FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
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
5mo ago
But why is that the option?
Because virtue signaling works.
From a manager's POV, they can either get staff to spend X hours working on getting progressive acceptance or X hours on making the actual customers want the game more.
Pretty sure my boss thinks the customers are all progressive as well, and he knows the middlemen between us and those customers are progressive. It's cheap advertising.
For example thinking of ways of making the game more fun or more mesmerizing, the story more compelling, etc.
Diminishing returns. We've already spent between hundreds and thousands of hours on those objectives; meanwhile, we'd spent zero hours shilling for this particular progressive cause.
Wouldn't a brainstorming session 'give me the most controversial idea that you think could create press / make more people interested in the game you can think of' be just as valuable if not more?
That's actually probably a pretty good idea, but it's clearly the sort of idea a bad person would come up with. You don't want to be a bad person, do you? People don't like bad people.
Perhaps having a character say dirty, sexist or racist jokes could make the game more interesting.
"Every day, there is a Main Character of twitter. Your goal is not to be this person." I mean, it's definately possible to succeed that way, but it's an extremely high-risk/medium-reward sort of strategy.
I can't imagine what kind of pressure the people working there are working under, being creative within extremely narrow guidelines.
It's generally not so bad, but it certainly has its moments. Diverse characters make pretty much everything harder, for approximately zero actual benefit. A lot of character design is exaggeration and cartooning; when you apply exaggeration and cartooning to a POC character, you enter a minefield, since anything resembling a stereotype has to be avoided. You can make a white character look dumb as a post, or criminal, or malicious, or lazy; doing these with a black character is capital-P Problematic. there's workarounds to the problem, which of course inflict their own forms of damage. Our game has male and female characters of various non-human races. The best way to make non-human female characters look female is with female signifiers, which are now understood to be sexist. and on, and on, and on. We go a couple months without having to deal with this horseshit, and then it pops up again, and you grit your teeth and do as your told until it goes away again. We had a no-shit full-bore SJW on the team injecting this stuff non-stop for a couple months, but they got let go when it turned out they didn't do any of the actual work they'd been hired to do, and then we got to crunch for a couple weeks straight to get done what they'd been supposedly working on for the last six months. After they were gone, I tentatively floated reversing some of the progressive bullshit changes to the art they'd demanded, and got immediately shot down. Haven't made that mistake since.
So it goes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I don't need to ask why. I've sat through a couple impromptu diversity lectures over the years. Both the indy space and Triple-A are completely dominated by progressive voices. The entire gaming press ecosystem is rabidly progressive. Influencers are more balanced, but everyone the boss knows and everyone the boss respects, cares about, and wants to impress are all on one side. You want to show your game at PAX, you want buzz, you want people cheering you on and giving you good press, well, there's a set of beliefs and behaviors that get you that, and there's another set of beliefs and behaviors that definately will not.
I could give more examples, but I'll leave it there for OPSEC purposes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
It's nice to see things tied up at last, but it seems to me the general pattern was well-established more or less at the time and we've just watched it play out. Every high-profile incident where people tried to defend themselves from rioters resulted in significant effort being made by the state to punish them as harshly as possible. These prosecutions clearly had nothing at all to do with the facts at hand, and everything to do with the demands of the mob.
Rittenhouse was subjected to a malicious murder prosecution in the face of multiple-angle video evidence showing his attempts to retreat from his attackers. His attackers were not charged in any way, despite solid evidence that they had broken the law.
The McCloskeys were charged with felonies for defending their home from a criminal mob, but managed to mostly defend themselves from the worst consequences.
Gardner was hounded to suicide with the able assistance of his local and state governments.
Bacca pleads guilty and will go to prison.
Daniel Perry has been sentenced to 25 years, but might get a pardon.
On the other side:
The CHAZ gunmen were allowed to slip away unmolested after one murder and an unknown number of attempted murders, with the implicit cooperation of local government.
Reinoehl committed cold-blooded murder, on camera, which was then publicly celebrated by his allies, again on camera. He died shortly after in a shootout with federal law enforcement, which the press spent some time spinning conspiracy theories about.
Dolloff shot a man to death for, at most, punching and pepper-spraying him, and witnesses were uncertain even of that much. The authorities declined to prosecute him, instead punishing his employers while he walked free.
...There's more, but I have better things to do this morning.
Some takeaways:
Masks work. Anonymity works. Not just for the basic reasons of making a positive ID harder, but because it makes every effort to cover for you by your allies downstream in the press, the activist scene and in government easier as well. It widens every subsequent zone of plausible deniability, lends credibility to every argument about why there's just nothing to be done about your exercise of coordinated political violence.
Institutional support is crucial for control of the streets, and thus the public. What these people did can't be done without a cooperative press and local government, and especially a firm handle on the police. Again, plausible deniability is key.
Manipulation of procedural outcomes is the name of the game, surfing that line between clearly communicating that you are above the law, and exposing yourself to real backlash and severe consequences. Making it clear that your side will tend to walk even when you murder, while the other side will be prosecuted even for defending themselves from you is an integral part of the strategy. Remember, even if it takes a while, even if the hit-rate is not 100%, your opponents are risk-averse and have a whole lot to lose, so it doesn't take much to shift the calculus. You or your allies need to control interpretation and implementation of the procedures. All else flows from that point.
For Reds specifically:
Don't live among Blues. Armed self-defense, in the lawful sense, assumes an impartial legal structure. That is not a supportable assumption anywhere Blues control. It doesn't matter what the laws say; they will interpret, ignore and adjudicate as necessary to secure their desired outcomes. If you cross them, they will find a way to fuck you. Not every time, but often enough that it's not worth the risk.
Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.
"Legitimately" according to who? I am sure that no matter how Trump is prevented from taking office, it will be entirely legitimate according to the New York Times and Blue Tribe generally. There will definately be wild accusations of election fraud. I'm going to wager that many of those accusations will be provably false, and none of them will be provably true. @ymeskhout will definately continue his series of impeccably accurate posts documenting these arguments and their lack of validity, as he should.
But it seems to me that the election is already illegitimate, and it will simply grow more illegitimate as this batch of escalations accumulate and ripen in the public consciousness. The gamesmanship has swamped any legitimacy the process might have had, and that trend will accelerate over time as the escalation spiral evolves.
What fraction of an electoral college vote is this novel legal theory worth, in practical terms? What fraction was it worth for the Press to systematically lie about the Hunter Biden Laptop story? What percentage was it worth for the FBI to assist in coordinating that lie? For the FBI to illegally spy on a presidential candidate? For Blue Tribe and the Democratic party to actively encourage and provide cover for large-scale, organized political violence? And so on, and on, ad nauseum.
Nor is there a remedy for these breaches, and the only available response is to find an escalation of your own. There is no agreement between the sides on what the rules actually are, no unified scale to measure escalations objectively. There will never be an agreement that what the other side did was justified by one's own side going too far; it's Russell Conjugations all the way down. Even if there were, the other side would simply agree and then add another escalation for good measure. When Red Tribe starts bombing things and murdering judges, no Blue is going to point to Ayers and Davis and say "well shucks, you got us there". It's going to be different, because it's always different when the outgroup does it. And likewise for Red Tribe, of course.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
This is quite schizo.
China is definately not sending agents as illegal immigrants to join the military and conquer the US via military coup. That plan is pants-on-head retarded.
I was initially going to say that if they aren't sending agents in as illegal immigrants for general sabotage/espionage work, they aren't trying, but honestly why send them over the border when they can simply immigrate legally through Academia or employment with various major corporations? The illegal route might be a better fit for the more hands-on side of things, I suppose, but the idea of getting enough illegals across the border and into the army to compromise the actual army is a complete non-starter.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
I don't like Planned Parenthood even a little. Anyone on the right celebrating this should understand that just as it did not start here, it absolutely will not stop here. The other side is going to look for a way to escalate until they find one, and then they're going to use it, likely without mercy. Why wouldn't they? There's no common understanding of rules being pursued here. The entire point of a legal system is to settle disputes. This is not a legal fight, but a war by other means, and those means remain fluid, as they have been since 2014. Reds accepted legal outcomes as binding because they were making a mistake. Realizing that acceptance of legal outcomes was a mistake, a weakness, does not stop people from abusing the courts, but rather incentivizes greater abuses while those courts retain some shred of validity; get what you can and the devil take the hindmost.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
Increasingly, it appears that the establishment also dislikes second parties.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Every time we made a piece of art that didn't have POC/gender balance in it, our boss told us it wasn't diverse enough and we had to remake it to be more diverse. This complaint never was made for anything involving villains. It took a dozen iterations before we started internally discussing where to put the diversity in a given image during the planning stage, and we still frequently are told that the images aren't diverse enough and we need to add more. Any time we do an early mockup with stock images that aren't themselves diverse, we're reminded that the finished version has to be diverse. I'm indy; the boss tells us directly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Would it be fair to say that your core assumption here is that the Civil War was a standard-deviation or three out from the optimal solution-space?
You describe Brown's results in negative terms: he sidelined other forms of resistance, exacerbated existing tensions, didn't resolve anything, divided rather than unified. Only, it seems to me that what he actually did was polarize the situation: he made it abundantly clear that the existing conditions could not last, and that something had to be done one way or the other. That unified each side within itself, even if it grew less united across the aisle.
Five years from his execution, Slavery in America was done. Not winding down, not slowly declining, not coming to a middle, not hotly contested, but ended decisively and permanently for so long as the society he operated within might survive. The cost was high, but it could be and in fact was paid. It seems hard to imagine that he himself would not see this as a near-optimal outcome, and many of his contemporaries seemed to see it likewise.
“But when John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared. There was an end to the argument. The time for compromises was gone, and to the armed hosts of freedom, standing above the chasm of a broken Union, was committed the decision of the sword. The South at once staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing in that, she drew the sword of rebellion, and thus made her own, and not John Brown’s, the lost cause.”
- Fredrick Douglas
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
If I tell someone shooting heroin that it's killing them and they need to stop, they can decide that actually I just hate them, and if they insist on doing so I certainly can't stop them. At a scale of the entire society, they're going to find no shortage of people who actually do hate heroin-shooters to conflate me with. That doesn't make their logic any less garbage.
Your insistence that Christians trying to warn non-believers away from Hell amounts to hatred and hostility seems nonsensical. Christians positing the existence of Hell neither breaks your leg nor picks your pocket, any more than your claiming our God and Heaven does not exist. To the extent that Christianity has been used to implement oppressive authoritarian norms in the past, so has literally every other ideology that has ever existed; where Christianity stands out is the number of states where it has played a significant role in allowing actual liberty, something secular humanism has a considerably worse record on.
You're free to despise Christians if that's your thing. Not liking people is legal. You're likewise free to coordinate meanness against them for believing things you disapprove of, since no system of law or custom will ever prevent such behavior. Just be clear-headed about the likely consequences of forcing several dozen million people to choose between peaceful coexistence or their faith.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.
It's good skills practice for everyone involved, and unlike many "life-saving" expenditures, if these people are saved they have a very high likelihood of going on to live productive lives that are a net-benefit to those around them.
I've increasingly become convinced that the underlying principles of the motte aren't working, or aren't true.
...From something I wrote several years ago and never got finished enough to post:
Charity is the benefit of the doubt. All charity comes down to some approximation of the following proposition: "I think you might be a bad person, but it's possible that I'm mistaken. I'll hedge my bets, and not treat you like a bad person if there's another option until I'm extremely certain."
Hedging is the technique of sacrificing scarce resources to offset risk, and the sacrifice generally involves a number of irreducible inefficiencies. The greater the risk, whether in probability or severity, the more sense it makes to offset that risk with a hedge. As risk declines in probability and severity, the inefficiencies involved in hedging eventually make it a net loss. With Charity, we're hedging against the risk of embracing conflict when productive cooperation was possible if we just worked at it a bit harder. The more uncertainty we have about whether some act is being taken in bad faith or not, and the lower the apparent severity of being wrong, the easier it is to treat them with charity, to extend them the benefit of the doubt.
All of this is just groundwork to hammer out a simple point: Charity is not free. It costs scarce resources, and its cost fluctuates according to your supply of doubt. The more certain you are, the less benefit of the doubt you can supply, and the more expensive charity grows. The less certain you are of bad intentions and serious consequences, the cheaper charity is.
Uncertainty exists in the absence of information and evidence. As evidence and information accumulate, uncertainty diminishes, and charity grows increasingly expensive. It costs you in terms of stress, attention, time, frustration. And of course at the tails, poorly-chosen charity can cost you your career, your friends, your sanity and if you're extremely unlucky your life.
Back in the early 2000s, when I was all hopped up on Blue Tribe 9/11 conspiracies, there was a idea kicking around my circles called "Peak Oil". The idea was that oil takes millions of years to make via geological processes, our society depended on it to function, we had used up most of it, and the price of oil was only going to rise from here on till it grew too expensive and society ground to a halt.
Of course, that never happened. Some brilliant engineer invented fracking, and political winds shifted, and here we are still driving cars and pumping cheap gas. Still, the logic seems sound, doesn't it?
Charity takes a long time to form, possibly on the order of generations. Our society depends on it to function. We have used up most of it, and there does not appear to be a way to manufacture more on short notice. Further, technology is making this problem a lot worse, not better, and it is difficult to imagine the social equivalent of fracking. Charity is expensive, and when people cannot afford it any more, society will grind to a halt.
Back in 2015, arguing with people who disagreed with you was a wonderful thing. The ideas they were pushing might seem strange, bizarre or maybe even harmful, but they were also very new and their outcomes and consequences were very much in doubt. There were still a great many uncertainties, hypotheticals, open questions about how things would play out. These uncertainties made charity relatively cheap, and discussion flourished.
It isn't 2015 any more. We've had seven years of incidents, arguments, and happenings to test our predictions and models. We've had seven years of data to examine. We've gotten to see long-term outcomes for a variety of issues. As events stack up, conversation becomes less and less useful. There was a point to arguing about whether Eich's firing was a good idea or not, whether it was a trend or not. By Damore, wherever you fell on the issue, you probably weren't going to change your mind. By Jeong, there was little left to discuss, and the positions people take largely serve only to disprove what few charitable models remain, or to run up the confirmations for sport[...]
[...]In this environment, given a reasonably stable userbase, Charity drops asymptotically to zero. It's never gone completely, but there's not enough to do what we need, and there's a little less every day, and what there is is a little more expensive, requires a little more effort, and the next day a little more care, and more, and yet more. People start rationing their charity. They start hoarding. The community stutters, chokes and seizes. No one wants this to happen! They want the conversations to keep going! They get angry at people for not being charitable enough, and demand more effort. They get angry at people for growing more certain, less open. But what else is evidence for, if not to lead to conclusions? What is the point of conversation, if not to move from less knowledge to more knowledge? Why ask questions if you don't want answers?
Still, it isn't as it was when we knew less and laughed more, and we miss what we once had. And so we try to adjust things, we try to put in more effort, we change rules and adapt approaches. And the evidence continues to accumulate, three thousand comments and maybe two or three hundred headlines and articles and studies a week, steadily, monotonously burning the charity away, belching out whatever soot is generated by burning the milk of human kindness. No one wants it to be that way. No one wants the thing we love to be its own annihilation. But it is that way, and it will be no other.
I don't think people are going to discover a way to frack charity. On the other hand, maybe it helps some to realize that the problem isn't just other people being awful, that the problem really is, lord help me, systemic, an emergent property of the world we're stuck living in rather than a choice people are making.
Sadly, the above is probably just more of the sort of depressive worldview that you're objecting to. Faith was the only exit from this dead-end that I could find; so long as the Rationalist tendency to empirical calculation is followed, fatalism seems inevitable. To escape the trap, it is necessary to defy the odds, to embrace axioms rather than evidence.
The argument that you should show empathy even to an enemy is noble, and I wish I had the generosity of spirit to really do it in this situation.
I'm not sure "empathy" is the right word, but if you do not recognize that you owe something to your enemies, some level of consideration, some measure of restraint, you are missing something humans cannot, in the long run, do without. I get that it's hard, but good things generally are. Being hard doesn't make them less necessary.
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Learning to see everyone around you as an avatar of their tribe is a big part of this process. It's not even untrue. It's probably even strongly predictive! That doesn't make it any less destructive in the long term.
I'm not in any position to judge your mind. On a bad day, I sweat tribal hatred, can taste it in my spit. It's still bad for us and for everyone around us.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Does this model explain why his rube-whispering was ineffective prior to 2016, leaving him a joke candidate in the two previous elections where he tried to run?
As an alternative, consider the idea that Trump is a product of policy starvation, not a generator of it. The previous system lost credibility because it was unable to deliver on its core promises and purposes. The credibility it lost flowed to the less-credible, more extreme fringes, Social Justice for the Blues and Trump for the Reds. Should they be discredited, it will continue to flow further to the fringes unless the center can find a way to present a credible alternative, which is not easy to do given the dysfunction and lack of trust.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Can you tell me what you're doing?
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Building a family. Having kids, building a good marriage with my wife, doing what I can to make us as secure in the future as possible.
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Helping to build up my extended family. Trying to build good relationships with my nieces and nephews. I am pretty well established as the cool uncle, and I'm trying to leverage that to have a significant and positive impact on their lives.
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Cementing myself into my community. For me, this mainly means church, and my friends from church.
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Building my relationship with God, so that I have something firm to stand on regardless of what else happens, and thus avoid madness.
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Beyond that, acquiring wealth, resources, tools. Learning skills, trying to improve the skills my career is built on.
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Beyond that, I've made a hobby of weapons development. My goal is to contribute to the general thrust laid out by Defense Distributed, to make gun control entirely impossible by developing methods for manufacturing effective weapons out of uncontrollable materials. This has worked well enough for me and for others that it has entirely shifted my view of the 2A debate from "we have to fight or they'll beat us" to "they have zero conception of how utterly fucked their entire project is." There's multiple entire branches of strategy people haven't even considered tapping yet, ripe for the picking, from stuff that's just immediately delightful for gun culture types to stuff that I don't talk about because I think doing so would be legitimately dangerous. The mainstream debate and the structures attempting to enforce the issues are so far out of touch with the realities of the situation that their ignorance is probably actively dangerous to our society's continued function.
Having a hobby on this end also exposes me to the activist element of the gun culture, which is doing very, very well for itself in a quite hostile environment. The level of contempt they inculcate for federal authorities and for the Blue machine generally is always heartening to see.
Can you explain how the motte has helped you do it?
The motte has, I think, helped me understand the Culture War, and perhaps more importantly, has helped me achieve a number of philosophical insights that have helped me better understand and accept the realities of life generally. These enable me to engage with the culture war with a great deal more equanimity than I used to possess. I am pretty sure I have a fair idea of where this is all going, which cuts out a lot of the worry and has allowed me to think through, precommit on, and make peace with some of the more bitter aspects during moments of calm. This is greatly preferable to attempting to do so in the heat of the moment.
There's more to say here, but it is very late, and I am very tired. Perhaps later.
Do you have any source re: rape in romance novels?
I would not defend the original claim without some considerable caveats, but my wife is a romance novel enjoyer, and the male love interests really, really do not practice affirmative consent, in a way that has heavy overlap with the definitional games that are commonly played, ie equivocating "sexual assault" with "rape", where the former covers "unwanted" touching, kissing etc. A lot of what happens would be grounds for criminal charges, not to speak of cancelation.
Eh.
There really ought to be some sort of large-scale survey, but romance novels have often seemed like a notable blind spot in the general discourse of feminism. It wouldn't surprise me if no one ever has bothered to look.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
If your culture can figure out a way to bridge gaps between different cultures, ethnicities, and groups, if you can truly make disparate peoples unite under one flag, one cause, one set of ideals, you can rule the world.
Sure. Not everyone wants to rule the world, though. The Swiss seem to have prioritized not ruling the world, and it worked really well for them. Why not be like the Swiss?
It's a major mistake to sneer at modern issues with immigration and say it's a doomed project when so much of our culture exists because of cultural plurality.
Like what, specifically?
It may be true that parts of our culture exist because of cultural plurality, but it's definately true that other parts only exist because of cultural homogeneity, and that in fact those parts fall into cacophonous incoherence the instant that homogeneity goes away. You know, little things like free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, our traditions of civil society generally, our systems of Justice, the principles of democracy itself... minor stuff really, compared to raw GDP and the welfare of the soulless, sociopathic distributed intelligence we call megacorporations, but one might be forgiven for holding a certain fond nostalgia for these minor relics of a bygone era.
People sneer because the multiculturalist message has been proven a lie over and over again for decades, and all the charity has been burned away. Neither you nor any other advocate of multiculturalism is willing to face the basic reality that your previous collective efforts have broken our societies in ways that cannot easily be fixed, and rather than apologize for this and sit quietly in the corner while we try to mitigate the damage, you just keep swinging the hammer. We point to disastrous result after disastrous result, and the response is an eye-roll and a "oh, you're bringing that up again, move on already".
Finally, we have America. I won't rehash this too much, as I think it's practically inarguable that America is a nation founded on the principle of immigration, religious freedom, and has levered it's ability to assimilate masses of immigrants to become the greatest nation in the history of the world.
Religious freedom is not a conceptual primitive, and the thing we apply the term to bears no resemblance to the naïve interpretation of the phrase. A more accurate title would be "freedom for religions we collectively don't consider too weird or awful", and it is only common assumptions born of cultural homogeneity that allow us to ignore the problematic edge cases enough to mistake it for a fully-generalizable value. "Freedom of religion" is a consequence of cultural homogeneity and peaceful conditions, not a creator of them.
America suffered considerable negative effects from previous waves of immigration, and repeatedly banned all immigration for lengthy periods of time on its road to the cultural successes you trumpet. Its ability to assimilate masses of immigrants pretty clearly no longer exists, given that its own people can't stand each other or find enough common ground for mutual long-term cooperation.
Social progress is the ongoing process of distilling the baby out of the bathwater. Separating good from evil, and adopting the good while negating and subverting the evil.
What evidence can you offer that you in particular or Social Progressivism generally has any fixed definition of "good" or "evil", "baby" or "bathwater"? If, as seems obvious to me, you have no such fixed definition, what do these statements even mean?
I'm not saying everything should be permitted now. Far from it.
Why not? How do we adjudicate which changes can be permitted now and which later?
"Which technological advancements will make pedophilia viable?"
You're reducing the problem to one of logistics. But of course, previous iterations of Social Progress, including the Trans issue that prompts this discussion, have demanded changes to values and social systems now, with logistical solutions promised in the indefinite future. Why should I believe that Social Progress will confine itself to thoroughly tested and engineered solutions when it has never done so before?
And this ignores the question of whether it really is just a question of logistics. What if they really, really want to fuck kids, for real, and are not satisfied with your simulacra? In that eventuality, on what basis do you deny their deeply-held, arguably-innate desires? What if they promise to only fuck the kids they clone and grow themselves?
How do you even know their desires are wrong? On what basis? Because "studies show"?
the costs... are too high... to explore...
Based on what, your opinion? People like me tell you that [$thing] has a cost too high to explore, and you laugh us off and explore the fuck out of it anyway, and then expect your own pronouncements to be treated as holy writ? Progressives disagreed with your opinion in the past, and actively encouraged and enabled pedophilia through the power of the state, because they knew better and "studies showed". Do you have some radical new insight that they somehow missed the last go-round?
...Rather than go point by point, let me try to draw this together: you talk as though there is an obvious good and evil, an obvious moral standard of correctness. You reject my claim to possess such a standard out of hand, and then you presume that your preferred standard is simply, obviously correct and needs no further justification. You do this in apparent blissful ignorance of the heaps of skulls previously generated by exactly the attitude you're currently displaying.
You frame the concepts of drift-of-form and drift-of-values in the most anodyne ways possible, ignoring all the obvious, glaring pitfalls, as though it's all about body-shape and inside we're of course all be true-blue (Berkeley progressive circa 2023) Americans. What if I decide I don't like having a conscience? What if I want to bake hatred of [$group] into myself on a genetic level, so I can pass it on to my kids? What if I want to self-modify to reverse my empathy so that observed injustice gives me orgasmic pleasure? What if the giant spider morph wants to eat children? What if trans surgery doesn't actually help and is actually mutilation? What if marketing heroin to kids is super-profitable and highly effective? What if the definition of human shifts, and some former persons don't make the cut (60 million abortions and counting, government-sponsored ads for Euthanasia as a cost-cutting measure)? What if it turns out some sector of the population is, like, really harshing your vibe, man?
What if, in short, the line between good and evil really does run through every human heart, and solving hatred and malice and greed and the urge to predation is not just a matter of engineering everybody into a sim-pod?
...And of course, all this is done, ignoring the fact that right now we don't have the tech, and you're arguing in favor of the people who push the "start" button anyway.
It's less about the gratification of desires and more about them not being frustrated as they unspool into acts of creation that give birth to intense and unique existences and experiences.
And the idea that these mostly-fictional or literally unimaginable desires might be frustrated weighs on your moral thinking, such that you're willing to assist in the radical, arguably-coercive restructuring of a society built and largely peopled by individuals who have no idea what the fuck you're on about, but are not interested in what you're selling? Like, Progressives collectively make this pitch, I and people like me say, "fuck no", and you try to push us into the hopper anyway? That about the size of it?
Have you considered that maybe you just have a fetish for novelty?
The live-and-let-live rugged individualism that I think you would like us to follow is not adaptive.
Say rather, it will not maximize material outcomes when you are the only one doing it.
On the other hand, nothing good will ever happen unless a critical mass of people do it.
Further, no critical mass is possible if everyone else is waiting for others to do it first.
Finally, there are things more important than maximized material outcomes.
The game-theoretic logic you are describing is doomed. People adopting this logic is why everything is going to shit. It cannot make things better, only worse. Self-immolation is not necessary, yet, but what will keep it at bay is for people to live by worthwhile axioms, rather than sinking to the level of their environment. That doesn't mean walking into the office and laying down truth-bombs until you're dragged bodily from the premises. It does mean figuring out what your principles are, and living by them, regardless of the outcome.
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?
Loop it back to Anheuser-Busch.
The reason Anheuser-Busch being boycotted is that they got dragged into the culture war. The reason they got dragged into the culture war is that an infinitesimally-small fraction of the population adopted extreme values, and have dedicated significant portions of their lives pursuing what would have, five or six years ago, been seen as an absurdly quixotic quest to fundamentally rewrite significant portions of our social reality, based on a manifestly self-contradictory ideology that turns self-mutilation into a sacrament.
These people are winning. They have taken massive strides toward achieving a goal that was not within a million miles of realistic. They have achieved a level of social dominance such that people who disagree with their ideology in public do so at the risk of their friendships and jobs, a level that frequently gives them social cover on behavior others would be crucified for.
This ad happened because extremists persevered in their extremism. Had they set reasonable goals, none of this would be happening.
The boycott, likewise, is a product of extremism. Taking 10% off the valuation of one of the larger corporations in the world is not a reasonable response to offense over a social media stunt. There's a million reasonable arguments for why this is silliness, and people should move on with their own business, touch grass, get a life, stop being mad at people on the internet. They could do that, A-B's stock would recover, the sun would rise tomorrow... and the thing that enraged them would continue to spread. While they act reasonably, extremists on the other side do not.
The boycott has not worked as well as it has because the people engaging in it have a reasonable goal. It is working because they have an unreasonable goal, an extreme goal: to punish a multinational corporation for siding with their enemies, to hurt that corporation as bad as they possibly can. Peer-to-peer, headless, truly grassroots activism is very hard in the best of circumstances, which this is not; any attempt at a boycott has to overcome a myriad of truly fearsome obstacles, and it is the unreasonableness of the goal that provides much of the motive energy. No one is going to switch their beer order in order to secure a "reasonable" goal, like a meaningless PR-speak non-apology on twitter. They are going to change their beer order because they think it might make a difference, and that means the outcome needs to be significant. The goal is not to get AB to apologize for what they did, but to ensure that neither A-B nor their competitors ever do it again.
There is every incentive to adopt an extreme goal: It motivates the grassroots, makes their hopes plausible, gives them a clear goal, an unambiguous goal, a distant goal to strive for, rather than prematurely declaring victory and giving up. Making the goal reasonable achieves little to nothing; there's no organization to preserve here, no resources to allocate, no credibility to be lost. A-B will probably not go bankrupt, but failing to make that happen will not cause a drop in fervor to the grassroots, since no one is actually expecting that to happen. It's not a "reasonable" goal, is it? On the other hand, if it did happen, that would be a win for the record books, and it certainly won't happen if they try for anything less. So why not swing for the fences?
John Brown didn't, in the end, try to organize a sewing circle. What he did was to make a serious attempt at personally murdering half a country. In doing so, he probably had a greater influence on achieving unrivaled supremacy for his values and on shaping the next two centuries than any other single human, and by a wide margin.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
If someone is famous enough to be an obvious example, then they're privileged and so don't count.
If someone isn't famous enough to be an obvious example, than no one's ever heard of them or knows to use them as an example, so they are ignored.
Gina Carrano is famous enough to have been heard of, but doesn't have billions. If it could be demonstrated that she suffered serious online harassment and that this harassment has been ignored, would that advance the conversation, or would the answer be that she's still too privileged?
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.
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