FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
The claim as I understand it:
You have social media models, women who are making a living squarely in the "model" category of posting pictures of themselves in skimpy clothes or bikinis or whatever, but are not selling nudes or selling actual sex, don't have an Onlyfans, aren't advertising availability as a sugar-baby, etc. Super-rich guys from Dubai (or presumably elsewhere, but Dubai is the usual claim) DM them soliciting straightforward prostitution, offering to fly them to the guy's location in a private jet, pay them an absurd sum for a considerable amount of degeneracy, maybe let them have a mini-vacation afterward, and then fly them home, and the women find this offer acceptable. To the super-rich Dubai guys, this is essentially ordering takeout as the money involved is insignificant. For the women, the money is very significant, and it turns out that they do indeed have a price. It is claimed that this happens often enough that it is A Thing, an element of the social media ecosystem of which common knowledge more or less exists. It's sort of the difference between people looking for work and people willing to be headhunted.
The quoted phrase is the above, framed maximally-uncharitably.
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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
It takes all sorts, I suppose. The meme is not an exaggeration, though, and the phenomenon is widespread enough that it is a meme and you have heard of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Looks to me like Trump imagined that because the US is large, it has magical powers to compel others to do what it says.
Trump appears to be compelling others to do what he says. Israel's airports have just resumed full operations. Iran is telling the Saudis that they're ready to resolve their differences with the US.
I’m getting a strong feeling that this is the same exact thing as happened with Russia and Ukraine. Wasn’t he supposed to end that war? What happened there?
Trump does not actually have magical powers. He has considerable power, but exercise of that power comes at unknown but significant costs. So far, ending the Ukraine war is beyond him. We'll see how it goes in the future, though.
The Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment appeared to exist.
Federal Circuit Courts informed them that they were mistaken, and that the Second Amendment very definately did not exist.
The Supreme Court accepted this correction, and allowed the Circuit Court decisions to stand rather than vindicate the Consitutional Rights of United States Citizens as required by its own prior decisions.
People like me abandoned all hope in the Supreme Court as a viable institution, removing the Jury Box from the "four boxes" model of liberty, and precommitted to discount all future adversarial arguments made on the basis of Constitutional Rights.
Well - if I understand "we're not always capable of evaluating deep connections" correctly, the Christian answer is not even "I don't have time for your stupid questions", it's "I don't know how all of this works myself, but I trust the textbook and you should too".
...With the attendant evidence that trusting the textbook has a long history of delivering net-positive results, sure. Compare that to novel theories with no track record at best, emerging from "science" that is in fact negative-sum social status tournaments with minimal connection to concrete reality.
The ability to admit uncertainty is greatly preferable to false certainty. It's what you know that just ain't so.
The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was not a "deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself".
The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was the widespread belief among Progressives that police kill large numbers of innocent Black men.
This belief was explicitly false, but became widespread among Progressives specifically because a large percentage of Journalists spent many years collaborating together to bias their reporting in a way calculated to create this impression, or in the parlance, "raise awareness". Widespread criticism of this practice was uniformly ignored.
And of course, the direct result of the riots was many thousands of additional Black people murdered by overwhelmingly Black criminals, as law enforcement broke down and the criminals ran rampant. This was the easily-predictable result of the riots, and it was in fact predicted in advance, by myself and many others. I observe that Blues, having been most vociferous in their support of the Black Lives Matter campaign when it was sparking riots based on a fictitious epidemic of Black murder, now studiously deploy the squid ink when the topic of the factual consequences of that campaign is raised. "Black Lives Matter" was a slogan to them, not anything resembling a principle.
calling immigrants "invaders"
The term seems appropriate.
and the DHS declaring intent to "liberate" LA from the socialists.
Despite what this poster and the average LA resident might think, Red Tribers are only de facto second-class citizens in Blue enclaves, not de jure. According to the actual laws in the actual law books, they are still entitled to the protections afforded by the law, and to having the laws enforced on those who break them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d 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
4d ago
Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?
Suppose we invent a new and improved form of heroin. Unlike normal heroin, you can't overdose on it, it doesn't cause chemical dependency, you won't catch anything from taking it because it comes in pill form. It also costs basically nothing. Like heroin, consuming it feels really, really good, significantly better than 99% of other experiences, and it puts you in an incapacitated stupor, often for between 1-3 hours a pop. Some people want to try to keep children and teenagers from having unrestricted access to this drug. Do you think they have a valid concern?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17d ago
People in this thread are claiming that the shooter is a Blue, given that he appears to have been appointed to office by Tim Waltz and possibly by other Democratic politicians, with one of the victims being a democrat who recently voted with the Republicans on an important issue, resulting in much criticism from her own party. Also, he apparently had a stack of No Kings flyers in his vehicle. This seems quite premature to me.
I'm going to bet that the motivations for this assassination end up red-coded. Per CNN, the shooter is apparently a devout Christian, with him being caught on video "pointedly questioned American morals on sexual orientation". I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers. And not to put too fine a point on it, but he just shot two democrats.
Apparently the police have a manifesto, so we'll probably know the truth soon enough.
With regard to the willful destruction of a viable human infant, no, I don't. Why should I? Do you have sympathy for mothers spurred by tragedy to murder their birthed children in other contexts? Do you endorse "accompaniment" killings like Sati?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
It seems fairly clear to me that the psych construct underlying the median abortion is closure. The psychic goal of abortion appears to be to avoid not only being a mother, but also having been a mother.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Putting the kid up for adoption would also prevent single-motherhood, and my understanding is that the child would have an excellent chance of being adopted more or less immediately.
We're talking about porn consumption, not masturbation.
- What number would you consider more appropriate?
- Are you familiar with the meme "nut, clean up, close 50 tabs"? And to put it delicately, how familiar?
- The argument doesn't assume people generally consume more than one pill a day, although they certainly could, and some do.
...One of the best porn-related pieces of advice I've ever seen is from The Last Psychiatrist:
You have to approach porn like a bank heist: get in, get out, you got 15 minutes and someone tripped the silent alarm. Leave nothing behind.
...He gives this advice, because he thinks people need it. Why do you suppose he thinks that?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
You don't really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope.
But you can in fact open it up and look at it with a microscope. Moreover, you can make a new one from scratch with tools, and make it to your exact specifications. You cannot open the mind and look at it with a microscope, and you cannot make a new mind to-spec with tools.
The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.
And this is distinct from the access you have working in the hard drive factory. But there is no hard drive factory for minds; the normal user access is all the access any of us have ever observed or confirmed empirically.
Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable.
The computer is matter. Matter was not "designed" to be understandable and manipulable. It is understandable and manipulable, and so complex arrangements of matter that we intentionally construct with tools generally retain this property. To the extent they lose this property, it is generally because multiplicative complexity accelerates their mechanics from within our grasp to outside it, and we can generally simplify that complexity to make them graspable again. In the same way, we construct LLMs from mechanical components, and to the extent that they lose the predictable and controllable mechanistic nature, it is through the multiplication of complexity to an intractable degree.
We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them; we can neither point to nor manipulate the gears themselves. Minds might well may be both mechanical and intractably complex, but the intractable complexity prevents the mechanical nature from being demonstrated or interacted with empirically. Hard Determinism is a viable axiom, but not an empirical fact. The problem is that people do not appear to understand the difference.
Would you say that your basic argument is that the rules shouldn't be changed, de facto or de jure, because the change might be weaponized against a given group, and that instead we should accept the status quo because its formal strictures provide better protection from such weaponization?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I think you have been well trained by enemies of Christianity.
Solid statistical evidence is a pretty recent invention, and its accessibility to the public even more recent. In the meantime humans live human lives and require human guidance.
Succeed in providing that guidance, and you may remove the proof needed to demonstrate why the guidance should be tolerated.
I was raised evangelical and converted to Orthodoxy and have never heard it suggested that swearing is somehow implicitly sinful.
Raised Church of Christ and returned to it, here. We were taught to avoid both blasphemy and obscenity as sinful. "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth..."
Apart from failing to cultivate a relationship with Christ I'm unable to think of any behavior typically described as sinful that doesn't have observable material costs.
I think you might well be correct, but it's very easy to lie to oneself about this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I've thought about starting a substack, just to have a place to collate ten years of writing if nothing else. Sadly, for the moment, no dice. You can always link to comments here if it helps.
"The real thing" is a more complex concept than many people appreciate, and a lot of it happens inside the skull and is heavily mediated by that skull's other contents. It is definitely possible to get to a place where "the fake thing" appears to be strictly superior; general gooner behavior is more or less a superhighway directly to this state. Further, this general pattern generalizes to most of the other pleasures of human existence.
The greatest source of joy in my life by far is my eldest child. Interacting with them, reading to them, the joy they radiate whenever they see me in the morning or when waking from a nap, cuddling with them and singing them to sleep at night are profoundly wonderful experiences that I would not trade for anything. But I remember quite well being quite determined to never have children, because they obviously interfered with all the "fun" I wanted to have playing video games and pursuing various hobbies. I do not think there are words present-Me could say to past-Me to convince them of their error; they thought the way they did because their mind was shaped by their circumstances and experiences, and only a change in circumstances and experiences could deliver a change of mind.
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
6d ago
Can you give me a quick summary of your understanding of Materialism and Determinism in the scientific era, and also your understanding of when Materialism, Determinism and Atheism began being taken seriously as workable axioms?
I guess I’ve just had better experiences than you. I’ve never been depressed about casual sex or masturbation. Or anything, really.
Quite possibly this is true. Perhaps it will continue to be true for the rest of your life. What I observe from society at large, however, is deep discontent bordering on open rage at the sexual environment our society has delivered. Having attempted to have the bloom only, the bloom withers and is gone, and people generally are much worse off for it, and perceive themselves to be much worse off.
Meanwhile, I have a spouse, and children, and strong ties to a family of considerable size. Do you have these things? If you do not, how do you think that fact shapes the world over the next two or three decades?
Another difference between you and me is that I do not want to stop others from choosing your path, or the other, while your side is fundamentally willing to coerce.
Then you and your preferences are irrelevant to the question of what the future will be. Coercion is an indispensable building-block for large-scale, high-complexity social order. To the extent that you disagree, it seems likely to me that you are either blind to the coercion you endorse and participate in, or else you are in a temporary pocket of calm created by the push and pull of competing ideological constructs. The tide goes in and out, and there's doubtless a moment there in the middle where it seems that the water is being neither pushed nor pulled, but it will not last. You will be found either by the coercion of Progressive ideology, or the coercion of people like me, or the coercion of some other construct, because atomic individualism creates a vast power vacuum, and sooner or later that vacuum will be filled.
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller life
(Which started by loving our neighbor, and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children, and the men lost reason and faith
and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said, "The Wages of Sin is Death."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.
Some rulers do that. Other rulers claim they're doing that and then rely on manipulation of procedural outcomes instead. And likewise, some critics are pointing to actual abuses, and some are simply mad because they got caught breaking black-letter law.
I believe I and others here are pointing to actual abuses. Between formal complexity, subjective interpretation, selective enforcement and corruption, Rule of Law is not a sustainable assumption in the United States. We cannot passively trust the legal system to fulfill its promises to us; pressure must be constantly applied, and some of that pressure must be illegible and outside the formal bounds of the law.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Mind reading is weakly possible. Elon Musk is doing it right now, amongst others.
I've seen Musk and others doing I/O. I/O is not read/write. The difference is one involves with a widget and your mind that you could otherwise do with your hand and your mind, and the other involves directly reading or changing your mind. When Musk has a working, rigorously accurate lie detector, let me know.
It's just that it's very difficult to extract useful information against someone's will.
If this is true, as opposed to it being strictly impossible, could you give me some examples of mental information being extracted deterministically from a human mind?
The chip die for the human mind is encased in a woman's uterus. The BIOS is encased in the human genome. It's just that the production process is insanely complicated.
A chip die is a tool we use to make a chip the way we want it. A BIOS is a tool we use to make basic adjustments to how a computer functions. We cannot make human minds the way we want them, with a uterus or by any other known means. We cannot make basic adjustments to how they operate, through the genome or by any other known means. It is not that the production process is insanely complicated; that would imply we could have some reasonable certainty that if we buckle down and work at it we should crack it in short order. But in fact, we do not know how to make significant positive changes to the human brain, and we have no idea if significant positive changes to the human mind are possible even in principle. Von Neumann seems to have had a superior human brain. He does not seem to have had a superior human mind; all evidence I've seen indicates that he was quite human in all the usual ways. I do not believe that a civilization of Von Neumanns would achieve Utopia, nor even lack criminals; I do not think you should believe this either.
The resurrection of Christ is a totally different kind of matter.
Why bring it up then? My point was that confident claims about things you believe will happen in the future are not evidence.
I have had materialists very directly deny the existence of free will in extended argumentation with me. I have observed other materialists, here and elsewhere, insist that no evidence against Materialism exists, and also that we know free will cannot actually exist because otherwise it would break materialism. Noting these positions is not a "pretense".
Things can work without us knowing how they work on a mechanistic level. Starting a fire is mechanistic; people worked with fire long, long before they had a mechanistic explanation of how it worked.
We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.
They are not my absurd standards, they were the absurd claims of the scientists and philosophers who built the paradigm of the material mind. These men claimed their axioms were empirical facts for more than a century, and used those claims to wield vast social, economic and political power while steadily retreating from every scrap of empirical evidence available. It is not my fault that much of the modern world was built by lying to people about empirical fact. I will not stop pointing that the lies were in fact lies, nor tracing the social consequences of those lies down to the present day. Nor will I cease to note the evidence of my own self-reported mind-states, and the ways in which simple observation entirely contradicts the materialist narrative.
Nor will I claim that I have knowledge that I do not, in fact, have. Determinism is a perfectly respectable axiom, and utility can be acquired through its use. but it is an axiom, the utility is acquired strictly through its use as an axiom, and it pays no direct rent at all.
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