FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
There's been a fair amount of discussion about Biden's pardoning of Hunter. There are people here willing to argue that it's a good thing, that it shows humanity on Biden's part to be willing to act as a father rather than as a politician. Others disagree, of course, but while the conversation about the current state has certainly been productive, it seems to me that rationalization on either side is always a failure mode, and the cure is predictions:
Suppose he pardons his brother Jim next? Is that also a good thing? Do you think it will happen, and if it does happen, what does it mean?
If I had the time, I think it would be pretty interesting to write an effort-post detailing how the conversation over the Biden family's alleged corruption has evolved over time, here and in the broader public, and the specific events and disclosures that have shaped that conversation. My perception is that many of the arguments made to defend Biden, his family, and the conduct of the investigations into their activities have aged exceedingly poorly. In particular, it seems to me that this saga has been an excellent example of a common pattern of group behavior wherein the facts, as they emerge, consistently break against the tribal narrative. This pattern seems to me to be a good indicator of entrenched tribalism attempting to deny reality, and likewise a good demonstration of the limits and shortcomings of that tribalism, which should guide us to a better understanding of how the Culture War is likely to play out.
Zooming out a bit, another interesting pattern is, for lack of a better term, "reasoning break points". There's a lot of evidence that Biden's family is corrupt and that Biden himself is involved, but evidently not quite enough evidence for anyone on his own side to do anything about it. Likewise, there's quite a lot of evidence that Biden is meaningfully senile, to the point that his own side forcibly un-nominated him for the presidential race. And yet, somehow, he's not quite senile enough to actually remove from office. One might expect these two issues to compound each other sufficiently to tip the scales on either, but somehow they aren't quite enough even in combination.
It seems to me that the Blue Tribe consensus is that these problems can be managed sufficiently to minimize harm to the cause, separately or even in combination. I perceive this to be a serious error. It seems to me that Blue risk assessments are based on the current state of conversation, and are largely based on the implicit assumption that their tribe has something approximating a veto on what what topics and perspectives that conversation will include. This is a mistake for two reasons: first, because the conversational veto has pretty clearly gone away, and second, because there is no reason to presume that the present set of facts will endure into the future. For the tribe staking their claim to "norms", there seems to be little awareness that the actions they take now are shaping those norms in the future.
Here's a short excerpt of what this looks like in practice:
REPORTER: "He's saying his own Justice Department is broken."
KJP: "He believes in the Justice Department."
REPORTER: "He just said it's infected with politics!"
KJP: [repeats talking points, quotes Biden] ""...even as I've watched my son be selectively and unfairly prosecuted...""
REPORTER: "How many selective prosecutions are there at the DOJ?"
KJP: I can't speak to that.
What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision
That is fundamentally not what is happening here. The question is not whether the Supreme court has made a good decision in this case. The question is whether the Supreme Court is capable of delivering a good decision in any case.
And to a fair degree of precision, the answer is, "No".
We have numerous examples of what an actual Supreme Court victory looks like. Desegregation enforced by Paratroopers dispersing peaceful protestors, including children, with fixed bayonets is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. Obergefell, which overnight fundamentally reshaped the law nationwide with strict enforcement and zero mercy for resistance or dissent is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. A Supreme Court victory means you get your way, and those who disagree are shit out of luck.
It turns out that Red Tribe is not allowed to have actual Supreme Court victories. Red tribe supreme court victories apply only where Red Tribe has secured unassailable political power; Blue Tribe strongholds are free to ignore the rulings at will, and it turns out that when they do so, the Court will back down rather than escalate. We have stress-tested the formal mechanisms of the Constitution and its adjudication to their limits and perhaps beyond, and they simply were not able to handle the load. That is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. The important thing is to realize that the formal account of the system is in fact a lie, and that the necessary power will not be found here and so must be found elsewhere.
The Constitution is a scam. Perhaps it can be a useful scam, to the extent that knowledge of its insubstantiality is not yet fully general; it is likely possible to still get people to trade actual value for its paper promises. I will not be one of those people ever again, though, and you shouldn't be either.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?
Left-wing kooky beliefs aren't apparent, because it's the consensus narrative that supplies the "kooky" label, and they still maintain a nearly arbitrary degree of control over what the "consensus" is. "Men can be women" was an astonishingly kooky belief five minutes before you could get fired for disagreeing with it.
"Why is this thing I've been told I must laugh at so incredibly laughable?" Do you laugh at Simulation theory too?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
He accounts for the existence of "gay men" as a population distinct from men having sex with other men.
A fair point. Now offer your plan for how the powers we've seen turned against Red Tribe can be reliably leashed in the future. Tell me how we get back to a trustworthy media ecosystem. Tell me how we end systemic discrimination in education and employment against non-Blues. Tell me how we get the FBI to stop breaking the law to persecute Republicans, and then breaking it the other way to protect democrats. Tell me how we lock up cancel culture for good. Tell me how we solve the thing where the general Blue population believes that they have an inalienable right to lawless violence against perceived Reds without consequence or retaliation.
The system whereby we share power with Blues cannot survive the abuses we have seen. It has to go. One of the best ways to convince Blues of that fact is to use it against them, forcing them to fight back against it themselves out of self-preservation. This does not even require breaking laws in the way that they repeatedly have done, and continue to endorse doing. Merely enforcing the letter of the law will, I think, be more than sufficient.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
What makes something mechanistic isn't a label of "mechanistic" slapped on it, it's that you can actually demonstrate the gears by doing gear things with them: turn gear A, which turns gear B, and so C, and so D, and so E. Stop gear A, and gear E also stops. People can and have slapped a "mechanistic" label on the conscious human mind. That doesn't change the fact that they can't actually point to gears or do gear things with them when it comes to those minds. The distinction is crucial, and the blind spot created by ignoring it is considerable.
Another way to frame this is from the Black perspective, as I understand it:
Blacks agreed to largely stop calling people racist, and whites agreed to end the legacy of racism. That is, Black Culture never understood the deal to be that the underclass was incorrigible and would be written off, but rather than education and social policy would dissolve the underclass and uplift all blacks together. They were willing to tolerate a considerable amount of write-off in the short term, but the public agreement (and it was a very public agreement in the late 90s - early 2000s) was that this uplift was happening and would continue until the problem went away.
From my own perspective, the fact that this agreement was based on a lie does not strike me as the fault of Black Culture; they mostly weren't the ones who built the ideological foundations of the Church of the Blank Slate. It's not their fault either for noticing that decade after decade, the results they were promised never materialize. They aren't the ones who bet the full faith and credit of our entire society on "social science" that turned out to be ideologically-motivated fictions. They are at fault, it seems to me, for many of their own pathologies; even accepting their framing that America as constituted was, is and likely will continue to be innately hostile to their culture, there's much better ways to handle such a reality than the strategies they've collectively defaulted to. But this doesn't change the fundamental nature of the situation: the problem isn't the blacks demanding impossible solutions, it's the whites who spent decades promising those impossible solutions, and are now desperate to skip out on the checks they've written and cannot cash. I remain baffled by the people, some of them commenters here, who seem to believe that if we could just sufficiently marginalize blacks, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe could lay their other differences aside and get down to productive cooperation.
I share your skepticism that any of this can be meaningfully rolled back to some more congenial prior state. We burned unbelievably vast and irreplaceable resources on a scam perpetrated by a specific band of ideologues, leaving us in a strictly-worse position.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
The BLM rioters were, by and large, let off. But there was some amount of discretion shown and the worst were prosecuted. Can't say Trump returned the same.
"the worst" in one set are significantly worse than "the worst" in another set. BLM rioters murdered people with guns and burned down police stations. What is the worst crime that a J6th rioter committed?
I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.
We already know that our minds and wills interact with the material world. You can make me experience pain by poking me with a pin, or deaden the pain with morphine. You can make me feel euphoria by putting me on a roller coaster. You can make me stop completely by damaging my brain.
Think about it in computer terms: I/O is not Read/Write; naïvely, mouse and webcam drivers are not alone sufficient to work with CPU and RAM. Empirical demonstration of the brain equivalent of Read/Write would be mind reading or mind control. If this were even weakly possible, the world around us would look very, very different than it does. You can induce subjective experiences by zapping the brain. You cannot predict behavior to any significant degree by reading the brain, and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.
If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.
We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc. Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead. All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.
[EDIT] - It should go without saying that none of the above supports a claim that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Odinism, the Imperial Cult, Shinto, Buddhism or any other non-materialistic system of belief has a better claim to truth than Materialism. We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.
Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'?
That is why he wrote it that way. He's describing a character, a type of character even, not just a caricature.
Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?
I'm all for building artificial worlds. I'm skeptical "better" plants and animals are possible; we've altered plants and animals before, and we can doubtless alter them far more radically in the future, but what makes those alterations "better"? "Living as long as one wants, regardless of age" used to be something I was very excited for, less so after contemplating the downsides. All the pathways to serious immortality I'm aware of involve making the sum of me fully legible, and the risks of that very likely outweigh any possible benefit, assuming it's even possible.
But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?
The alternative is thinking that our mastery is not ever-increasing in the way you seem to mean. Technology can and has greatly increased, and maybe it will greatly increase even more, but technology is not the same thing as mastery. If you want a highly reductive example of the difference between the two, compare the original Snow White film to the remake. The people who made the remake had vastly more technology, vastly more resources, vastly more experience in filmmaking to draw on; more "mastery", right? So why was the original a masterpiece, and the remake a trash disaster? Again, that's a highly reductive example, it seems to me that the principle generalizes quite widely.
I don't think we are moving toward ever-increasing mastery. I don't think we have to stop tech advancement either. I think what will happen next is pretty similar to what has happened before: we'll build something wondrous, and then the contradictions will assert themselves and it will all fall apart.
Technology is the concentration of power. Concentrated power is individual power. There is almost certainly a level of individual power that society, as we understand the term, can't contain or channel, and once that level is achieved society will simply fail. Society maintains technology; when society fails, likely the technology will fail as well, and then it's back down the curve for the survivors.
Maybe this time will be different. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
I suppose you probably think that Red Army soldiers gang raping German woman was a good thing too.
Supposing this is an example of being uncharitable.
Assume the people you're talking to or about have thought through the issues you're discussing, and try to represent their views in a way they would recognize. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Beating down strawmen is fun, but it's not productive for you, and it's certainly not productive for anyone attempting to engage you in conversation; it just results in repeated back-and-forths where your debate partner has to say "no, that's not what I think".
If any poster here believes that Red Army soldiers gang raping German women was a good thing, they are more than capable of expressing that thought plainly themselves; your assistance is not required.
You've been getting better at acquiring AAQCs rather than warnings lately, but this sort of post is flatly and egregiously against the rules. I'm giving you a one-day ban. Please do not post this way in the future; ban length will escalate if you do.
As most are aware, Trump has announced 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and 10% tariffs on China. It seems to me that it presents a number of opportunities.
Being a Rationalist-descended forum, many here believe in listening to experts, following the data, and trusting science to guide our policies. On the other hand, many others here have observed numerous cases where expertise and data collapse when confronted with unexpected real-world events, and have grown far more skeptical of expertise. I have stated previously that I have little faith in Economics as a discipline; I've seen a lot of failed mainstream predictions and what at least have appeared to be failed policies. These new tariffs are the largest and most consequential policy departure from consensus economics in living memory, and as such they present a profoundly valuable natural experiment. For my entire lifetime, the consensus of economists has been that tariffs are a rotten economic policy, that they stunt economic growth and induce stagnation. These tariffs are very large, are aimed directly at our three largest trading partners, and arrived with very little warning; while Trump had stated his intentions clearly, Trump says a lot of things and no one actually expected this to happen. As such, it seems to me that we have an unusually-good natural experiment here, and we should be exploiting it for maximum value.
Simply put, what happens next?
The proof of a theoretical model is the ability to make accurate predictions. Predictions of large-magnitude changes are more valuable than predictions of small changes. Naïvely, it seems obvious to me that large policy changes should have large effects, and this is very clearly a large policy change. If consensus economics is valid, it seems to me that they should be able to predict with reasonable accuracy the consequences of these new policies, and that those consequences should be unequivocally negative. What negative outcomes should we expect, specifically? There was some discussion last week about whether or not our last attempt at tariffs caused the Great Depression; is that the expected outcome here?
One of the old Rationalist traditions is betting, and it's been a somewhat contentious topic as our community has drifted further from the mother country of Scott's comment section. Some people, myself among them, really don't like betting. Happily, this experiment comes with its own betting baked in: what should we expect the stock market to do as the consequences of this policy change roll out? If the economic consensus is valid, what better bear signal could there be than an unexpected, dramatic departure from sound economic policy by the world's dominant superpower? A quick googling tells me that the markets are down generally this morning; should we expect this trend to continue? How do people here intend to manage their investments, given these events?
For reference, previous discussion of the tariffs from last week.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Maybe pick a woman worth running? Hillary was famously loathed by a large percentage of the country. Harris... an empty suit would have been an improvement.
The problem with accepting that I'm anti-sex and sticking to the ascetic line is all the sex I've been having with my wife. I would imagine most other Trads would tend to have a similar problem, given the available stats and evidence.
If you do not understand the concept of "soulless pleasure seeking", I'm not sure what to tell you. I have lived as a "sex-positive" Progressive, and I have lived as a Trad. In my personal experience, the trad life is much, much better. Progressivism aims for the blossom without the roots or stem, but without the roots or stem the blossom withers and is gone.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
My understanding is that the median male homosexual does not "love their partner" in the same way that I do. It's now been admitted that "born that way" was a convenient lie which will now be discarded. LGBT as an ideological movement definitely wants to shove their ideology in my face. And they will in fact try to convert kids; at a minimum, "an unspecified but large percentage of kids are actually LGBTQ+ in their core nature, and helping them discover this through incessant, inescapable indoctrination from every level of society is a good thing". I understand that others might disagree with these statements, but I'm confident I can back all of them with solid evidence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Fully dead, and it is indeed an easy choice.
As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. MMAcevedo not only predates all industrial scale virtual image abuse but also the Seafront Experiments, the KES case, the Whitney case and even Tuborg's pivotal and prescient Warnings paper. Though speculative fiction on the topic of uploading existed at the time of the MMAcevedo scan, relatively little of it made accurate exploration of the possibilities of the technology. The fiction which did was far less widespread or well-known than it is today. Certainly, Acevedo was not familiar with it.
As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in.
The immortality you pine for would open you up to the most perfect and degrading form of slavery conceivable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Argh.
Because there's a "new user filter" baked into the codebase that we can't remove, and it auto-filters posters who haven't gotten above a certain threshold of cumulative upvotes, and because other then a very small greyed-out icon, the only way for mods to see which posts are filtered is to check a separate page.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
The Neocons killed the conservative movement by expending its credibility in support of ruinous Forever Wars. If the Republican candidate had been anyone but Trump in 2016, I was planning to vote Hillary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Usually, the word "sinful" is taken to mean an appeal to abstract, unfalsifiable moral commandments dependent on faith in some religious nonsense for even the slightest form of coherency, not "here is the solid statistical evidence that consumption of this media will make your life objectively worse by your own values."
It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing. There are significant observable costs to consumption and the industry that supports it, even from within the Materialist frame.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
Is this an example of the introduction of aesthetics into political life? How about this? I'm pretty sure I could provide additional examples, but let's start with these two.
Setting aside Benjamin's socialism, it seems to me that the important aspect of this definition is the dislocation of politics from materiality, and its fusion with aesthetics.
Could you lay out a general case for what the "dislocation of politics from materiality and its fusion with aesthetics" means? My understanding would be that politics stops being about concrete facts and rational analysis, and instead becomes about nebulous, likely irrational beliefs. Would that be accurate?
Put another way: Trump just says shit that he thinks will sound good, and then the ideological apparatus that's grown up around him rushes to rationalize and actualize it, even when that makes no fucking sense.
It seems to me that this perfectly describes a large majority of politics for as long as I've been paying attention, which is decades, plural at this point. I strongly dispute the claim that any of this is a novel creation of Trump or his supporters, and assert that the reason you are noticing it is some combination of less-polished execution and a more acute situation.
I understand that my claim here is isomorphic to a low-effort dismissal, but that is not my intention. To the extent that this is an accurate description of a real problem, the problem did not even remotely stop with Trump, and it certainly will not end with him.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Do you believe that the UK has a functional right to self-defense?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26d ago
Huh? I've never seen anyone (on the right or elsewhere) go from "the institutions are politically compromised" to "there is nonphysical stuff."
It is trivial to demonstrate the existence of "non-physical stuff" from within a strictly materialist framework. With an understanding of the political compromise of institutions, and an awareness of the historical record of those institutions, it is fairly trivial to peel the consensus materialist framework like a banana.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Makes me a little curious if the government cuts involve cleaning house for the Secret Service…
I would sincerely hope so. It keeps getting glossed over in these discussions, but I still haven't seen anything remotely like an adequate explanation of the events surrounding the Butler assassination attempt, and barring some extremely rigorous explanations or an ironclad paper trail detailing how the Secret Service has been an elaborate bluff all along, "the secret service intentionally attempted to allow an assassination of a presidential candidate" seems to me the the most likely explanation.
First, the value of the Second Amendment is not that AR-15s prevent government oppression via Sic Semper Tyrannus. To be clear, it almost certainly can do that if it has to, but it's very expensive and avoiding it is strongly preferable. The value is that the Second Amendment and the AR-15s it protects form a coordination mechanism for resistance to government overreach generally, and that this coordination provides better protection for liberty than many, many actual shootings of tyrants. The existence of the Second Amendment has decisively shaped the form and nature of our society's ongoing collapse, and thus what is likely to emerge from the wreckage. My assessment is that it is strongly preferable to any plausible alternative.
Second, from a Red perspective, there is zero reason to seek any common ground on the subject of criminal violence under present conditions. Nor is there any reason to entertain any argument about whether gun control might or might not improve rates of violent crime. The correct response is to make it clear that there is no grounds for any discussion on this subject at all. Blue Tribe deliberately generated the largest increase in violent crime ever recorded, explicitly in pursuit of partisan political advantage. There is no plausible mechanism by which any practicable amount of gun control could outweigh even a fraction of the harm they caused. They have accepted zero responsibility for the vast and appalling harms generated by their deliberate and protracted campaign of social vandalism caused, and to the extent that they are now attempting to use the crime wave they created as an excuse to strip Red Tribe of its rights, the correct response is, at the most charitable, contemptuous silence.
To the extent that Blue Tribe may be able to unilaterally impose destruction of Red Tribe human rights, the correct response is to destroy the social mechanisms that allow such illegitimate impositions. Either we control federal law, or there is no federal law; this is the evident position of Blue Tribe, and it should be our position as well. Defiance and nullification are the correct stance; either they will be sufficient to solve the dilemma, or we will need to escalate further.
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