FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
The above-mentioned merchants, "merchants" being shorthand for industrious citizens of all descriptions. The people who make, build, grow, fix, plan, engineer, coordinate, invest and so on. Those people need an impartial system of law once what they build reaches a certain level of complexity, but the law exists to reduce friction between those building society. It certainly does not build society itself.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
That would be my rough assessment as well.
Blue Tribe excels at soft control, but that does not translate into hard control. They win when they can isolate a situation and then drown it in "process". You can't isolate a draft; it's everywhere and all at once. Likewise for firearms confiscation, or even firearms registration for that matter, or arresting state governors.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
If that defiance doesn't keep escalating like you predict, but instead does "all fizzle out," and Red Tribe mostly backs down like Nybbler and I predict, what will you say then?
I'll say that you were right that non-violent defiance wouldn't work, and that we should escalate. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul" remains true. It also remains true that keeping one's soul does not appear to require pacifism. Belief in God cuts both ways: it means we see no reason to pursue victory at any cost, but it also means some of those "costs" are in fact acceptable. Faith in God does not preclude prosecuting war, nor inflicting the harms of war. There are no "horrors to come"; pain and death are the inevitable lot of all men, always have been and always will be.
knowing their can be no real victory in this world anyway, and the only reward to be sought is in the next life, which is why all atheists are Leftists by definition, right? (Again, this is from Hlynka.)
You've mangled the argument rather badly, but sure, close enough for purposes of this discussion. If Blue Tribe hegemony is destroyed, that will not in fact solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Destroying the Third Reich didn't solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Neither did grinding down the Soviet Union. Both were still the right thing to do, and worth the costs required to do them. In the latter case, Von Nuemann was wrong; beating the Soviet Union was not worth a nuclear exchange. We probably should have paid more than we did, but a full-blown nuclear war was not worth it to stop a tyranny that was, in fact, already doomed.
If the defiance accelerates and grows, are you and @TheNybbler going to admit you were wrong?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Well, no one was going to look at the actual rule, anyway.
I certainly wasn't going to, because I assumed this is what it would look like, and it appears I was correct. Mandatory gender identity affirmation for elementary kids. Denial of gender identity affirmation technically possible at older ages, provided that one class of Blue partisans wants to deny it, and a second class of Blue partisans seconds their motion.
Given that it's a federal rule and is going to be immediately complied with in all Blue areas, how often do you expect those Blue areas to conclude that "sex-related criteria that limit participation of some transgender students" will actually be implemented, much less approved of by federal authorities?
Why do you think this is a reasonable rule? Why do you think using it to coordinate Red Tribe defiance is a bad idea?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d 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
9d ago
Back in the Freedom Fries era, we occasionally saw someone attacking a swarthy individual wearing a turban while shouting something derogatory to Arabs, and then it turned out the victim was actually Sikh. My understanding is that these cases were generally chalked up to Islamophobia, even though the victim wasn't a Muslim, because the attacker's motivation was hatred of Muslims.
This situation seems analogous. I guess it's reasonable to ask whether the hatred is toward Catholics in particular, or Christians generally, but it's pretty clearly a wave of hate crimes aimed at a coherent target. It's especially notable since there's zero evidence the inciting incident actually happened.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Why is that certain?
Nothing is certain, but I'd say it's a very good bet. I'm pretty sure getting the public to comply with a draft requires more social trust than, in the words of the economist, "getting credit cards to work".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
First time?
Everyone in the Culture War has this experience sooner or later. It sucks, but eventually the realization settles that this is how it is and it's not going to change, so you make your peace with it and move on with life.
For me, it helped to realize that most people who talk about politics and culture aren't actually engaging in analysis, but rather an informal group-bonding game built around call-and-response meme-trading. This doesn't make them stupid or irrational, any more than posting dogespeak memes means they don't understand proper grammar. They aren't trading John-Oliver-tier (or steven crowder tier) talking points because they're interested in pursuing objective truth, they're doing it because it generates a feeling of togetherness. Sure, it's alienating to you, because the pings they're generating are pings your brain rejects, but that's not really their fault. People are different, is all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I'm legitimately not sure whether you're being sarcastic or not. The argument would make sense either way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Certainly they are not.
Certainly they are. The guns are never, ever going to go away. Registration is not going to happen. Confiscation is not going to happen. They're still trying to go after the manufacturers and dealers, but DIY manufacturing gets easier and more accessible every year, and we're well past the point where this process can be stopped or even meaningfully slowed. Enforcement on any of this, whether against the gun culture or against criminals, is a complete joke.
Meanwhile, the Gun Culture has learned to actively erode existing laws through malicious compliance and technological innovation, and are doing an excellent job of radicalizing the community as a whole to reject the legitimacy of gun control laws. The Fudds are all but extinct, and the people who replaced them are moving from "I lost them in a boating accident" to "I didn't lose shit." I am pretty sure I'm going to see the NFA die in my lifetime, one way or the other. Concealed Carry continues to steadily expand. And as fantastic as all that is, we've barely started on the low-hanging fruit. There's beautiful avenues of practical lawfare/tech development just lying around, waiting for someone to pick them up and thus further beclown state and federal laws.
Yes, it's easier for the blues to violate the letter and the spirit of the laws they don't like, thanks to their stranglehold on institutional support. But it is not only possible to do as they have done, it is inevitable.
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true.
Every human has a lifetime of direct experience of something that appears in every observable and testable way to be free will. Complex predictions can be accurately made on the assumption of free will's existence.
Neither statement is true of Determinism, which, if it exists, can neither be observed nor tested in any way. Entire generations of scientists claimed otherwise, and their claims were dramatically falsified over the course of the last century. Belief in Determinism is axiomatic, not evidence-based.
To the extent that "true" is a meaningful term, free will is true. It is true in all the ways that gravity is true, and rejecting it involves exactly the same sorts of commitments and actions that rejecting gravity involves: namely, discarding huge portions of one's moment-to-moment experience as fundamentally unreliable, without any compensatory increase in predictive power.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
There was the draft, in a previous society posessed of a great deal of social cohesion. That society no longer exists.
They're not engaging in analysis, right.
They aren't, though. That's an observable fact to me, and I'm okay if you disagree with that, but I'd be interested in seeing what arguments you'd present to support that disagreement.
Neither John Oliver nor Jon Stewart nor Steven Crowder nor Sean Hannity are optimizing for truth. All four of these people are entertainers, and their schtick is to offer a just-so story where their tribe is obviously correct and the other tribe is some combination of stupid or evil. All of them build their argumentation around isolated demands for rigor, cherry picking, motte-and-bailey, and the rest of the dark arts. The talking points they generate are frequently absurd, and require complete ignorance of the facts of the matter to maintain any significant persuasive value. They sell low-information politics to (politically) low-information people for whom politics is essentially a spectator sport, similar to football or baseball. The version of "politics" they present has only the most minimal connection to the realities of how our system apportions and exercises power.
It is not pretension to point out that every four years, both major presidential candidates give a speech on how they're going to fix the education system, and every four years both speeches are remarkably identical both between the candidates, and between all previous candidates in living memory. Meanwhile, the educational system has been obviously broken and getting worse throughout living memory, has been repeatedly "reformed" every few years, and not only have those reforms failed, some of them have failed two or even three times, the failures being recorded, forgotten, and then recapitulated in a system without memory, accountability, or even direction. That is not a result that serious, thoughtful, dedicated people will produce. And many, perhaps even most political matters observably operate in this fashion. If the economy improves, the incumbent's supporters will say he did it, and his detractors will say it was the last guy. If the economy declines, his supporters will say it was the last guy and his detractors will say he did it, and they will do this regardless of what they previously said and regardless of the evidence. Ditto for most other areas of domestic and foreign policy. We were "winning" the war in Afghanistan for twenty years across three separate administrations, until we abruptly lost it upon the arrival of the fourth, in an event that was absolutely predictable fifteen years in advance. Pick your favorite issue of policy, and I'd wager a similar situation is what you'll see when you dig in. The captain's wheel of Democracy does not appear to be linked to the rudder of concrete policy; spin it left, spin it right, take your hands completely off, it doesn't actually matter much.
I guess if your idea of analysis is pseudo-scientific half-readings of social science papers (which isn't a real field unless the paper supports your conclusion btw)
My personal standard is admission against interest, actually. If the findings make the researchers extremely unhappy and unpopular with their peers and co-tribals, but they can't find a way around the data, the data's probably worth considering.
... inability to separate personal bias from the external world, and a strong superiority complex then it should be painfully obvious why no one wants to engage with you IRL.
I had a lot more trouble engaging with people back when I took them all seriously. Now when I get hit with a low-information call-and-response, I just give them a milktoast-moderate version of their preferred ping and it's all good. If they actually are trying to engage in analysis but lack the background, I give them a step past wherever they are, and then shrug and say "but who knows, really" to offer a non-threatening exit, that tends to work pretty well. If they're a serious person with a serious interest, it's not hard to tell and then we can have a serious conversation, but that's relatively rare.
I do not concede that everyone who considers themselves "serious about politics" is actually serious about politics. I do not require that people agree with me about politics to consider them serious. I do require that they have a decent grasp on political history, and a grasp on the relevant facts over the last several decades for the issues they claim to care about. If they "care" enough about a subject to want to talk about it, but don't care enough to actually read up on the relevant information beyond the talking points their preferred partisan pre-packaged for them, and if they are more interested in those talking points than in making actual predictions based on the available evidence, it seems to me that their actions speak for themselves. If they "care" about politics the way an NFL fan "cares" about their team, I see no reason why "caring" more than them would lead to better outcomes. And indeed, my experience is that it does not.
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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
27d ago
I would take the other side of that bet. What makes it different than Oblivion's potato faces is that they already had good art, and replaced it with bad art. The difference is not subtle, so a lot of people knew in advance that the new art was bad, which would obviously undermine any plausible benefits to the change. Nor is there any serious technical challenge to hide behind; these are low-fi models and textures implementing what is probably the single best-understood and simplest-to-implement 3d art style there is. There's a DEI entity being paid by the company to propose CW changes to the game, and this matches quite well to a DEI change. Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past, that's what this looks like to me.
If what you say about locked accessories is true, this was probably seen as the cheapest way to double the number of custom options available to each player.
I'm sure that's roughly accurate to how they sold it to management. From experience, my guess would be that the artists got their marching-orders from management, decided it wasn't worth fighting, and did exactly what they were told with full knowledge that they were making trash, given that the alternative would involve a direct threat to their employment for a ~zero-percent chance of achieving anything. Your boss paid money for the bad advice because it's the bad advice he wanted. Having paid for the bad advice, he's not interested in you telling him that it's bad. Shut up and push the buttons, art monkey.
If the US government issues visas for a hundred million inhabitants of the third world to come to the US, Texas can’t do anything about it other than secede.
Texas can coordinate defiance to federal authority without pursuing secession. Federal authority is a norm, not an immutable law of the universe, and norms can go away over time. Here, defiance by Red Tribe provides the other half of the back-and-forth wrenching that will tear this norm out of its cultural foundations. The first half of the wrenching has been amply supplied by Blues for decades to any exercise of Federal authority by Reds. If Trump wins, we're absolutely going to see more broad-spectrum "resistance". If Abbott and DeSantis continue on their current trajectory, then we'll see more Broad spectrum resistance from Reds as well. Keep that up, and it's entirely possible that Federal authority loses all credibility, and the existing system simply dies. That's a better outcome than most we could ask for, and requires no battles or redrawing of borders.
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
22d ago
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. ...Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
It doesn't seem to me that the shaming norms immediately prior to the Sexual Revolution were particularly strict, from a historical perspective. Nor does this comport with my understanding of how revolutions generally work; they generally don't happen when conditions decline past some critical threshold, but rather when things are getting better, but people think they should be getting better faster. Is that not your understanding? In any case, it's hard to believe that 1950s America leaned harder on shame than, say, Puritan America. Why didn't Puritan America result in a Sexual Revolution, under your model?
The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers.
Historically speaking, I do not see the Sexual Revolution being driven by people who had been shamed reaching a critical mass. Rather, what I observe is people who were not being shamed buying into the idea that the shame-enforcement system they were already on the right side of could be dismantled without cost or consequence, that the fences against sexual misconduct were pointless and that tearing them down would have no downsides and only benefits, because We Had Progressed. Without a broad-based commitment to the big lie of Progress and all the "little" lies that supported it, the sexual revolution would not have happened. Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society desperately eager to believe them, the sexual revolution doesn't happen.
Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.
But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
Is it culturally formed, or is it culturally deformed? We agree that people can be made to feel shame about things that should not be considered shameful. The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.
I'm sure kids aren't born being ashamed of nakedness or of touching their genitals. On the other hand, they aren't ashamed of casual cruelty either; they have to learn that other people exist and to empathize with them, but that doesn't mean that empathy itself is a cultural construction that we can take or leave as we will. I think modesty is similar: you aren't born knowing it, but you learn about it soon enough unless others expend a great deal of effort trying to hide it from you, and even then sooner or later it'll be back.
The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine. That pitch has been gradually walked back as the resulting disasters become increasingly undeniable. The relatively slow pace of that walk-back has been, in my view, only achievable through large-scale deceit and the intentional obfuscation of the horrors the Revolution's architects unleashed and refused to recognize.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
They are literally tracking all the online purchases of people buying 3d printers, checking them against social media and reports by leftist informants, and raiding people at 3am.
Could you provide a source for this? I like to keep abreast of current developments on this front.
In any case, what do they do if you have a 3d printer and no social media?
Thinking about "revolution" is insane with the kind of tyranny you're facing.
I suppose that depends rather heavily on how you expect a revolution to work. Some are easier to execute than others.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
you would ban someone who showed up saying "nobody is trying to take your guns, you stupid paranoid hicks. Why do you want school shootings so much?"
"nobody is trying" is kinda consensus-building, but probably fine. "you stupid paranoid hicks" is an immediate ban because it's needlessly inflammatory.
If, on the other hand, someone comes in and posts "The gun control debate seems pretty absurd to me at this point. I see no evidence that anyone actually wants to confiscate all the guns or shoot all gun owners or whatever, and claims to the contrary seem totally unsupportable. This looks to me like another case where the Red Tribe bought into their own spin so much that they've lost all touch with reality."
...They are totally allowed to do that. I and Gattsuru and about a dozen other people will then bury them under an avalanche of quotes and citations, but we'll have to be civil about it as well. Even when you know the person is arguing in bad faith, even you can't remember when they've argued in good faith, you still have to keep it civil or just stay out of it. This does allow some people to get away with bad behavior long-term, but it makes them work very, very hard for it, and they evidently don't enjoy it much, so that's probably the best we can ask for.
Your way, we're stuck trying to judge who is lying, and that opens up a whole other can of worms. Are they lying if they don't believe in Climate Change? If they don't believe trans women are women? If They think the president is doing a good job?
[EDIT] - The paper you linked is a much, much more persuasive argument than an expression of your emotional state. Just link a couple paragraphs and compare and contrast to the people acting like it isn't happening. That is super-effective rhetoric right there.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Weren't they Gnostics? Gnosticism definately still exists.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
Why isn't that fear enough?
Because, in my assessment, it's not rational. It appears that others agree with me, Abbott and DeSantis among them, among a number of other leaders and their supporters. Defiance of Federal authority is observably being coordinated, right out in the open where you can watch it happen.
You can believe that such defiance is inevitably doomed to fail, but I disagree, and it appears others disagree as well. Very well: we've made our predictions, and the outcomes will be as they will be.
What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.
It doesn't seem to me that they're getting it, and the trend seems to be that they're getting less of it over time.
Because you will be punished if you don't?
It seems to me that their capacity for punishment is declining, and that well-chosen actions can force it further into decline.
Trump is certainly being punished. He has survived so far, and is plausibly going to win the election. If he does, they will stonewall him and continue their efforts to destroy him, and the result that matters is that the system will continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. If he does not win the election, or if they succeed in destroying him, the system will likewise continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. I do not see a route by which the establishment arm of the GOP regain authority over and support from their base, which has been in open rebellion for some years now. Abbott has not yet been punished, and neither has DeSantis. Even if Trump is destroyed, and Abbott is destroyed, and DeSantis is destroyed, someone else will step up to take their respective places, and the process will continue.
This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.
Abbott has done so before, and Biden backed down. Abbott is doing so again, and Biden is very likely to back down this time too.
There is more defiance to Federal authority now than there was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. It does not seem to me that the trend supports your interpretations or predictions.
...As for the rest, I maintain that the ultima ration is preferable to an uncontested blue tribe win, and that it favors Red Tribe. I also maintain that it would be a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale, think it should be our last resort, and do not believe that discussing it in detail is a good idea, especially in this forum. I continue to decline discussion of the ultima ratio beyond these points, and continue to be comfortable with your assumption and assertion that this means there is no substance to my argument. I invite you to dispense with the questions and simply proceed to state that I offer no explanation and thus should not be listened to. Others are free to draw their own conclusions.
One of those options is to coordinate the withdrawal of consent from and the subsequent dissolution of the current system. It's a pretty good option, in my view, and apparently a lot of other Americans agree.
The standard Blue tactic is to isolate a situation and then drown it in "process". That doesn't seem to be working so hot any more. What else you got?
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