FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Maybe, but I hope people realize that there are still many people in the United States who think that they are under hostile occupation by conservative Christians and have good reason to think so.
What does "hostile occupation by conservative Christians" look like in practice, in the year 2023?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
For example, I know a person who grew up in a Jehovah's Witnesses family and was forbidden from having any friends who were not JW. I think this upbringing was seriously psychologically damaging.
Do you have any examples where the "hostile occupation" is not, one way or another, one's own parents? Like, unrelated Christians will beat you in the street, destroy your property, or make a credible effort to get you fired from your job for being visibly non-Christian?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Why? What is the significant cost of perceiving an ad executive ploy as an attack, and being angry about it? Do these costs apply to all people who get angry about social signals they don't like? Because from where I'm sitting, the argument that such behavior is not adaptive is flatly incredible, and really ought to be backed with elaboration and evidence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
No, "nigger" and "nigga" are not the same words.
In what way are they not the same? If a white person publicly says the latter, in what way would the results be appreciably different than saying the former? Will people even recognize that they didn't say the former?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
The theoretical model is not difficult to derive, but does not answer the question. I'm asking for your evidence that such a model possesses any connection to the social realities our society actually operates under, that the "a"-ending-word does not possess the same Deplorable Word effect as its hard-r progenitor.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
What did this domination or significant influence look like in practice, how many people did it effect, and to what degree was it avoidable by personal choice?
I don't doubt that the people you're describing exist, or even that their concerns are important on at least some level. But if I said that the number of people "who think that they are under hostile occupation by woke Progressivism and have good reason to think so" is an order of magnitude or two larger, would you think that was a reasonable statement?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
I can believe that you've seen not-black people use the a-variant in front of black people without issue. My prior is that they were close friends.
Your first link opens with a number of statements about how the author views white people using the a-variant as strongly objectionable, even in the most innocent of contexts, even singing along to a song by themselves in private, with the reaction ranging from the instant souring of personal relationships to a prompt resort to physical violence, which the author views as appropriate. Their analysis repeatedly loops back to considerations of context, with no amount of context actually making the use innocuous in the author's view. Their conclusion is that the taboo is probably weakening in wider society, and they are deeply ambivalent about that.
Previously, you've linked to an example of a black person using the word in a public context, which caused significant controversy.
Your second link is paywalled, but from the blurb, it seems to be a story about how personal relationships with people allowed a level of intimacy where an otherwise-taboo interaction became something to bond over. Presuming that's a fair description, I don't think it supports your thesis.
The third article is attempting to engage with the obvious craziness of enforcing the taboo on a word the enforcers use constantly in extremely popular cultural products. It likewise contains numerous references to how, under current conditions, the taboo absolutely exists and is strongly enforced. This likewise does not seem to support your thesis, any more than it would to point to the "n-word pass" meme, where supposedly black kids sell white kids a promissory note for use of the word.
None of this changes the fact that if I have a positive interaction with a black stranger, and exclaim "my man!", nothing will happen, but if I exclaim "my ***a!", I have vastly increased my odds of having a very, very bad time, not least because, even if the event were video recorded, it's entirely possible for either the black stranger or subsequent viewers to perceive the hard-r anyway.
More generally, does this conversation seem productive from your end?
Thanks, these are interesting questions. Sorry I took me two weeks to get to them (I hope you get a chance to read the article itself!).
I did, but got caught up arguing about it with others in the thread, rather than writing a more cohesive reply. I think this one gets to a lot of the issues, though.
Are you asking this from an Aristotelian point of view? I.e. "what is the Telos of Man"? To take your question literally. I'd say human nature has not changed very much. I wouldn't say our Telos has changed at all.
I'll cop to not actually having read Aristotle, but from inference, that's the general thrust. I'd put it more in terms of values and experience and significant choices available. Fighting is a fairly significant part of the general human experience, and the core nature of a fight, what it is and what it means, its moral nature if you will, seems immune to technological progress. I think it is the same for love, friendship, ambition, curiosity, marriage, sex, procreation, pleasure, fear, sickness, pain, death, justice, betrayal, jealousy... every morally significant aspect of the human experience, in short. And if these aspects of the human experience are what we lean on to understand morality, and mundane progress doesn't change them, why should mundane progress change morality?
Also I'm showing that the mundane progress shouldn't be lightly ignored. My examples are there to show that any attempt to do so, distorts the word far away from it's ordinary meaning.
Does mundane progress have any moral weight? It seems to me that by asking this question, we're already saying that our primary concern is morality, the Good, and we're seeing if mundane progress measures up to a standard already set. We recognize a number of moral principles, all of which trade off against each other. If mundane progress has moral weight, then it too should trade off against our other moral principles, and technological progress should, say, offset injustice. if it has no moral weight, then I think we are forced to conclude that mundane progress can, in fact, be ignored, because it does not actually matter, it is not integral to The Good.
People use the word progress to mean "things getting better". I remember life before air conditioning, and I definately like air conditioning better. But there's still a clear difference with mundane preferences and moral imperatives, and it seems to me that the gap between them is unbridgeable.
I wouldn't condemn that critique. I even might join it, depending on what exactly is being critiqued. But I object to that critique being extended to a blanket claim that progress doesn't exist -- that would be to conflate absolute and mundane progress.
As I see it, the people who first argued that moral progress was possible did in fact conflate absolute and mundane progress. They did not recognize a distinction between them, and they made a lot of testable predictions about how manipulating mundane conditions would improve the moral character of human society. For three hundred years now, they've been claiming that fundamental convolutions of the human experience could be solved outright, that crime, want, hate, jealousy, greed, and many more besides could be decisively and permanently deconstructed. This is my understanding of the claim of moral progress: that we become flatly better than we were before, that when we were a child we reasoned as a child, but now that we are a man, the childish things are put away. Progressives have spent a lot of time making that argument very, very explicitly, and it seems to me that they've been consistently wrong.
The question here, I think, is whether moral reality is absolutely unchanging, or whether it is malleable. If the later, a further question is whether that change is bounded, or whether it is unbounded. Progressives, to continue using the term loosely, seem to believe that moral reality is unboundedly malleable. I think it is narrowly bounded; there are better and worse societies, but making a society too much worse tends to crash society as a whole, and making it better runs into fundamental, unchangeable limits of human nature, and is very difficult to sustain in any case.
Is your point that, were absolute progress real, then we would have moved beyond the problems which those works grapple with? Because that is a valid point, which I'd like to tackle if that's really where you are going with this.
Just so.
The Progressives have been refreshingly clear on this point, with their predictions about the infinite perfectibility of man, the "new soviet man", the Master Race, their stated ambitions for Psychology flatly solving major aspects of the human condition, Wars on Poverty and so on. A lot of this gets sanewashed in retrospect, by necessity given the outcomes, but if you read their prior positions they were not kidding around. They expected actual, tangible, undeniable moral progress, a clear discontinuity in human nature and human experience. They expected obvious parts of the human experience to simply go away, and other parts to be radically altered in immediately obvious ways; the abolishment of the family, for example. None of this happened, and a lot of the attempts to make it happen generated significant areas of concentrated misery, vast moral sinkholes.
If moral progress exists, though, it could be argued that they were right to make the attempt. If mundane progress has moral weight, a lot of repugnant arguments seem to logically follow, starting with the idea that less-advanced cultures are of lesser moral weight than more-advanced cultures, with crimes between them being of unequal weight as well. A lot of variations on "the ends justify the means" and "for the greater good" come to the fore, because we're presuming that there are ends at play, that there is a Greater Good available.
...On the other hand, my position requires biting a number of bullets. One of the bigger ones is that neither pleasure nor pain, nor even death, are admitted to have moral weight. If murder or sadism are to have moral weight, they must be for a reason other than their material effects, which I'd expect most moderns would consider a rather unintuitive claim. From where I sit, though, that logic is the best guard available against the embrace of atrocity and degradation. As they say, you can't make an omelet without killing a few people.
Interestingly, these moral claims don't seem to be unfalsifiable. People actually have been trying for some time to generate clear moral progress. If the tech curve goes exponential, if we see superhuman AI and a lot of the transhumanist claims come true, it seems hard to see why radical discontinuity would not be possible, and the skin-in-the-game has been recognized by both sides quite a way back; C.S. Lewis wrote a pretty good book making one side of the argument, back when Progressivism was running full-steam ahead, for example. How one assess that argument depends a lot on one's priors and perspective on both history and the current situation, but it seems to me fairly decisive; one can find the same argument made from other perspectives as well, for example Scott R Bakker's Semantic Apocalypse. To sum up the general form of the argument, even from a strictly materialist perspective, it seems hard to imagine how moral progress could happen without moral change, and if moral change is possible, it's not obvious that "progress" is actually a coherent concept, and the more accurate term would be something like "values drift". Our whole conception of the Good and of Progress assumes a fixed point, but there are solid reasons to believe that approaching that point requires an eschaton that nothing recognizably human would survive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
The evangelicals have always been anti-abortion pro death penalty vibes but I don’t think an intellectually honest (most people aren’t) could view life as sacred and take that view.
killing babies is wrong because the babies are innocent. Executing murderers is not wrong, because they are not innocent. "If a man sheds blood, by man shall his blood be shed." How is that incompatible with a view of life being sacred?
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.
the missionary is acting as though there is a law to be followed, when there obviously is not. The checkpoint guard is a potential threat, the "service charge" is not optional, and these realities must be engaged with. The missionary is thinking there's some system in place such that these realities are Someone Else's Problem, that the proper response is to file a complaint form and let the system handle it. He's blind to the fact that there is no system, that this is the way things are.
The cat lady is doing the same thing. She acts as though there's a system to enforce her will over and above her immediate actions. She apparently thinks there's a system that prevents the cat from walking out an open door, ignoring that no such system exists. She wants such a system to exist, ignores the fact that it does not, and so suffers the consequences.
The "dishes" poem (one of my favorites, by the way) illustrates the disconnect between cooperative systems of the type the people in these two examples are imagining exist, and the reality of individual choice. Washing the dishes is supposed to preclude breaking them, but there's nothing innate to the task to actually prevent this. What prevents breaking dishes is something entirely different, a whole other complex of assumptions and interactions with no actual connection to the act of dish-washing itself, and the existence of those assumptions cannot simply be assumed when it's time for dish-washing.
Assuming the above is correct, let's see if I can extend the pattern.
This scene from The Wire is all about the divide between the power of a hypothetical system and the power of material reality. The guard wants it to be one way: his whole job is in fact to be that system, that's the whole reason he's there, the reason he draws a paycheck, he has a uniform and everything! And yet, it's the other way: the system doesn't actually exist, even though he wants it to, even though he's paid to implement it, because at the end of the day, cooperation has to either be consented to or enforced, nd mechanisms of enforcement are both very expensive and quite limited in what they can achieve. Stanfield refuses to consent, and the guard, and the people the guard represents, aren't actually prepared for enforcement. They're bluffing, and Stanfield calls it. The guard's response is to try to guilt-trip him over his defection, as though Stanfield doesn't understand what he's doing, as though he's just making a mistake, and once this is pointed out he'll fall in line with the system. This doesn't work because Stanfield is not making a mistake, has no intention of cooperating, and knows that neither the guard nor the people behind him have any way of enforcing the system they're claiming exists. In reality, he has all the cards, and recognizes no reason to pretend otherwise. He is able to inflict emotional whiplash on the guard at will, by allowing the guard to pretend the system exists, and then demonstrating that it does not.
Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is. The point of all these statements is to highlight different ways that this system vs reality disconnect applies to the system of the Constitution: the document itself is not the power, the justices aren't even the power. The paper and ink and the justices interpreting it are just coordination mechanisms. The power comes from the social consensus that they exist to coordinate, and that power can be manipulated in a whole variety of ways that have nothing to do with a fancy piece of parchment or five people in silly black robes. A foolish person might imagine that their ignition key is what powers their car: they turn the key and the car starts! But of course, the ignition key is only indirectly connected to the car's engine, and if there's something wrong with the engine the key certainly isn't going to help.
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Ok fair enough. But I don’t think that works for a Christian. Jesus ate with hookers. The whole Christ narrative is that he died for our sins and his resurrection redeemed us.
None of that has anything at all to do with systems of earthly justice. Salvation from sins is not a free pass from the consequences of sin here and now. Stealing and repenting of it doesn't mean you don't go to jail, and in fact the proper thing to do is to take the penalty willingly because you agree it is just.
So while I agree that your logic can work I don’t think it fits with being a Christian which most pro-life people claim some kind of Christianity. The sacredness of their life isn’t related to their deeds it’s sacred because they are human.
The life they took was also sacred, and they violated that sanctity through murder. Executing them is a balancing of the scales. It's not about revenge, or anger or hatred, it's about what is just.
It's entirely Christian to reject one's own claims to justice, to forgive someone who has stolen from you, to deny that they have stolen by stating that you give what they took freely. Notably, the victims of murder cannot actually do this, and it is at least highly questionable whether others can meaningfully do it on their behalf. It is not Christian to attempt to overthrow the entire concept of earthly justice, to try to enforce this sort of forgiveness on those unwilling or unable to offer it freely.
The whole point of justice, of laws, is that it is supposed to be impartially and uniformly enforced. The whole point of Christianity is that it is a free choice by the individual, an acceptance of a gift freely offered. The two have a lot less to do with each other than people imagine.
Why work a 9-to-5 when you could be peddling dope?
Crooks and gangbangers aren't trying to build stable, productive lives. They aren't aiming for the same win condition, so they aren't playing by the same rules. If one does not share their goals, some of their tactics are useless or actively counterproductive.
I think a more productive framing would be to examine what level of disobedience people are willing and able to enact. "Always cooperate", always work within the system, is clearly a bad strategy in an adverse environment. The question is how to strike a balance between defending oneself against adverse action, and compromising actual goals. Currently, it's clear that people generally lean way too hard toward compliance at all costs, with avoiding all risk, and that their risk-aversion makes them easy to manipulate. Unfortunately, figuring out what level of risk is acceptable is actually very difficult to do well, and the consequences are significant. It's not obvious to me that individual action is a solution here, since a lot of the threats are actively being coordinated at the level of overall society. Taking drug-dealer risks for CCW-benefits is a pretty questionable idea. On the other hand, the capacity to resist must be cultivated, and that means accepting some non-zero level of risk.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
The very point of being a Christian is you give up earthly justice.
Is the point of being a Christian that you give up material wealth, because your treasure is in heaven, and therefore no true Christian should have a home or a bank account?
No. Having money isn't un-Christian, loving money is un-Christian. Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell all he had, give to the poor, and to follow him. He did not tell Zacchaeus to do the same, and viewed Zacchaeus making ample restitution to those he had wronged as sufficient. Annanias and Saphira were not struck down for not giving all they owned, they were struck down for lying about what they had given. Whether to sell the land was their choice, and whether to give some or all of the money was likewise a free choice, not a moral imperative.
Christians can have jobs and draw paychecks for working them. They can choose how to spend the money they earn. What they shouldn't do is treat the money as an end to itself, or think that it is there to gratify their desires. They should feed themselves, clothe themselves, house themselves to the extent that they are able, engaging in honest work and careful use of their resources to satisfy their own needs, and to build the capacity to help those around them who are in need. They should always be willing and able to walk away from their material wealth if that is what is necessary, but it is not always or even often necessary. What Christians should do with money is not reducible to a hard and fast rule, any more than their other moral commitments. Obviously they should not steal or cheat, and they should tithe, but these rules are not sufficient to capture the deeper reality of what it means to steward value in service of God.
Likewise with Justice, and law generally, and military force and a great many other things: these are part of the world that Christians are commanded to live in and to interact with, and simply abdicating all involvement and responsibility is not a general solution to the problem. There does not, in fact, appear to be a general solution to these problems, only imperfect tradeoffs. Christians should do their best to trade well, not foolishly squander what they have been given. There are circumstances when mercy is squandering what you have been given, and there are circumstances where mercy is imperative, and it is not possible for limited, flawed humans to always make the right call. All we can do is use what wisdom we have to try our best.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
uh? Of course there is a meaningful distinction: My version is factually accurate, and your version is not. The Nazi utopia is defined as one which only Aryans survive, or at least that non-Aryans are subservient. The Marxist utopia of a perfect equal and conflict-free society is not defined as one in which only one group of people exist, nor one in which one group oppresses the other.
Marx and his disciples absolutely believed that there was a future where only one group of people existed. This group had specific, definable characteristics, and people who lacked these characteristics were to be eliminated by various means, one the major means being mass murder.
Marxists had "class" enemies, and Nazis had "race" enemies. Class and Race are circles drawn around different sets of immutable characteristics, but they are both circles drawn around sets of immutable characteristics, and for people inside the circle, there was no room in the dogma for "getting on board". Who they were made them a target for murder. I am arguing that it is the drawing of such circles that is objectionable, not which specific features these circles capture. This is the essential nature of what both groups did, and this is why what makes them the same is vastly more important than what made them different.
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, p. 2[23]
And sure, Lenin walks it back a bit, in that specific instance, for reasons of perceived practicality:
Political distrust means we must not put non-Soviet people in politically responsible posts. It means the Cheka must keep a sharp eye on members of classes, sections or groups that have leanings towards the white guards. (Though, incidentally, one need not go to the same absurd lengths as Comrade Latsis, one of our finest, tried and tested Communists, did in his Kazan magazine, Krasny Terror. He wanted to say that Red terror meant the forcible suppression of exploiters who attempted to restore their rule, but instead, he put it this way [on page 2 of the first issue of his magazine]: “Don't search [!!?] the records for evidence of whether his revolt against the Soviet was an armed or only a verbal one”) ... Political distrust of the members of a bourgeois apparatus is legitimate and essential. But to refuse to use them in administration and construction would be the height of folly, fraught with untold harm to communism.
— Lenin, A Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems (1918–1919)[24]
...But Latsis' description is more accurate to how the Bolsheviks, including Lenin himself actually operated. They really did kill people en masse for their real or imagined immutable characteristics, from the beginning and for decades after. Lenin and Trotsky and the other "good" Bolsheviks killed millions, and then Stalin killed millions more, including a lot of his former allies. It worked the same way in Cambodia. I'm not entirely sure whether Mao went lighter on the direct killing and made up for it with incompetence and indifference, or if the incompetence and indifference just swamp the still-considerable killing, but it's probably some combination of the two.
As noted by Weitz, one central assumption of the Marxist utopian project was the malleability of persons...
Marx himself does not appear to believe that conversion was possible for class enemies. He did not even believe that true conversion was possible for class friends. He believed that the successful revolution would shape from birth new people, better people, who would inherit a better world once the current, intractably-flawed revolutionaries died off. Meanwhile, class enemies would never be capable of cooperating or conforming to the regime, and would have to be ruthlessly suppressed, eliminated, and at best allowed to quietly die off before that new world could be created.
there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
—Marx
...And of course the model he drew from was the French Revolution, which itself was predicated on mass murder. And of course, this is how his followers understood his theories, and this is how they implemented them. They actually did kill people indiscriminately, in massive numbers, due to immutable or poorly-defined characteristics.
But, at this point, you are refuting your initial claim.
Sorry, different poster, and I do indeed refute that claim. The differences between them are not significant, there is no fig leaf. They are the same problem, expressing itself in the same way, and the differences are irrelevant surface detail.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
I don’t disagree entirely but we don’t get to take a life if we have another option.
There is always another option. No action is ever truly forced. We can take a life if it is right to do so, and if there doesn't seem to be a better way to actually handle the problem. Putting murderers in prison isn't actually a solution, as evidenced by all the murder in prison, and the murder committed by people released from prison, or escaped from prison. It's all tradeoffs made with imperfect information, there is no obvious right answer. Executing a person for murder or for other heinous crimes is not objectionable under a Christian framework; executions for lawbreaking were ordered by God himself. What execution doesn't do is clearly fulfill Christian obligations; if our society abolishes execution completely, that might well be morally acceptable to Christians, just as abolishing slavery was. Christianity demands neither.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
In that scene it's not as if they're not prepared to enforce compliance and totally bluffing, they're just not prepared to enforce compliance on Marlo Stanfield. If Bubbles tried to steal something the security guard would have stopped him without a second thought.
I guess it comes down to what it means to be a "bluff". You say that if Bubbles tried to steal something the guard would stop him, but would Bubbles actually try to steal something? Bubbles isn't Marlo, and he doesn't have the power or the understanding of that power that Marlo has.
The guard has no gun, only a radio, and no one he radios is going to do anything worth mentioning about Marlo's theft of two lollipops. Marlo would not do this in front of an actual cop, because the actual cop has an actual gun and an actual police force behind him. An actual cop can prosecute a fight, his organization will back him, and Marlo will definately lose. The guard is not a cop, only pretending to be one, hoping the actual power of the cops rubs off on him vicariously through a bit of social mimicry. He's hoping he has authority because he looks like authority, without actually backing it up. He's bluffing.
The system that no longer exists isn't state and federal law, it's the norm that people outside "the game", especially "citizens" are to be left alone and not really interfered with.
Yes, exactly, and it's the same with real-world issues as well. State and federal law, like the Constitution, are coordination mechanisms. Their goal is to create a norm of cooperation between all the members of society. That norm is where all the benefits come from, and it can be weakened or destroyed without those mechanisms changing in the slightest way. Breakdown of norms is a social problem, and systemic solutions might be necessary to solve them, they are by no means sufficient. If your counterparties aren't actually looking to cooperate, cooperation isn't on the table.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
The consequences for a non-habitual-criminal being non-compliant in ways the state cares about are very high, and the state capacity to find and punish them is also very high.
It's not clear to me that this is actually true. It is very clear that Blue Tribe and the authorities do everything in their power to make it appear to be true, but actual prosecutions seem quite rare.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
The linked scene is Michael Collins arguing to a crowd that they need to take collective action. They do, fighting back against the Constables who attack Collins and the crowd. Collins himself fights, before being hustled to safety by two others.
They are each acting individually, and Collins' argument is a specific appeal to individual action: "if they shoot me, which specific one of you will step up to take my place?" But that individual action is welded into a common purpose, a common cause, collective action, collective identity. And this process, by which individuals individually choose to act in concert, is the entire basis for his plan. What makes his victory possible is the fact that not only one person will step up to replace him, but many and more.
Coordination defeats individual action. People are stronger together than they are apart. "Irish Democracy" required the Irish, and wasn't going to happen without them. Individuals can attempt something similar, but the potential payoffs are much different. That doesn't make pure individualism a bad idea, but it does make coordination much stronger for a variety of reasons.
In the same way, POWs attempt to form organization with their fellow prisoners, and their captors often make every effort to keep them isolated from each other. the captors would much rather coordinate against individuals than against a group; the prisoners would rather compete group vs group than individual vs group.
I'm not claiming collective action is a general solution, only that individual action isn't either. There are no general solutions. It's a hard problem all the way around.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Only in the sense that all differences between groups would be erased, so that what once was several groups is ultimately one. Very different from the Nazi vision.
The Marxist intent was that "differences between groups" was to be eliminated by eliminating several of the different groups, through intentional mass-murder of some of those groups, and ruthless oppression of others. That does not seem very different from the Nazis. In fact, it seems like an exact match to the generalization of the Nazi problem: it's a bad idea to try to make a better world by killing all the "bad people".
People treat them differently because they sympathize with the way the Marxists picked their victims, or because sympathizers lied to them about the reality of what actually happened. The latter is obviously less objectionable than the former, but neither is to be admired.
Ok, but then I am not sure if we are disagreeing because I dont know what your position is re OP's claim that Nazism's nationalist bent is what explains the differential response thereto.
I disagree with it. It's not the nationalist bent that does it. People treat communists and nazis differently because we sent free tanks, guns and gasoline to Communists, and firebombed nazi cities. We did those things because Communists had significant penetration into our social and political systems, and Nazis did not. The details of the ideologies are largely irrelevant.
I agree with your overall characterization. To be clear my objection "the constitution is dead" rhetoric has always been that something must have actually been alive at some point in order to be "dead".
A fair point. There was a big post I've tried to write a couple times about exactly this, how the partisan politics of my youth deeply ingrained an idea that the system actually ran things, that the key powered the car. And this is in fact how I grew up thinking about the constitution, as though the paper and ink had a life of their own, as though the social system that emerged from them was as dependable as gravity. I think a lot of people still think of it that way.
Thinking about it, though, wasn't that the point? Weren't the Constitution's authors attempting to create an instinctive, unquestioned norm, something where compliance didn't have to be enforced on a case-by-case basis, but could simply be assumed? My church seems "alive" to me, because we don't argue about whether God exists, whether Jesus died for us, or whether our goal is to serve him. If those were live issues within my church, if the preacher and the elders considered them live issues of debate, I'd be looking for a new church, because I would consider my current one to be "dead". Ideally, wouldn't it be the same for the constitution?
They're still trying to model the world in terms of systems of inductive logic, they're still trying frame things in terms of where they sit in the intersectional stack, they still have not grasped the true implications of the "replication crisis" and apparent fact that the bulk of academic inputs are garbage, they still buy into obvious nonsense like "elite theory" and "external loci of control".
This was me, for a long, long time, as you no doubt noticed, and the temptation is still there.
There's a deeper thread I wish I had more time to follow; briefly, the systems, when they work, make things a lot easier for everyone involved. Certainly that's how it was for me. I didn't want to accept that there wasn't a systemic answer available, because non-systemic answers seem riskier and scarier than systemic ones. Probably it's no more complicated than the difficulty of distinguishing prudence from cowardice; the latter will always frame itself as the former, one can always say that that any risk is too great.
A scene from one of my favorite films:
Turkish : Tommy, why is your skin leaking?
Tommy : I'm a little worried actually, Turkish.
Turkish : Worried about what?
Tommy : What happens if the gypsy knocks the other man out? I mean, he's done it before ain't he?
Turkish : We get murdered before we leave the building, and I imagine we get fed to the pigs.
Tommy : Well I'm glad to see you're climbing the walls in fucking anxiety. Pardon my cynicism, but I don't exactly trust the pikey.
Turkish : Don't think I haven't thunk about that one, Tommy. It's his mum's funeral tonight. God bless her. You know those gypsies like a drink at a wake. I'm not worried about whether Mickey knocks the other man out. I'm worried about whether Mickey makes it to the fourth fucking round.
Tommy : What if he doesn't make it to the fourth round?
Turkish : We get murdered before we leave the building, and I imagine we get fed to the pigs.
Tommy : So why are you so calm? ...I said...
Turkish : I heard what you said, Tommy! It's not as though we've got a choice, now, is it? You show me how to control a wild fucking gypsy, and I'll show you how to control an unhinged, pig-feeding gangster.
Tommy wants a plan. He wants a systemic answer that assures him everything is going to be fine, that risk is minimal. He wants lines to color inside and the assurance that as long as he does his part, everything will work out. A lot of people are like Tommy. I certainly was, and still am to at least some extent. Freedom is scary. You changed my mind pretty significantly by having a similar conversation once upon a time, but for this reality to sink in one has to be willing to accept the possibility of considerable losses. There's another effort-post I've been considering, looking at rationalist and proto-rationalist fiction, stuff like HPMOR and Ender's Game, and the way certain Enlightenment assumptions bleed through every part of the narrative: there's a right answer, there's a winning move to find if you're clever enough, there's always a way out, a way to fix things, a way to get what you want. The same idea comes through in a lot of Scott's and Yudkowski's writings. They look at the world and imagine there's a system to manipulate, a right answer to parrot back, a solution. Hence Utilitarianism's attempts to "solve" morality like a math problem, and all the absurdities and atrocities that result. My experience is that this idea is very attractive, and it dies very hard.
Well, that is certainly a unique take on the history of the Twentieth Century, I will give you that.
Maybe for people who haven't actually read the historical record, which I'll grant is most people.
[EDIT] - Eh, a bit more effort. Duranty and the social networks that allowed him to thrive, for one example.
coordination and cooperation and a recognition of common identity, a "you and I together", I think? Or is this what makes them a "collection"? One can act as an individual without these, and should, but they make one's individual action a lot more effective. I'll freely admit that people, myself unfortunately included, tend to treat these things as though they are necessary for individual action, when they absolutely are not, or that they replace individual action, which they absolutely do not.
I got the images by searching Pinterest for "rocket launch". Have you tried the generate-from-sketch options? Seems like it'd be easier to composite together an image, and then have the AI chew it over to unify the style... I really need to play with SD more.
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