serious attempts at assassinations of Republican leadership. They actually have prosecuted Reds for lawful self-defense. They actually have attempted to jail political opponents. They actually ignore all of the numerous violations they actually commit on a regular basis, and paper it over with fictions about Nazis and the Handmaid's Tale.
There is only so long this pattern can continue before it breaks things none of us will be able to fix. Today was just another step closer to the brink.
Should we cancel all Mormon/Catholic/Christian authors then?
Is this an acceptable conversation to be having in the mainstream culture? If and when the consensus shifts to "yes", what should happen then? We both agree that it's not camps, but it is religious discrimination being cemented as a cultural norm, right?
Twitter and Reddit seem to have an awful lot of "Hey, did you know Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon?" threads.
...How is this different than (((Triple Parentheses)))?
This conversation from back in the day seems relevant, and particularly this part:
But it is very obvious to me that for Blues this similarity is definitive, that the problem with the WBC isn't that specific Christians are acting like assholes, but that Christians in general are assholes. And the problem I have with your arguments is that on the one hand you are steadfast in your appeal to mistake theory, toleration and conciliation, and on the other hand you seem to share this understanding that the problem is the core beliefs, not particular actions by which those beliefs are expressed. It seems to me that those positions are mutually incoherent.
Is the problem that Sanderson expressed his views poorly, or that he has them at all? Pretty clearly the latter, for GFM, and for many, perhaps most of those populating that thread. As you note, the social consensus evidently isn't there to secure her tribal preferences, quite, yet. Of course, the consensus is there to allow her to make this attack without personal consequence, and it's there to protect her from any symmetrical attack from the other side, and there's no reason to think where we are now is where we'll be in five years, or ten. And it does no good to appeal to the broad consensus of public opinion, when we have Quiet Diplomacy to shape the options presented to the public such that they don't realize what the choices available actually were.
I guess my question is, why is she wrong, really? In five years, or ten, when the social consensus has ratcheted forward another few notches and she or someone like her tries again, what will the objection be? And it's not like I'm better. I personally don't have an answer to the observation that there are some practices that I am not willing to tolerate, even though they are obviously deeply significant to their adherents. I cannot actually make an argument for universal toleration that would put me in a position to condemn GFM on principles. I don't think anyone else can either. This is why values-drift inspires such despair: because it seems obvious that it can, in fact, make people mutually intolerable to each other, that it can remove the possibility of peace from our future.
As you said way back then:
All of which is a roundabout way of saying I'd like there to be more tolerance on all sides, but yeah, if your religious convictions and your need to express them are in conflict with public harmony, your religious convictions lose...
...The thing is, what does it take for her "religion" to be seen as the threat to "public harmony"? Or is that a conclusion reserved for actual religions?
The thesis I was referencing is that WNs and alt-righters are, in fact, Blues applying a fundamentally Blue worldview. You are jointly your own closest brothers and worst enemies.
If I can say to you, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing", and mean it, live by it, raise my children and build my community by it, what does any of the above or below have to entice me? The standard response is that Christianity has failed... delivered, generally, by people who willingly chose to abandon the faith of their fathers to embrace an alien and alienating worldview, and refuse to let it go.
Your post honestly deserves a more detailed response than that, but this, to me, is the core of the issue: You're looking for a banner to rally behind, but you've rejected the most proven banner known to man because it's incompatible with fundamental elements of the Blue worldview, which you still hold. Meanwhile, the Reds that comprise most of the people you're trying to rally have no interest in the alternative banners you offer, because they recognize their fundamentally Blue nature.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Ben Shapiro says that we should just argue people into adopting our views because it'll suddenly work, even though we've been trying for years and it hasn't worked. Peter Brimelow says we should close the border and have white babies. Curtis Yarvin says that we should put a dictator in charge, or at least whatever FDR was. Caldwell says that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act, even though it's as much a part of our national identity at this point as the Constitution.
Build a parallel status economy.
Every social system should either work for us or not work at all. Actively attack enemy-held institutions by any means necessary.
reject and subvert systems that work against our interests. Deny their power, hamper their operations, refuse their legitimacy, appropriate or destroy their resources.
Focus on outcomes, not process. Process is for coordinating cooperation, and that is not a thing our present society is capable of maintaining.
The goal should be a breakdown of federal authority, and acceleration in the decay of existing systems of social control such as the media ecosystem, educational system, academia generally, the courts, and the federal bureaucracy. Delegitimizing these institutions in the eyes of as much of the public as possible is a good first step.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.
...It seems to me that your arguments would benefit greatly from expansion into more than single-sentence, contextless dismissal. You appear to be arguing that the population as a whole is still moving away from religiosity. But my argument was not that people are moving toward Religion, but rather that they are moving away from liberalism and its axioms, upon which the Progressive edifice is founded. My argument is not that Conservative Christians will secure power, it is that power will lean somewhat more in our direction and very hard away from our most dedicated opponents, because our critiques are valid and theirs are not.
They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.
I am highly confident that none of the 2028 contenders will be Boomer-brained Gen-x-er preachers or middle-aged church ladies, in either party. I'm highly confident that the Republican 2028 contenders will be much more sympathetic to Conservative Christian social critique than they will be to Progressive social critique, and will consider protection of religious freedom for Conservative Christians as a winning political cause.
I'm weakly confident that Republicans will win in 2028, and I am highly confident that taking advice from the Hananiah set would degrade those odds, not improve them. The sort of reductive mental caching you seem to be deploying in this thread is a fair bit of the reason why. Rather than engage with what is actually happening, you consistently substitute factual realities for an imagined set more conducive to your axioms. Here, you are trying to round "Conservative Christians have persuasive critiques of our current culture" to "The Religious Right is ascendent, will try to jail people for viewing porn."
The problem with your claim, as I understand it, is that this is not actually going to happen, and the reason it isn't going to happen is not that people with power will take your advice. You can box phantoms for the next three years as much as you like; the world will proceed without you.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Drone strikes seems like a reasonable one. I'm not a fan of Israel by any means, but this seems straightforwardly preferable to the classic "hellfire missile into a compound that turns out to be a wedding". As I recall, there were a lot of incidents along those general lines, any one of which was almost certainly much more objectionable than this entire attack.
What exactly is the basis for objection here?
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The targets are Hezbollah agents. I don't see any reasonable objection to Israel targeting Hezbollah agents.
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The method involves explosives, which are not perfectly discriminate, so there's risk of collateral damage. Only, these appear to be very small bombs, such that you need to be either touching them or quite unlucky to be seriously maimed or killed.
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The explosives are delivered "blind", in the sense that when they're detonated, the people detonating them don't know where they are or who actually has them, raising the risk of collateral damage. On the other hand, they were delivered in a way that provides a very high probability that they will, in fact, be in the direct personal possession of legitimate targets, and those not in the personal possession of legitimate targets probably got there by the actions of the legitimate targets, not the attackers.
My distaste for the Israeli state comes from them frequently being indiscriminate in the application of violence, either maiming and killing people who I do not consider legitimate targets. This attack in particular seems orders-of-magnitude better than the average in terms of target discrimination.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Does Might make Right? Is Justice as simple as "Whatever the strong impose on the weak"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Almost no normies actually think communism is good, nor are they yearning for it to any great degree.
I put forward that normies think Nazism is bad. If you display a swastika, you are likely to suffer immediate social and possibly even legal consequences due to this belief.
What social and possibly even legal results do you observe from people displaying the hammer and sickle? If you observe a disparity, how large is that disparity? If it is indeed quite large, do you think it is perhaps too large, that the reaction to the hammer and sickle should conform more to that of the swastika? If so, what is the problem with describing this rectification as "teaching normies that communism is bad"?
This dude actually jokes around about suspending the Constitution
Why do you care about this, and why should anyone else care about this? The Constitution is dead, and there will be no resurrection. I do not believe that it protects me or my tribe in any meaningful way, and I do not see why I should respect claims of its protection put forward by other tribes. Constitutional claims are useful when they convince other people to drop opposition to one's values or goals. There is no reason to allow them to obstruct one's own values or goals. The constitution means whatever five justices say it means, without limit; benefits are entirely derived from controlling the mechanisms of interpretation, not the document being interpreted. If you have political and social control, you don't need the Constitution, and if you lack it, the Constitution will not help you. This is how the document observably works, and knowledge that this is how it observably works is now reasonably common across the population, and will only grow increasingly common over time as the contradictions inherent to the system continue to express themselves.
not-so-jokingly asks about deploying troops domestically which we've only seen in living memory a few times in the 60s and once in '92 for the LA race riots.
Deploying troops domestically was the correct response to the Floyd riots, and the failure to do so seriously damaged what remains of our country. The riots were the culmination of Blue Tribe's long-established strategy of employing organized, lawless political violence to secure political and social power, and they succeeded to an unbelievable degree specifically because no one was willing or able to deploy the appropriate response of overwhelming lawful force on the part of the authorities. That failure made the culture war much, much worse in a way that probably cannot be fixed.
Trump is not a unique threat. He exists because a critical mass of Red Tribe has lost faith in the existing system and wishes to coordinate meanness outside it. If he is finally destroyed that critical mass will find some other avatar or method to coordinate meanness through. They will continue to do so until either they find an effective method to obtain real address of grievances, or until society suffers a fatal rupture. The later seems, admittedly, a more likely outcome, but the former should not be underestimated. The current systems which prevent redress seem to me much more fragile than they generally appear.
If we try and you're wrong, then we win. If we try and you're right, then this creates common knowledge of the problem, which is useful for coordinating further escalation, which creates opportunities for an eventual win.
What's the alternative? If we don't fight, we definately lose. What's the argument that fighting and losing leads to worse outcomes than not fighting and losing? What's the outcome you're actually attempting to avoid, and how do your prescriptions actually lead to avoiding it?
One theory is that Blue Tribe turns the burner up or down for purposes of tactical or strategic advantage. Given that they're more or less back in control, what advantage is there on turning the burner back to high?
Thousands of extra black people are being killed per year, compared to five years ago, and this rise correlates neatly with the largest social intervention in law enforcement in living memory. But this is an inconvenient correlation to examine, so it simply goes unexamined, and people mention how it seems like things have chilled out lately. Well, sure. The chillness or lack thereof of our collective environment is entirely determined by Blue Tribe social consensus, and is entirely detached from any actual facts of our physical existence.
BLM was a crisis of the cops hunting black people in the street, not because the cops were actually hunting black people in the street, but because the media and other organs of blue-tribe social consensus generated a collective delusion that it was so. Now black people are actually being killed at rates approximating those delusive rates, but no one cares. This is how it works, and in fact how it has always worked. We've collectively outsourced our cognition to a small cadre of radical utopians, and we dance to their whim.
It will remain so until the existing system ruptures badly enough that the problems become undeniably immediate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Given how hard the US right is now pulling for "1. feed Ukraine to Putin 2. ???? 3. PROFIT!"
The implication being that the pro-Ukraine side, by contrast, has a plan?
How'd Syria go?
Libya?
Afghanistan?
Iraq?
Iraq the first time?
Iran?
Afghanistan the first time?
...Like, what's your actual conception of how this is all going to roll out? Putin is couped by the competent, democratic statesmen who form his opposition and then Russia reforms into a functional capitalist democracy, thereby nullifying the threat of their considerable nuclear arsenal? Is that the road you're looking for?
If you want to defend the interventionist consensus, defend the results it has delivered over the last thirty years through the multiple fucking iterations it has played out, very publicly, at vast economic and social and human cost. Show how all the previous disasters were really just faulty perception, or working the kinks out, or something other than simply a blind-spot in your geopolitical perception the size of the fucking moon. I'll cop to not expecting the Russian army to be a shambolic trash-disaster, and sure, right now we are fairly thoroughly mauling that army for pennies on the dollar, given that Ukranian and Russian lives are considered to have no value in the equation. But what's the endgame, here?
What are you willing to call success, such that we can move on, job well done, no more entanglements and expenditures needed?
What are you willing to call failure, such that you agree that it's time to cut our losses?
Because I have heard this fucking song and dance before, where "these next six months are critical" for ten or fifteen or twenty years at a stretch, and my heuristic is that anyone selling that bullshit is either a braindead incompetent or a literal vampire who requires decapitation and a stake through the heart. I refuse to play this game where we pretend that all those previous disasters and betrayals and massacres and atrocities didn't actually happen or were just crazy random happenstance, where we pretend that American foreign policy and leadership should be presumed to be competent and efficient and generally on the ball. I can't pretend that hard, and I have zero respect for those who can.
the missionary is acting as though there is a law to be followed, when there obviously is not. The checkpoint guard is a potential threat, the "service charge" is not optional, and these realities must be engaged with. The missionary is thinking there's some system in place such that these realities are Someone Else's Problem, that the proper response is to file a complaint form and let the system handle it. He's blind to the fact that there is no system, that this is the way things are.
The cat lady is doing the same thing. She acts as though there's a system to enforce her will over and above her immediate actions. She apparently thinks there's a system that prevents the cat from walking out an open door, ignoring that no such system exists. She wants such a system to exist, ignores the fact that it does not, and so suffers the consequences.
The "dishes" poem (one of my favorites, by the way) illustrates the disconnect between cooperative systems of the type the people in these two examples are imagining exist, and the reality of individual choice. Washing the dishes is supposed to preclude breaking them, but there's nothing innate to the task to actually prevent this. What prevents breaking dishes is something entirely different, a whole other complex of assumptions and interactions with no actual connection to the act of dish-washing itself, and the existence of those assumptions cannot simply be assumed when it's time for dish-washing.
Assuming the above is correct, let's see if I can extend the pattern.
This scene from The Wire is all about the divide between the power of a hypothetical system and the power of material reality. The guard wants it to be one way: his whole job is in fact to be that system, that's the whole reason he's there, the reason he draws a paycheck, he has a uniform and everything! And yet, it's the other way: the system doesn't actually exist, even though he wants it to, even though he's paid to implement it, because at the end of the day, cooperation has to either be consented to or enforced, nd mechanisms of enforcement are both very expensive and quite limited in what they can achieve. Stanfield refuses to consent, and the guard, and the people the guard represents, aren't actually prepared for enforcement. They're bluffing, and Stanfield calls it. The guard's response is to try to guilt-trip him over his defection, as though Stanfield doesn't understand what he's doing, as though he's just making a mistake, and once this is pointed out he'll fall in line with the system. This doesn't work because Stanfield is not making a mistake, has no intention of cooperating, and knows that neither the guard nor the people behind him have any way of enforcing the system they're claiming exists. In reality, he has all the cards, and recognizes no reason to pretend otherwise. He is able to inflict emotional whiplash on the guard at will, by allowing the guard to pretend the system exists, and then demonstrating that it does not.
Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is. The point of all these statements is to highlight different ways that this system vs reality disconnect applies to the system of the Constitution: the document itself is not the power, the justices aren't even the power. The paper and ink and the justices interpreting it are just coordination mechanisms. The power comes from the social consensus that they exist to coordinate, and that power can be manipulated in a whole variety of ways that have nothing to do with a fancy piece of parchment or five people in silly black robes. A foolish person might imagine that their ignition key is what powers their car: they turn the key and the car starts! But of course, the ignition key is only indirectly connected to the car's engine, and if there's something wrong with the engine the key certainly isn't going to help.
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
You are correct that the violence is currently sporadic and unlikely to escalate. What you are missing is that a precedent is being set here for the level of background violence "we" are supposed to tolerate, but that standard is being set largely by social institutions that are predominantly Blue and are sympathetic to Blue violence. At some point in the not-to-distant future, I think it is likely that it will be Reds committing the sporadic violence. When that happens, the Blues are not going to want to tolerate it, and the Reds are not going to accept an abrupt demand for a return to order and decorum. That is when things will go sideways.
I'm confident we could game out how the conversation goes, right here and now. Sometime in the next five years, a popular Democrat gets topped by an assassin. Someone comes in here and says The Culture War has Gone Too Far, we have to get a handle on the violence guys, sure things happened in the past, but now it's serious, it's time to crack down on the hate and radicalism! How do you think that conversation goes?
Crimes are real, and people in high places commit them. But prosecuting them is reactive, and prosecutorial discretion lends itself to petty political witch hunts. Trump supporters, of all people, should realize this.
No, we shouldn't. What we should realize is that the system has been used against us, legitimately or illegitimately, and so now it needs to be used against them as well. If the ways that federal, state, social and corporate power have been used against Red Tribe were acceptable, then they remain acceptable when we use them against Blue Tribe. If that cannot and will not be allowed to happen, then that is valuable information that we would do well to confirm before considering where we go from here.
If in fact the situation is one where Blue Tribe is fundamentally unwilling to accept application of their own rules against their interests, then this fact needs to be made common knowledge.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Should Hirohito have surrendered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Do you think Japan should have continued to fight on further?) The war was already lost well before that point; all continuing to fight did was get even more Japanese killed.
We are not the imperial Japanese, and the Blues are not 1940s America. Should the Russian Whites have surrendered meekly to the Reds? My read is no, but again, our situation isn't Whites vs Reds either. We are actually in a much better situation, against a much less ruthless enemy. We have not yet begun to fight, metaphorically or literally. There is no rational basis for despair in the current situation.
This would require a Red Tribe capable of coordinating, rather than being downright allergic to it.
The Reds I see around me are evidently capable of considerable coordination. You should at least consider the possibility that your personal experiences do not generalize.
They'll grumble, and mutter about "2nd amendment solutions," but they'll bow down and comply.
Your opinion is that I am a liar, because I have repeatedly stated that I believe that "2nd Amendment solutions" are both a possible and practical solution to the current situation, without providing details of how that would work. I've stated that I prefer being called a liar to providing those details, annoying as it is, because I'm still hoping the current push for peaceful defiance will work. But I will note that every time you initiate this argument, you claim that "2nd Amendment solutions" means hicks with AR15s in twos and threes attempting to fight the US government. I think you badly underestimate both the chances both of the hicks actually trying this and the possible effectiveness of the strategy if they do, but I believe I've stated a number of times that my understanding of "2nd Amendment solutions" does not consist of Red Tribers, singly or in numbers, fighting the government with their personal collections of small-arms. If that was the scenario I was expecting, I would be significantly less confident in success, though still not as pessimistic as you. But that is not, in fact, the scenario I think is likely, and my assessment of that scenario is not the source of my confidence. If the Blues find a genie that magically un-exists all guns in America, it would not materially change my estimate of our chances for overthrowing Blue Tribe. The Second Amendment and the firearms it is intended to protect are much, much more valuable as a coordination mechanism than for pure tactical advantage. The tactical advantages come from other vectors, vectors which neither you nor most others appear to have grasped. I think this is a good thing, because we might still be able to unwind this mess before people like you stumble across them, a whole lot of people die, and the lights probably go out for the forseeable future.
And the part I can't figure out is, what your actual position is. Let's say you're right about everything. I'm lying, and we have no chance. You appear to argue that the correct option is unilateral surrender, let the Blues do whatever they want, in the hope that they'll abuse us less. Is that correct?
Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time.
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
Well, let's look at a concrete example. Does this sort of post seem valuable to you? Because if that's not Darwin, it's someone doing a very, very good impression of him.
Leaving aside the questions of whether that is Darwin and whether Darwin actually posted like that in the past, would you agree that someone who habitually posts in that fashion is optimizing for heat, not light? @Soriek, same question.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
that is worth noting, but it's also worth noting that their fundraiser was allowed to operate, in contrast to those of, for example, Gardner and Rittenhouse. This is a concrete way in which our society observably treats red-tribe lawful self-defense as strictly worse than blue-tribe lawless murder.
Below, in the discussion of Architectural philosophies, @Primaprimaprima provides an admirably concrete statement:
There's no cognitive dissonance because there's no evil here, anywhere.
Eisenman's buildings range from "fine" to "pretty darn cool" in my view. "...Architecture that similarly alludes to a deeper or alternate view of reality" in a Lovecraftian fashion is also cool. Rad, even. I want more of that. Sign me up. This isn't even some complex "well we have to understand the dialectical nature of suffering and how even negative emotions can be valuable" shit. This is just very straightforwardly an architect who makes cool buildings that he thinks are cool and other people think are cool. There's no malfeasance here, no shenanigans.
To me, your question sounds akin to someone saying "how exactly can you support Harry Potter books pushing Satanic propaganda on our children?" It's hard to provide an answer because I disagree with the entire framing.
If the framing is the issue, perhaps it would help to examine that framing from the ground up, as it were. Is there such a thing as "evil" architecture? Should we recognize this as a thing that exists?
Here are a half-dozen variations on the theme of "prison cell": 1 2 3 4 5 6
Considering the above six images:
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would you expect that the ordering of the above images was random? If the ordering was not random, how would you describe the ordering principles?
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What details of the environments seem emotionally salient to you? What colors, textures, contrasts, symmetries or asymmetries, rhythms, etc stand out?
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This question is a bit awkward to phrase, so bear with me: If we ordered these images by the most prominent mental and emotional effects we expect them to induce on their occupants, would you expect the given order to change? What are the antipodes of the strongest gradient you recognize, and does that gradient require a re-ordering of the images to convey continuously?
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Would the ranking change if you ordered them by which "looks cool"? For example, if you were picking prison cell designs for a movie set or a video game level, do you think the ordering would change? Note that we can actually make this question strictly empirical by looking at actual prison cells in actual movies and video games.
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Would the ordering change if you ranked them by which you would rather be a prisoner in?
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Would the order change if you ranked them by which you would rather actual convicts be housed in?
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Suppose a person prefers the given ranking if they were a prisoner, and prefers the reverse ranking for convicts, would you describe this as a morally-neutral preference?
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Assuming that the emotional gradient you perceive is relatively positive-to-negative, suppose that a person prefers the max-negative antipode for both themselves and for convicts. Does this show that the max-negative antipode would actually be "good" for convicts? Why or why not?
Elsewhere in the thread, we are provided with a link to this Japanese highschool gymnasium as a positive example of Eisenman's general style of architecture.
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If you ordered the various shots of the exterior and interiors of the gymnasium, which do you consider the best, and which the worst? What principles seem most salient to this ordering? What patterns emerge?
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If we compare and contrast the gymnasium interiors to our original six cells, what commonalities emerge in environmental detail and in expected mood? Which of the six do these interior shots seem to naturally group with? at which end of the various gradients do they fall?
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The gymnasium is, clearly, not a prison. Despite this, are there relevant principles identified in your analysis of the cell variations that you think should carry over to analysis of the gymnasium?
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leaving cell interiors unpainted would obviously be cheaper than painting them. Would it be better to leave cell interiors unpainted, similar to the gymnasium interiors? Is the preference to paint or not paint cell interiors morally neutral?
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More generally, presuming the design of the Gymnasium is a good one, should similar principles be applied to the design of prisons? It's hard to deny that prisons could certainly look cooler than they do. Perhaps we could even make them look Rad. Presuming that this would not compromise first-order expenses or impose first-order security concerns, would it be a good idea to do this?
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Among the gymnasium images, there's a shot of a classroom. Why do you suppose the designer has chosen to make the back wall of the classroom, facing the teacher, smooth and relatively low-detail compared to the front wall of the classroom, facing the students? What would you expect the results of this design choice to be on the intended function of the room?
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Do you consider the preceding question to be a reasonable one?
Bonus Round:
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Consider hostile architecture. How might we apply principles gleaned from the above questions to this separate branch of architecture and design?
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Do you think hostile architecture is morally neutral? Morally positive? Morally negative? Why?
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If someone believes that hostile architecture "looks cool", do you think that should be a persuasive argument in its favor?
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Do you expect that those who enjoy and support the sort of architecture typified by the nikken sekkei gymnasium also support and enjoy hostile architecture? What about those who oppose it?
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot.
You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. We're just warming up here, the election race has barely started! There's a whole year of this to go, and that's just until the election is "over".
Some obvious predictions:
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Trump will be the Republican nominee.
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Trump will not take office next year.
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This will, again, be the "most secure election ever".
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A year from now, public trust in the election, the courts, the media, the federal bureaucracy, and the federal government will be significantly lower than it is now. The pattern will hold for subsequent elections.
[EDIT] - To put it more plainly, the point of this isn't to keep Trump off the ballot. The point is that this is a way to hurt the outgroup without getting in too much trouble. If it actually keeps Trump off the ballot, fantastic. But the actual value is the incremental reduction in probability of an effective Trump administration, verses the predicted cost, which I'd imagine is perceived as negligible. What you are seeing here is Blue Tribe's institutional dedication to picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And why not? Look at all these free pennies!
Moving this to a top-level comment, since the point seems generally applicable.
Previously, a conversation about "Cultural Marxism" vs "Marxism".
Not similar at all. Aim of Marxism is indeed radical social change, while aim of wokeism is preserving society as it is, only with more rainbow flags and transgender toilets.
There's a point of view from which the point of Scientology is to allow someone to rid themselves of the Thetans that cling to them, becoming "clear" and unlocking the supernatural powers that are every human's true birthright. There's another sense in which the point of Scientology is to scam people into placing everything they have and are at the mercy of a vast, highly scalable scam so systemized that it outlived its creator and arguably now runs itself. Both of these could be, potentially, valuable ways to understand and discuss Scientology, but it's important to understand the distinction between them.
When talking about groups and how they relate to each other, I think it's not terribly useful to argue over whether two groups are, in their immutable essence, related or not related to each other. I think it's much more useful to lay out one's own understanding of the salient connection or separation between the groupings under discussion. It seems evident to me that you believe Marxism and Wokeism share no relation, because Wokeism has discarded too much of Marxism's theory and practice. I can readily concede that this is a coherent view to hold, if one thinks that the specific elements of theory and practice are the core of Marxism, rather than the periphery.
On the other hand, it is not obvious to me that wokism is any less aimed at producing radical social change than Marxism is. Certainly it seems to me that it has succeeded in changing society quite radically in the short time it's existed as the current, coherent, legible ideology. Certainly the Woke themselves would not agree with your description, so why should we presume it on your say-so?
When Marxists get their way, billionaires are expropriated. When wokeists get their way, billionaires are richer and more secure than ever before.
When Wokeists get their way, Billionaires and the corporations they control throw their unquestioning support behind Wokeism, providing a great deal of social, political, and economic power behind, for example, large-scale lawless political violence. The fact that CHAZ enjoyed de facto corporate sponsorship did not make its actions any less radical. The capitalists can, in fact, sell Revolutionaries the rope to hang them with, and can even help them tie the nooses. Nor is cooperation between Billionaires and radical leftists a novel development; rich people have attempted to cooperate and support radical socialist utopianism many times before. Some of them actually moved to the USSR.
When Marxists got their way in one situation, which itself contradicted Marx in numerous ways, some billionaires got expropriated. That does not prove that one attempt to implement some elements of Marxism while discarding others is fundamentally different from another attempt that implements and discards a different selection of elements. What we actually have, as with Scientology above, is an open question of which elements of Marxism are core, and which are periphery. You and I can have differing opinions on the answer to that question.
In my view, Marx's theories are of roughly equivalent value to Scientology's theories about Thetans. Labor theory of value, scientific materialism, class analysis and so on are more or less fiction, and are not load-bearing to Marxism as an effective ideology. Ideologies, I think, are best considered not by their stated aims, but by what they actually produce. Marxism is quite bad at producing Materialist Utopia, but it's fantastic at generating and prosecuting class warfare, thereby accumulating power to Marxists themselves. It's a system for building an army unconstrained by the humanizing effects of tradition and civilization, and putting oneself at the head of it. It does this by telling people a lie about their lives, that the misfortunes and tragedies that beset all humans are not simply the nature of human existence, but are instead are intentional harms inflicted by bad people on good people, and that if the good people band together and remove the bad people from power and possibly from existence, all their problems can and will be resolved.
Marx's theories about the identity and characteristics of the good people and bad people, how to remove them, what to do once they're removed and so on do not, in my view, actually matter. Marx was not a scientist in any meaningful sense of the term. His factual claims about what his ideology was supposed to achieve have either been falsified or proven themselves unfalsifiable. What makes Marxism relevant is not its blueprint for building a better world, but rather its blueprint for burning down the existing one, and it is from this perspective that its similarities to Wokeism emerge. Wokeism adapts Marxism's core lie to a wildly different cultural context, where its original claims would be laughably irrelevant. The proletariat never actually mattered, which is why Marxist revolutions were executed in countries with no proletariat to speak of. Categorizing society into oppressors and oppressed and relentlessly framing all social issues according to these categories, on the other hand, is actually how both the Marxist and Wokeist systems work.
Perhaps the model I describe above is wrong, and some doctrinaire Marxist model is correct; that's at least potentially a productive conversation to have. What's necessary, though, is an understanding that the groupings are something we're generating as a tool, not a brute fact of the universe. I draw connections between Marxism and Wokeism and progressivism not because people did one and then the other, but because I believe there's actually important parts of the ideology that the later has drawn and continues to draw from the former.
Actually existing Indians well understood differences between European colonialists and played them for their advantage as they could.
Sure. So what's the relevant differences between Marxists and Wokeists that I'm missing here, and how should people like me play them to our advantage?
I do not get why boomer conservatives insist on pushing "Marxist" straightjacket on everything, why they insist calling "Marxist" people who know nothing about Marx and never claimed to be Marxist.
I observe that the Wokeists do in fact claim to be Marxists quite frequently, claim to know quite a bit about Marx, and often frame their critiques in terms of Marx's ideas. So right off the bat, we have a factual disagreement.
I observe that, doctrinal disputes aside, Marxism remains eminently relevant to the whole of Progressivism. As long as they keep quoting and teaching him, and as long as they keep building their ideology around the scaffolding he provided, I think it's reasonable to take them at their word that he's relevant to them, and hence to those who oppose them.
If you disagree with my understanding of the facts, we could go look at some actual evidence, of which I'm confident that there's no shortage. If you concede the above, I'm not sure how your critique makes sense.
If you asked woke activists about Marx, 90% would answer "What is Marx?" and 10% would say "Fuck this white racist colonizer".
This has not been my experience. Can you provide some examples?
Is it their childhood programming that taught them that Marxism is the worst thing in the world, and all bad things must be Marxist?
I certainly don't think what I've written above can be summarized in such a way. Have I provided you with a fresh perspective?
They don't, communism appealed very much to the working class.
It appealed very much to intellectuals, academics, journalists, and other elites, and I'd argue appealed to such people much more consistently than it did to the lower classes.
You may not see this because communism was basically illegal in the US, but where it did exist the parties were staffed by working class people and that's where they received votes.
Communism was not basically illegal in the US. It was suppressed to a limited and ineffectual extent for brief periods that manifestly failed to eradicate it from elite strongpoints, academia among them. I've no doubt that formal structures for organizing working-class people were predominantly staffed by working class people; I would be surprised if it were otherwise. On the other hand, Communist penetration of multiple Western governments didn't happen at the behest of steelworkers and teamsters. Stalin was an academic before turning to revolution full-time. So was Lenin. So was Marx.
What would that be?
Heirarchy, tradition, law, economics, justice, ethics, morals, etc. Ideas along the lines of "Social justice" or the cultivation of a "revolutionary conscience" recur with monotonous regularity, because the fundamental logic of Progressive Materialist revolution demand such innovations.
All strong ideologies "attack the family" to some degree:
Your examples seem fairly bimodal to me, in a way that is quite telling. I observe a significant difference between honoring God above one's father and mother, and honoring the state or one's auditor above one's father and mother. Neither Christianity nor Judaism seem to encourage this.
This is a pretty good example of a low-effort "boo outgroup" post. From the rules:
I think I have heard the name "Lomez" before. I have no idea who they are, or why they are a good representative for the "Right Wing" generally, or why this meme tweet is indicative of "Right Wing Life Advice". I think it's probably possible to describe a coherent category of "Right Wing Life Advice" and describe central examples of that category; I do not think "not going to college, working at the nail factory, marrying an 170 pound woman, dumpster diving for yogurt, and not getting vaccinated" would be a reasonable summation of that category, but if that's the argument, you should put some effort into proactively providing evidence to support it.
...and due to my "e" key being broken, @self_made_human beat me to it. Consider his warning seconded.
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