FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
What is the contrary evidence?
We can make choices, every minute of every day. We can directly observe ourselves and others making those choices, and have direct insight to the apparent cause of those choices, which appears to be individual will and volition. We can observe that the behavior of others is not perfectly or even mostly predictable or manipulable, and that the degree predictability and manipulability that does exist varies widely across people and across contexts. All of our experiences conform seamlessly with the general concept of free will, none of them conform with Determinism of any sort.
All long-term-successful social technology presupposes free will and attempts to engage it on its own terms. All attempts to engineer society along deterministic principles have failed, often repeatedly and at great cost. This is not an abstract question; it has innumerable direct and obvious impacts on the real world in every facet of human organization, cooperation and activity. There is a long history of actually testing determinism in the real world, and the results have been uniformly negative.
Humans are thinking machines that are self aware and they exist.
There is no evidence that humans are "machines", ie deterministic chains of cause and effect. This claim is not supported by any direct, testable evidence available to us, and is in fact contradicted by our moment-to-moment experience of making choices freely. Many predictions have been made on the theory that humans are machines, and all of those predictions, to date, have been falsified. Even now, you form the claim in a way specifically designed to be untestable, because you are aware that such a machine cannot now be made. You only believe that it will be possible to be made at some indeterminate point in the future, perhaps ten years hence; ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago and more, your predecessors believed the same thing for the same reasons.
Materialists claim that there is no evidence for anything but materialism. Then they claim that our common, direct observation of free will can't be accurate, because it would contradict Materialism. But if our direct experience contradicts Materialism, that is evidence against Materialism.
You do not believe in Determinism because it has been directly demonstrated by evidence. You believe in Determinism because you are committed to Materialism as an axiom, and because any position other than Determinism evidently breaks that axiom. Beliefs are not generated by a deterministic accretion of evidence, but are rather chosen through the exercise of free will, by a process that is easily observed by anyone with a reasonable memory and a willingness to examine one's own thought-process dispassionately. As I said before, this is how all human reason works, how all beliefs and values are formed and adopted. The mistake is only in failing to recognize the choices being made, to allow oneself to believe that the choices are anything other than choices.
Shouldn't it logically follow that more thinking self aware machines can be made? If it exists, which it does, it can be created by us given enough resources.
It logically follows, provided one chooses to adopt Materialist axioms, and thus commits to ignoring all contrary evidence. Logical deduction from axioms is not evidence, though, and, as I mentioned previously, all attempts to actually demonstrate Determinism have failed. We do our actual engineering off free will, not determinism.
None of the above is a language game or a pointless abstraction, all of it can be directly and reliably demonstrated by universal, directly-observable experiences. None of it relies on supposition or interpretation. I reiterate that to the extent that facts exist, the above is simply factual.
Great, you've shown there "must" be an Unmoved Mover/Uncaused Cause. What exactly does find an replace with "God" for "the Big Bang" lose out on?
What does replacing the Big Bang with God lose out on? Both of them share the attribute of serving as a termination point for materialistic explanations. Anything posited past that point is unfalsifiable by definition, unless something pretty significant changes in terms of our understanding of physics.
If there's an unmoved mover/uncaused cause, that means that there's at least one non-materialistic answer that's unavoidable. Materialism's whole point is that no non-materialistic answers are necessary, that it offers a seamless answer to all our questions. This is a seam, and not a small one either. And as I argued in our last go-round, it's not the only such seam.
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?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
We make new humans every single day. So yes they can be constructed. Just with DNA right now instead of machine code. It is all still code.
The fact that we can make more humans does not demonstrate that humans are deterministic machines, or that we can make a human-equivalent deterministic machine.
You can imagine making different ones which gives you the false impression that something different could have happened. But it never could have.
Based on what direct evidence? This is not an abstract, unfalsifiable question by default. If what I am going to choose is predetermined, you could demonstrate that by successfully predicting what I will do next to an arbitrary degree of precision, or by demonstrating arbitrary control over my decision-making through some form of mechanistic tampering with my inputs. Only, neither you nor anyone else can do either to any significant degree, and in fact the above statement makes no testable predictions, nor is based on any testable predictions. Worse, multiple generations of scientists have previously claimed to be able to do exactly that, and have observably failed. You are repeating their claims, modified only to the extent that you carefully avoid any claim that could be tested empirically under current conditions.
The only reason my choices "can't" be free is because them being free would contradict materialism. Only, I can directly observe my choices, and they do in fact appear to be free, and the apparent fact that they are free has material consequences that can be measured and observed in the real world. Your just-so story about how they only "appear" to be free in every single observable way is precisely analogous to Sagan's invisible dragon.
Ask yourself this, how are you making your choices?
By focusing my will, determining the action I wish to take, and then following through on it, despite incentives to do otherwise. I can directly observe every part of this process, as can you. I can embrace unthinking habit and instinctive responses, or I can cultivate my will and consciousness of choice, as can you. This experience of exercising the will could indeed all be an illusion, but if it is, no evidence of it being so has ever been presented.
I reiterate: your belief in Determinism is not based on evidence of Determinism itself, because such evidence does not exist. You believe that our minds are deterministic and that the evidence of free will you have directly observed every minute of every day of your entire life must be an illusion, because if it is not, then it implies that Materialism is wrong, and you are committed on a pre-rational basis to Materialism. Yours is an argument from logical inference, dependent on logical axioms, not a position derived at from direct observation of facts on the object level. And this is normal, because all human beliefs are derived in exactly this way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
Or forums like motte, which as far as I am aware, all moderators are liberal
I'm certainly not a liberal of any variety.
Simplicity, in the information theoretic sense, since you're dispensing with all the complexity involved with God.
Infinite universal cycles, simulation, and God are all equally non-materialistic, and it seems to me that information theory doesn't apply to non-materialistic explanations. In what sense would it? In what sense is God more complex than a universe looping according to non-observable physics without beginning or end? Is there math that can be shown proving one less complex than the other? You mention Kolmogorov complexity, but I'm skeptical. Wikipedia provides:
the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is the length of a shortest computer program (in a predetermined programming language) that produces the object as output.
...I don't think you can write a computer program that produces either "God" or "A looping Universe" or "The computer the universe is being simulated on" as output in any meaningful sense, so I don't think you can meaningfully calculate the Kolmogorov complexity of any one of these, nor compare their complexity to determine which is the "least complex". All three concepts are, by definition, outside the bounds of observable reality, which means that whatever statements you make about them are unfalsifiable. I see no reason to presume that you can meaningfully do math on unfalsifiables.
Explaining "all but one" beats the alternatives.
It doesn't, actually, if the alternatives do not conflict with materialism when materialism gives answers that seem reasonable. Christians did not reject the concepts of math or gravity or the rocket equations. The whole claim of Materialism is that it was better because it left no need for anything further. It turns out that it does in fact need further things, and in addition appears to require discarding quite a large amount of solid evidence. Those realities pretty seriously undermine its claims to primacy through simplicity, occam's razor, etc, or that people are forced to it by a hard-nosed commitment to only draw forced conclusions.
There are no forced conclusions are forced. All reason is irreducibly axiomatic. We all believe as we will. We each make our bets and take our chances.
Besides, why isn't the Big Bang covered by "materialism"?
Because the math says it happened, but the math also says it can't happen. That is just another way of saying "we don't have a good explanation for this phenomenon."
Our intuitive notions of causality went out the window the moment quantum mechanics, with all it's superposition, entanglement and reference-frame/observer dependent definitions of cause and effect arrived.
Our "intuitive notions of causality" are the foundation of Materialism. Abandon those, and what remains? If you get to appeal to miracles, why shouldn't I?
The math does a better job.
The math doesn't do a job at all. It isn't supporting your conclusion. Your commitment to Materialism is axiomatic, not ultimately dependent on the outcome of a formula.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d 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?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
I don't know that that is quite accurate. See here. It is more that Hitler's utopia was an exclusive, zero-sum one, whereas the utopias promised by Mao and Lenin were theoretically universal.
Mao's and Stalin's utopias were "theoretically universal" in the exact same way that Hitler's utopia was: the future infinite population would be "good people", the "bad people" having all been exterminated.
We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror
— Martin Latsis, Red Terror, no 1, Kazan, 1 November 1918
...
To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.
— Grigory Zinoviev, 1918
The idea that some portion of the population were innately bad and thus needed to be liquidated was baked into the cake long, long before Stalin, and none of the revolutionaries were at all shy about saying so. These ideas go all the way back past Marx to the French Revolution, and arguably straight to Rousseau and the other founders of the Enlightenment.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
We can only fight on in his name, because he was in fact right.
What determines what you will or what action you chose?
All direct evidence available to me indicates that I determine what actions I choose, through an exercise of non-deterministic free will.
Unless you're flipping a coin you're always going to chose it based on who you are genetically and your interaction with the universe up to this point. That is it.
Genetics determinism should be considered a subset of physics-based determinism, but it hardly matters because there is no evidence to support either. You can sequence someone's genome and measure their environment, and you still can't predict or manipulate their thoughts or behavior with any appreciable degree of accuracy.
There isn't any other option.
...Unless we accept that Materialism appears to be wrong in this case.
There is no such thing as free will because there literally can't be.
...Unless we accept that Materialism appears to be wrong in this case. You are demonstrating the nature of axiomatic thinking perfectly. You are not providing direct evidence of Determinism, you are simply repeating that a commitment to Materialism demands that one accept Determinism, despite all evidence to the contrary. And that is my entire point.
He’s a capricious blood god in the mold of allah or odin.
Can you give an example from the OT of God being capricious?
You know why people believe the ‘antitheist professors’? Because what they say is convincing.
Freud was one of the most convincing antitheist professors that has ever lived. Do you believe that this was because his arguments were correct?
They don’t rely on the gullibility of the recently born and the soon-to-be deceased.
No, they rely on the gullibility of people who yearn to be told that they can do what they want without consequence.
And for the record, I did not have to wait for college to notice the discrepancy between the old god and the new.
It would be interesting if you could demonstrate that discrepancy, then, because I don't think it actually exists.
Besides, those most involved in selling the image of a nice new testament god aren’t guys like me but modern christians, who by embuing him entirely with enlightenment values, sanewash christianity.
People who ignore bits of the Bible they find inconvenient aren't actually Christians. There are plenty of us left who do not.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
A God that doesn't do anything else except set up a clockwork universe and then fuck off and never intervenes where anyone can see it isn't an entity worth worshipping.
The variant that persuaded me actually came from the Atheists, who asserted that a God who attempts to secure your love through threats of eternal torture is a monster. That seemed like a pretty good argument to me, along with the obvious-when-you-think-about-it point that if a God existed, and if he wanted us to know he existed, we'd simply have the unalterable knowledge baked in. Of course, if we knew for a certainty that he existed, then the promise of heaven and the threat of hell would be dispositive, even if Hell is the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. On the other hand, if God existed, and wanted us to choose to love him of our own free will, the only way that works is if we get to choose whether or not to believe in him as well. In that case, leaving his existence plausible but ambiguous makes perfect sense, together with Hell as the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. It fits even better if you presume annihilationism is correct, and the people who reject God get exactly what they're expecting: death, and then non-existence.
In any case, the chain of logic seems simple: God wants to share love with people. It's not love unless it's freely chosen. The choice is permanent, and the choice being offered is better than it not being offered. Certain knowledge of the consequences of the choice corrupt the free nature of the choice. Given those constraints, blinding the choice is the obvious way forward.
Blasphemy. That’s how we got the christians to calm down.
No, it isn't.
Free speech of muslims should be curtailed on that point, anyone preaching that doctrine should be deported or imprisoned.
...Haven't you repeatedly argued with me that Free Speech Maximalism is one of your core values, and that I'm wrong when I argue that almost all people aren't actually free-speech maximalist but rather want as much free speech as possible so long as the speech isn't too objectionable? Because this sure looks an awful lot like "speech should be free as long as it's not too awful." I guess my point is that we are in agreement here, but that your previous statements indicate that this should be surprising to you.
Israel should bulldoze al-aqsa on live TV while ceremoniously asking Allah to do something about it.
It seems to me that your logic comes from a place where you assume the other side isn't going to actually be able to execute what they see as the righteous vengeance of God. That's not an assumption I would want to make a habit of relying on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
The motte seems to be one very rare place where people on the left and right can engage in intellectual cooperation with some semblance of a shared set of principles.
I do not think the claim that "we" share principles is a supportable assumption, whether referring to you and me or the community generally. What the community shares is a standard of decorum.
These polemics against perceived enemies on the left...
What level of evidence would you require to consider removing the "perceived" from that phrase? If you're left-wing or Blue Tribe or a moderate or whatever, I'm happy to talk with you politely, but I'm pretty sure you're my enemy, and not in a loosey-goosey metaphorical sense. I'd give it better than 70% odds that you or a close friend or family member would experience net-positive qualia if they heard about me being fired from my job, imprisoned, seriously injured or killed due to a politically-colored incident.
This is not a claim that you or your friends or family are in any way unusual; the above applies to me, and without the caveat of friends and family. I observe that a lot of Americans legitimately hate each other across the red/blue divide with great fervor and zeal. I have consumed memes about bad things happening to Blues in politically-charged incidents, and experienced positive qualia. I think it's fairly obvious that most politically-aware people on both sides have. That is not a good thing, but it is a thing, it is not hard to find, and pretending it isn't real doesn't make it go away.
...in a tone so radical and final, is just shitting on the public good here.
The post I was replying to was putting forward the idea that Hanania is providing a viable path forward for, broadly speaking, "the Right". They listed off the other, obviously-non-viable alternatives. I listed the alternative they left off the list, which happens to be the most viable, easiest to execute given the givens, and probably one of the least destructive. Every tactic I listed has been a standard part of the political environment for decades. No violence is required. To the extent that laws can be said to exist in a meaningful sense, there's no need to break them. All that is needed is to recognize that our values are not, in fact, reconcilable, and that we are all better off if we stop pretending otherwise. It is better to divorce and then leave each other alone if we can, than to continue the endlessly-escalating fight for dominance.
Given what you've written here it's obviously pointless for anyone who might disagree to engage with you.
I don't think this is true. You are free to disagree if you like, and I will do my best to be polite and respectful in return.
I cannot fathom why the community tolerates this kind of thing; certainly it would never tolerate any naked calls for the explicit demolition of conservative power structures from anyone left of center.
You are free to argue for the explicit demolition of conservative power structures, and people have. You are free to argue for Communist revolution if you like. During the riots, people argued that rioting was a good thing and that burning police stations was awesome. I'm religious; someone elsewhere in this week's thread has argued that religion should be considered a mental illness. He's allowed to do that.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
and it’s also likely that any president’s child would get a similar sweetheart deal.
Would Trump's children receive such a deal?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
The Marxist utopia -- a classless, and hence conflict-free, society was one which was theoretically available to people everywhere. The Nazi utopia was one which was available only to Germans, or perhaps Aryans.
People everywhere
Germans, or perhaps aryans.
The implication of your phrasing is that Marxists offered a Utopia for "people" generally, while the nazis restricted their utopia to a specific subset of people. But in fact, the Marxists did not offer a Utopia for "people" generally, but for a specific subset of people. People who did not belong to that subset were to be exterminated without mercy, a policy they stated quite clearly and followed through on with great enthusiasm.
But for Marxists, the elimination of counter-revolutionaries was a means to achieving the utopia, while for Nazis, the elimination of various undesirables was a component of utopia.
There is no meaningful distinction between these two statements. They are isomorphic, and you can reverse them with no loss in accuracy or meaning: For marxists, the elimination of [bad people] was a component of Utopia, while for Nazis, the elimination of [bad people] was a means of achieving the Utopia.
Note that I am not saying that one was "better" than the other, but rather that both aimed at achieving a utopia, but their visions of utopia differed.
Utopia being a thing that cannot actually exist, the specific visions of that imaginary thing don't seem terribly relevant. That being said, it's not obvious to me that the differences between their visions were actually significant. They both thought that they would kill all the bad people, and then they'd win forever and everything would be just the best for them and all the good people under them.
What does this mean?
It means that when a computer does something wrong, we yell at the person who programmed it, and when a machine does something wrong, we yell at the person operating it, but when a person does something wrong, we yell at that person in particular. This is how it works in every facet of human interaction, and for the obvious reason that doing otherwise doesn't work.
More specifically, it means that I am conscious, that I can direct my conscious experience through choices with apparent total freedom. I can think about what I want to think about. I can not want to think about things for a set of reasons, and want to think about them for another set of reasons, and make a decision about what to do. It means I can decide whether to get up in the morning or sleep in, decide what to eat, what to drink, what to do, who to talk to, what words to say. It means I can compose this post to you by choosing each word, based on the message I wish to convey. These conscious experiences of free will are notably distinct from non-conscious impulses, itches, sensations, etc, and can with effort directly override the later. One can choose to suppress the response to and experience of severe pain, for example, through the direct application of one's will.
The laws of the universe are deterministic at the scale humans operate on.
They observably are for all inert matter. They ought to be for human minds, if Materialism is true. They do not appear to be, if our internal experience is to be believed, which is why this has been a hotly-debated topic for decades even when very nearly everyone involved in the debate very much wants the same answer. The problem is that the evidence we actually have flatly contradicts that answer.
There is no scenario in which "free will" could ever even be a thing.
Well, the Christians could be right, and humans could be an immortal soul housed within a material body, not subject to the deterministic rules of the temporary physical universe. Alternatively, we could be living in a simulation, our understanding of causality and material reality could be based not on baseline reality, but on the simulation's own arbitrary-though-internally-consistent code, while our free will could come from a separate module that runs on different principles. So that's two scenarios where free will could ever even be a thing.
But the point remains that you simply repeating yourself: free will can't exist because it breaks Materialism. This does not change the fact that all the direct evidence indicates that free will does in fact appear to exist. All your arguments to the contrary are inferential, not direct. If I want to prove that a machine is deterministic, I show you how the gears work. If I want to prove that a computer is deterministic, I show you how the circuits work. The human mind from the inside does not appear to be gears and circuits at all. It's possible that appearances are deceiving, but "possible" and "proven" should be distinct concepts.
It is a physical and even metaphysical impossibility.
How so? Is there any answer that doesn't amount to "because Materialism demands it be so"?
The flood
People throughout the world grow extremely wicked, God destroys them as punishment while protecting a righteous man and his family. Not capricious.
sodom and gomorrah
People in two cities grow extremely wicked, God destroys them as punishment while protecting a righteous man and his family. Not capricious.
the binding of isaac
God demonstrates that his chosen patriarch is willing to sacrifice his son, and also that such sacrifices are not desired by God; that is to say, the absence of child sacrifice is not due to a lack of fervor or obedience on the part of God's people, but rather because God himself considers child-sacrifice abhorrent. Not capricious.
being a dick to job
The point of Job is that God is under no obligation to justify his actions to his creation. It is not claimed that God acts arbitrarily, only that we are not owed an explanation for specific things that happen. This is as close to capricious as your list gets, but throughout God insists that he has reasons for what he does. Not capricious, any more than any other need-to-know system is.
the killing of egyptian first-borns
The Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews, and attempted genocide against them by ordering the execution of all their male children. Their own first-borns are killed by God as punishment, after they are given repeated opportunities to relent from their actions. Not capricious.
Exodus 4 : 24
Moses, while acting as God's prophet, has violated the covenant by not circumcising his sons in direct violation of God's command. Not capricious.
Kings 4 : 23
The youths treat God's representative with scorn, dishonoring God, and an example is made of them. Not capricious.
Judges 11
The capricious actions are all Jepthah's, not God's. Jepthah is a cautionary story about swearing foolish oaths, and Jephthah himself is no more an example of a righteous man than Samson is.
None of these citations involve a single capricious action on God's part.
Again with Freud.
Stop claiming that expert-based consensus settles arguments, and I'll stop citing the gold-standard of evidence that expert-based consensus absolutely does not settle arguments.
Look, it’s not a binary. All else equal, an adult being convinced by arguments is more evidence of them being correct than a child believing something.
And if Christians were only made by convincing children, this would be relevant. But they are not, and those convinced as children grow up and have ample opportunity to change their minds. Likewise, adults being convinced of something is not good evidence that the thing they're convinced of is true. There is no such thing as proof by social consensus, so stop citing social consensus as evidence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Your enemy holds the bureaucracy.
Abbott and DeSantis are coordinating open defiance to the bureaucracy. Maybe they'll lose, but they haven't yet. The Bureaucracy tried to put Rittenhouse in a cell for the rest of his life, and he's a free man. The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
They hold the media.
The media are losing their influence, and in many cases their ability to even keep their doors open due to their entire business model going extinct.
They hold the vast majority of the corporations.
And they are destroying those corporations, in a way that's pretty impossible to hide.
They hold Federal law enforcement and state law enforcement in many states.
And yet, those agencies can and have been successfully defied, and they can and have fought and lost.
And of course all big city law enforcement
And those cities continue to decay.
They don't actually have a plan. They have a scam that works when we endlessly cooperate with it, and that falls apart if we simply and consistently defect. We are currently organizing that defection, and it is delivering tangible results. Your predictions have been consistent for some time, and increasingly they are being falsified by the actual outcomes. Your prediction was that Abbott would not be able to defy Biden on the border, but he did. Your prediction, I think, would be that Republicans would "compromise" and vote for the border bill, but we didn't. Resistance is not costless, but the costs can and are being borne.
Your tribe has paths for exit but no paths for entrance -- you may birth more young people but they end up rejecting you under the influence of the institutions.
Time will tell.
And most of your tribe respects all of those institutions despite their obvious capture.
Too much of my tribe does, it's true, but less and less each day, and the more we push resistance, the more obvious the problems with the system become and the less my tribe respects it.
When Trump is duly convicted in New York Kangaroo Court, a large number of your people will say "Well, the jury had more information than I do, so he must be guilty" or similar rationalizations to trust the institutions.
This is a prediction. Let's see how it goes.
Because the very idea that the institutions are utterly corrupt and should be defied is anti-conservative.
To the extent that this is true, it seems to me that Conservatism is on the way out. Again, Abbott and DeSantis seem to be going for open defiance. The gun culture is definately going for open defiance. Trump's supporters are going for open defiance. Maybe you're right and it will all fizzle out, but that does not appear to me to be the trajectory we're on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
All this is true. And yet, collapses actually happen, have happened recently, and are likely to continue to happen.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
I don't like Planned Parenthood even a little. Anyone on the right celebrating this should understand that just as it did not start here, it absolutely will not stop here. The other side is going to look for a way to escalate until they find one, and then they're going to use it, likely without mercy. Why wouldn't they? There's no common understanding of rules being pursued here. The entire point of a legal system is to settle disputes. This is not a legal fight, but a war by other means, and those means remain fluid, as they have been since 2014. Reds accepted legal outcomes as binding because they were making a mistake. Realizing that acceptance of legal outcomes was a mistake, a weakness, does not stop people from abusing the courts, but rather incentivizes greater abuses while those courts retain some shred of validity; get what you can and the devil take the hindmost.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle, that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement, and that their conflict with each other is fundamentally an example of the narcissism of small differences. To the extent that I understood his arguments, he also appeared to be correct about Hobbes vs Rosseau.
I don't think this is surprising. A lot of Ukraine's ability to resist was predicated on US assistance, which has become increasingly rare due to resistance from House Republican leadership.
Maybe don't promise things you can't deliver? I never supported Ukraine, I have no interest in supporting Ukraine, and I'm not interested in voting for people who support Ukraine. If more people thought like me, it's entirely possible that this war would not have happened. Given that this war has happened, I'm not going to change my mind because "you broke it, you bought it". I didn't buy shit, and I think anyone who's still on-board with writing blank checks to the American foreign policy apparatus is too stupid to be allowed to vote. If the last twenty-four years of disasters wasn't enough to drive the lesson home, they're simply incapable of learning.
This is so bizarre to me. Ukrainian women are... people? They are not the property of Ukrainian men.
This would be a better argument if those Ukrainian men weren't faced with forced conscription into indefinite service in a meatgrinder war of attrition. They are also people, no? But naturally, when it's the men, it's honor and duty, and when it's the women, it's human rights and individualism. Women have, after all, always been the greatest victims of war.
I do not think "maintaining the territorial integrity of Ukraine" is an "abstract geopolitical goal of NATO."
Then I submit that you are not very good at assessing what is and is not an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
I don't believe your motivation for engaging is to discuss the culture war. I think you're waging it by manipulating people into passive acceptance.
I have spent a lot of time arguing with CPAR, and I assure you he is in fact here to discuss the culture war in good faith, and is not here to run a scam.
You are freewheeling. You have bitten off too large a chunk of the culture war to be chewed and swallowed, and you are metaphorically choking on it. What that looks like is a moment of crisis, where one is seized by the certainty that the present situation is absolutely intolerable, and that Something Must Be Done. I have experienced this myself, a number of times.
The Motte is not intended, nor is it fit, to Do Something. It does not exist to coordinate action, only discussion. The good the Motte has done is to allow people very different from each other to converse. That's it. It is not going to help your friend relying on expired baby food, nor is it going to deliver solutions to the problems you list in your OP. It never promised to, and was never intended to.
The horrors you are seeing are not new. Large segments of human experience have always been "intolerable", and despite this, have been tolerated by previous generations. Your great grandparents lived through a global economic collapse and trench warfare. The present situation is not even that bad, historically speaking, and we have so, so much further to fall.
The culture war is not going to stop soon. The part that has been going for a decade is only one battle; the actual war has been going at least since the 60s, and arguably since the 1600s. It is probably going to continue to impinge on your life and awareness in unpleasant ways for the rest of your life; if we are all very lucky, our children might potentially live to see the other side of it. You should attempt to make peace with that fact, because if you do not it is entirely possible that the culture war will drive you insane.
None of the above is an argument for quietism or surrender. There are many useful actions to take, many useful things to be done, many choices to be made, many strategies to pursue. It is, in fact, possible to Do Something, but it helps to have a clear idea of what one is trying to accomplish and what the actual effects of a given action are likely to be. Lashing out is not advisable, and is likely to be counterproductive. What the Motte can help with, for those with the patience to use it correctly, is to learn better about the realities of the situation, which makes productive action easier. I appreciate that this is not a satisfying answer, in an emotional sense. The truth rarely is.
Be nice, until you can coordinate meanness. Abbott appears to be coordinating meanness.
From a Red Tribe perspective, there is no rational reason beyond naked fear to respect or maintain federal authority. Nullification is indeed on the horizon, it's just the one behind us, given that we're certainly two and perhaps as many as five generations past the point where Federal authority could plausibly be claimed to operate according to well-defined and well-respected rules. We Reds already know that laws we pass at the Federal level aren't real laws, that our Supreme Court victories don't count, that it isn't actual democracy when we win elections, that we do not enjoy meaningful rule of law. We know the existing system has no intention of cooperating with us at any level. Our situation is a conflict, not a mistake.
We won on immigration law, and our laws were ignored. Blue Tribe spent decades actively facilitated the illegal immigration of dozens of millions of people from the poorest regions of the world, and they did it while explicitly celebrating the thesis that this would give them an insurmountable and irreversible advantage politically. It seems pretty clear that they have in fact derived a very significant and irreversible political advantage from this tactic. Blues look at this as a fiat accompli, but why respect a system that doesn't respect you? @TracingWoodgrains points out that all the establishment institutions are solidly against Red Tribe. Given that reality, why continue to support and maintain those institutions? Because we need them to keep society running? Have you seen society?
The correct move is to withdraw the consent of the governed, and make them fight for every step. Impose costs anywhere and everywhere. Impose friction. Deny them freedom of action at every possible point. Contest every issue under every theory imaginable, and when those run out, think up new ones. Never concede their legitimacy, never grant them authority, never cooperate. When they push back, escalate, and when they push back on that, escalate again. Attack their institutions and organizations. Locate, isolate and persecute their partisans. Engage in economic and legislative warfare. All this has been done to us; tit-for-tat is the correct strategy given the state of play. The Progressive Coalition is not a stable entity, and it is already suffering severe policy starvation. It does not appear to have unlimited state capacity to spare. It is entirely possible that we can grind them down to the point that the social structures they're leaning on simply collapse, and their project of cultural imperialism dies of exhaustion, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions. Formal secession is not necessary, much less the severing of economic ties or serious breach of the peace, only a destruction of the mechanisms of centralized power.
And if we are not so fortunate as to get the happy end, all the efforts put into this strategy pay dividends at the subsequent levels of escalation.
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