FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control. Then 9/11 happened, and he wasted trillions wandering our military through the middle east.
Now the debt is very bad, and people are once more raising the banner of Fiscal Responsibility. Is it in Republicans' interest to enforce "fiscal responsibility", and if so, how? If we were to seriously cut spending and raise taxes, as people claim the fiscal situation demands, this would almost certainly cost us the next election. In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule. The more likely case would be us expending our political power to ameliorate spending that our opponents increase to gain power for themselves, resulting in a much shakier economy and our complete political irrelevance.
Why not offer the Fiscal Responsibility mantel to the Democrats? The economy is very complicated after all, and they are at this point clearly the party of Expert Opinion: who better to determine and implement the hard-nosed measures necessary to right our economic vessel? When I was younger, the obvious rejoinder would have been that they would do a bad job of it and disaster would result, but it seems to me that we have not done all that much better, and disaster seems likely in any case. If disaster cannot be meaningfully avoided, then why expend limited resources demanded by a serious political conflict on an unfixable resource-sink of a problem? What's the actual plan, here?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Do you think that will stop Leftists from trying to crowdsource his assassination?
Elevatorgate was the Gamergate of the Atheist community. That either explains the whole thing perfectly or leaves you totally mystified, so I'll break it down a bit more.
You have a community. A woman in the community claims that the behavior of the men in the community is problematic, and what is needed is for the community to begin enforcing stringent new rules developed by social justice ideology. These rules contradict large portions of the community's existing norms, so people resist their imposition. The community rapidly polarizes into those who are on board with Social Justice ideology and those who are not, and social shunning and retaliation forces people to pick a side or have a side picked for them.
A short time later, the community that once existed is now a shell of its former self, if it exists at all.
I say "woman" above because the primary blast wave happened to coincide with a notable wave of Feminism, but this appears to be more or less an accident of history. It could be any identity group favored by social justice, and later often was, but in 2014-2015 it was mainly feminism driving the process. "Elevatorgate" was when the blastwave hit the Atheists. "Gamergate" was when it hit video game fans. "RequiresHate" was when it came for the fantasy/sci-fi authors community, "The Dickwolves Incident" for the Penny Arcade fandom; I don't know what they called it for the TTRPG designer forums. It came for most online communities sooner or later.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
aka the Ghost of Kiev, aka the Tiger of Jerusalem, aka the Sandy Hook Mastermind, aka The Candy Man
aka austere scholar Sammir al Hayyid...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
My interpretation: Suppose my eldest discovers a talent for drumming, and wants to learn to be a really good drummer. Should I be angry that their pursuit of drumming as a hobby means they aren't studying programming as hard, which means they won't be positioned to contribute to AI safety efforts when they're older?
People imagine that there's some Golden Path, and then measure their their current circumstances and choices against some idealized "best possible alternative". But the Golden Path is imaginary, and in fact there is much value to simply doing what one can where one is. Life's value comes from human connections, not from peak performance indicators. We have responsibilities to others and arguably to the world as a whole, but those responsibilities are sharply limited, and ignoring those limits is unreasonable. So, the latter interpretation, I think. It's not your job to save the world. It's your job to build a good life such that your corner of the world doesn't need saving, and it's your job to help others do the same where you can.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
But their point wasn't that exorcism numbers balance out mental illness numbers. Their point was that the formal part of a formal mental illness diagnosis is already strongly tribally coded, in the same way that a formal possession diagnosis is tribally coded. That is, therapy is integrated into Blue life in a way that it is not for Red life; it may be that Reds suffer mental illness at equivalent rates, but are simply vastly less likely to attempt to get treatment for it. Given the extremely questionable efficacy of therapy as a treatment, it's not obvious why what we see is not what we should expect to see, given an equivalent prevalence of mental illness: Crazy reds ignore it and cope as best they can, Crazy blues get "treatment" that largely does nothing, and then cope as best they can with roughly similar outcomes to the Reds.
This is not the way I would personally bet, as I think Blue Tribe has some legitimately fucked-up memes endemic in its environment that are in fact bad for the brain, but I would certainly not claim to be able to prove this at a population level. The replication crisis looms too large over the datasets, in my opinion.
But I was jumping off of "If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict (…)"
- "Mostly peaceful" protests involving large-scale property damage and arson, with the tacit approval of authorities and powerful institutions.
- Openly armed gangs shooting people in public treated as a "street festival," law enforcement declines to intervene in any meaningful way.
- Organized political violence, nationwide, with implicit backing from local authorities.
- Selective withdrawal of police protection from the politically-disfavored.
- Selective denial of access to the mechanisms of law: you don't get lawyers, you are not allowed to organize donations, etc.
- Wide and deep social approval and encouragement of high-value assassinations.
- Wide and deep social approval and encouragement for harassment of ordinary people of the wrong tribe, up to and including property damage and physical assault.
- Institutional protection and significant rewards given to actual terrorists and murderers.
- Tacit norms that if bad things happen to blues who find themselves in Red areas, it's their own fault for trespassing.
...and, most crucially, equivalent analogues to these things, where one-to-one replication is not possible. Those are the rules Blue Tribe has very evidently operated by for many, many years.
And it's worth noting that my claim is not that Red Tribe doing these things would destroy Blue Tribe. It is that Red Tribe doing these things would be a significant escalation, that Blue Tribe would absolutely engage in significant escalation in response, and the outcome of that escalation spiral would not be survivable for anything we would recognize as Blue Tribe now.
...But leaving that aside, you claim:
The Blue Tribe has better liars, better loophole-finders, and above all else a much better social shaming apparatus. It has a nonzero ability to affect Red-aligned normies' worldview, while Red think-tanks are pretty useless at shifting Blue-aligned normies' Overton window.
Over the last decade, it seems to me that I have seen all these advantages degrade significantly. Trust in the media is cratering. Major media organizations are conducting mass-layoffs. Culture-production centers are visibly withering. The knowledge-production apparatus is now under siege, and Red Tribe is orienting itself to make that siege lasting and merciless.
To me, it seems obvious that our recent political history has a pretty simple story: post-civil-war through the 1960s, we had a more or less unified country, with elite institutions operating as the thought and memory of the common man. In the role of thought and memory, it was easy to steer the large mass of people wherever the elites wished them to go, and because the elites and the commons were more or less in tune, they didn't want to steer them anywhere the common man didn't particularly want to go. In the 60s, the elites diverged in values sufficiently that they attempted steering that the common man did not readily accept, and the elites and commons began to diverge. The more that divergence grew, the less the common man trusted the elites to serve as thought and memory, and the more they did their thinking and remembering for themselves, the more evidence of divergence they retained. This process ignited a chain reaction that accelerated slowly and then all at once.
In the 90s, the phrase "mainstream media" marked you as a kook. By the 2000s, it marked you as an upstart. By the 2010s, it was a necessary descriptor to accurately describe the realities of the situation. By the 2020s, the term "legacy media" is legitimately appropriate. Trust in the ability of Elite institutions to provide thought and memory continues to degrade as common knowledge of their malformation continues to accumulate. The entire ecosystem is dying.
Which is a long way of saying, I like our odds.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Okay, here's my prediction: Of the ire Musk directs at the GOP, he focuses it primarily on the MAGA-reluctant or unreliable elements, which will likely be a benefit to the MAGA wing. Likewise, Trump does not use government power to retaliate against Musk, and in fact Musk's companies continue to enjoy government protection and largesse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.
Do you predict Trump will turn government power against Musk's commercial enterprises?
Do you predict Musk will campaign openly against Trump himself?
What if the other side bends the niceties, but is still constrained by them to a point? You're better off with a devil who's compelled to keep up a facade of lawfulness than a devil who's acting completely unconstrained.
Of course. Then the discussion advances to where we draw the line between "we can live with this" and "we cannot live with this", and it becomes very important to have a clear understanding of exactly what you're being asked to tolerate. Hence why @gattsuru and I have spent considerable effort over a long period of time tracking the facts on the ground, and why, more and more over time, the conversations here are predictable in advance. At some point in the relatively near future, the Supreme Court is going to hand another win to Blue Tribe, and then our elites will turn to Red Tribe and expect them to accept this win as decisive, and then will be shocked and horrified when Red Tribe fails to comply. How dare they! Don't they understand that we have norms? Well, no, "We" don't, because those norms died here, even if realization of their death doesn't actually dawn until Blue Tribe attempts to draw on them and so renders their absence legible via New York Times headlines.
To put it another way, taking the blows is usually a better strategy than declaring all-out war. The fact that the other guy is feeling free to pummel you is a pretty good sign that they're confident in their ability to win (or at least ensure MAD) if you did, foolishly, fight back with lethal force.
The other guy is deluded, and their delusion has been sustained by ironclad control of the knowledge-production apparatus that, it turns out, has just about rusted through. If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict, while our chances of surviving are excellent; thrive vs survive, no?
Blue Tribe's inability to understand this fact and thus leaning heavily on their supposed strength is one of the great risk factors dominating the present crisis.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
So I am pretty confident that he wouldn't end up like MAGA.
Could you elaborate on the specific features of MAGA that that you believe would preclude his approval?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
There are no tribes, just some really loud megaphones (currently mostly in the media) and a lot of people dancing to their tune. Change the megaphones and the people will follow, both red and blue.
It is evident that Blue Tribe had uncontested control of a supermajority of the "megaphone" for a very long time, and now this control is almost entirely gone. If there are only megaphones and people dancing to their tune, how did this occur?
At a minimum, your account of the political process is missing the concept of policy starvation.
I understand that values-coherence is not maintainable in the long term. The nation long divided will unite, the nation long-united will divide. All works of the human mind and hand decay eventually. The fact remains that some of them decay like stone, and some decay like nitroglycerin.
Let us suppose I rigorously observe the forms and niceties. The other side flouts them. This is regrettable, but mistakes and friction are inevitable.
I continue to observe the forms and niceties. The other side continues to flout them. This happens repeatably, to the point that I can predict in advance with excellent accuracy where and when the flouting will occur, the specific mechanisms used to organize, implement, and protect it. This flouting constantly costs me value, and the value it costs me is increasing rapidly over time.
Your claim seems to be that the correct response is to grin and bear it, to accept that justice will never be done and that this is okay because mumble mumble.
There are contexts in which this is an answer I, personally, am willing to accept: "Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me?"
This is not an answer that you should rely on to maintain our current, observably-shaky condition of peace and plenty in the long term. Such reliance is extremely foolish and extremely dangerous. I invite you to contemplate the political history of the phrase "no justice, no peace", and to examine its prominence in the political landscape. Examine the position of John Brown within our society and political mythos.
But they're couched as arguments over what is the minimum set of laws to allow diverse viewpoints and lifestyles. Even if in practice they can be the same, they are not presented as a naked "Ok, now that I have the backing of a majority you better adopt the lifestyle I want you to have or else..." I guess in a spirited debate it's possible to accuse the other side of doing it. But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.
But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.
You are perhaps more correct than you realize.
"The Country" has not defeated attempts to curtail religious liberties. Specific power blocs have defeated those attempts. To the extent that the Court has been involved, it has recognized political victories, not generated them. Absent those power blocs, neither the Constitution nor the Court will protect religious liberties for any significant length of time.
At every step from absolute liberty to absolute oppression, it is always possible to describe the negative space around current restrictions as "huge deference". Allowing Churches tax-exemption is Huge Deference. When that is removed, allowing them to hold meetings without the approval of an official censor will be Huge Deference. when that is removed, allowing them to meet at all will be huge deference. Not searching former congregants homes for banned materials. Allowing them to have children. Allowing them to live. All possible laws leave negative space, and any amount of negative space can always be framed as Huge Deference. It's not as though deference has a standard unit of measure, much less a volume equation.
[...]
There is no objective measure for "huge deference", "reasonable restrictions", "necessary protections", or any other such phrase. Such phrases are not pointing to a unbiased rule or a principled argument. They are a naked appeal to social consensus, and social consensus observably has had an unacceptably wide range of possible positions within our lifetimes, much less over the course of human history.
"The Constitution protects this" means nothing more than "this is safe so long as the right people approve of it". I observe that "what people approve of" is a fantastically malleable category; if we can go from the 2000s consensus on free expression to the consensus of Current Year, no principle is safe.
This level of victory really requires winning two (or really three, in this case) of the branches of government.
Under present conditions, this level of victory is what is known colloquially as a "coup-complete problem". We had ample demonstration of how Blue Tribe reacted to the president attempting to enforce what one might have imagined would be relatively uncontroversial laws like "don't burn down a federal courthouse" via armed federal agents during the BLM riots.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
"The ability to coerce others " is exactly how Blues have wielded the Constitution for more than half a century, and arguably much, much longer. There was a time when I and others like me were foolish enough to believe that this was acceptable, because this was a power that both tribes shared equally: we must respect the enforcement of their rights against our desires, because they must accept the enforcement of our rights against their desires.
We now have conclusive proof that they will never accept the enforcement of our rights against their desires. Claims to the contrary were lies.
For further elaboration, see above.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Envy is seeing what someone else has, hating them for it, and wanting to destroy it. It’s bringing someone low because you can’t stand seeing them up.
For values of "up" centered around standing on my neck, yes. Blues have insisted that the Constitution allows them to impose their values on me for my entire life. For most of my life, I accepted this because I believed our tribes were both operating within a concrete set of rules, and that honoring appeals to those rules by my opponents would ensure that my own appeals to those rules would likewise be honored. This belief is no longer supportable by the available evidence. All value expended in preserving "Constitutional norms" by my side was wasted for zero benefit. Blues will never accept Constitutional limits on their desires, and the Constitutional machine observably does not have sufficient horsepower to force them to do so.
My prescription remains the same as it has for some years now: a national divorce is the least-worst option available to us. Blues and Reds are not capable of living together, nor of sharing power with each other; attempts to do so will inevitably lead to constant escalation of conflict ending in large-scale fratricide. All attempts to arrest the escalation spiral to-date have failed, often at the cost of the social and political tools used in the attempt. Our institutions, structures and norms were designed to operate in an environment of values-coherence; that environment no longer exists, and it is the height of foolishness to fail to recognize this fact.
For those seeking additional context:
As I understand it, your complaint is that people are increasingly reluctant to accept the outcomes mandated by the rules. I doubt that you consider rule-following to be a terminal goal, so the argument would be that rule-following should produce superior outcomes, right?
Let's say we disagree strongly on how things should be, but we've agreed to follow a set of rules. A conflict arises. You follow the rules to the letter. I apply a novel strategy the rules didn't account for. I win. You have no grounds within the rules to contest my win, because I didn't break any of the rules as written. Changing the rules to account for this novel strategy is itself a conflict, and you're already behind on winning conflicts. Suppose this pattern repeats a number of times, and you now expect that you lose by attempting to play by the rules, and I win by playing outside them.
Let's say you believe this outcome is a problem. What are your options to resolve it? Attempting to improve the rules is not, I think, a workable strategy. The simple fact is that, contrary to Enlightenment ideology, there is no flawless ruleset available. You are never going to close all the loopholes. Rules are simplifications, abstractions, map and not territory. they have to be interpreted, adjudicated, enforced, and each of those steps involves human judgement and an irreducible loss of objectivity. Motivated agents will always find ways around a fixed ruleset, and the longer they stand, the more porous they become.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that respect for a ruleset requires either trust that the rules lack fragility, or trust in the other party not to abuse that fragility for their own advantage. Leaving aside questions of cause and responsibility, it seems obvious to me that neither side of the Culture War actually maintains confidence in either of these propositions. Under such conditions, why would one expect the rules to continue to operate in anything approaching a reliable fashion?
The value of the Constitution came when it acted as a hard limit on the scope and scale of political conflict. People understood it to put many tools of power off the table for most practical purposes, removing them from the normal push and pull of the political contest. When we vote, the Constitution means that we're voting on policy, not on our basic political rights. If we lose, we suffer the other side's policies for a few years, but our rights are inviolate.
Only, they aren't, and anyone who believes otherwise at this point is quite foolish indeed. Progressives and their Living Constitution ideology mean that all bets are off, and indeed we have seen abuses and usurpations committed and upheld that would have been unimaginable as little as ten years ago.
"They wouldn't do that...." Yes, they would, for any value of "that" that one cares to specify. Americans, Blue or Red, are human, and "that" is what humans reliably do. Presidential candidates have campaigned on the idea of taxing religions they don't like, and openly laughed at the idea of constitutional limits on their ambitions. The theoretical grounding is solid, and the underlying logic is simply correct. Where your "norms" are supposed to fit into this picture I really cannot say.
Turn back to your favorite histories, and contemplate the fact that for all our technological sophistication, nothing about our core nature as humans has ever really changed. Humans will inevitably human. We create systems to control and channel our nature, but what our hands make, they can unmake as well. The Constitution arose from a specific culture, and it worked due to a specific set of cultural norms and assumptions. That culture changed, the norms and assumptions no longer apply, and so the Constitution is dead. To the extent that common knowledge of its death has not proliferated, it serves mainly to fool people into making sacrifices that will not be reciprocated by those who caught on a little quicker.
I am not claiming that "both sides are unreasonable partisans, and they just need to be reasonable". I am claiming that our current system makes unreasonable partisanship the only viable policy option, and pointing out that anyone who expects anything other than an escalation spiral is lying to themselves. I am attempting to argue this from the outside view, ignoring any question of which side is right and which wrong, simply looking at the incentives. I obviously have my own opinion of who is right and who is wrong, and I've argued that further down in the thread. I am making this argument because it is common for moderates here to argue that the Culture War isn't that big a deal, that it's blown out of proportion, and that our existing systems are basically fine and simply need routine maintenance for everything to work out fine. I believe that such moderate arguments are dead wrong to the point of being actively dangerous, and I am attempting to communicate the basis for that conclusion across the tribal divide.
I have my own position, based on my own values and my own best interpretation of the facts. What I'm trying to show is that the larger pattern is obvious regardless of particular values or understandings of the facts: regardless of whether you side with Foster, Perry, neither or both, the situation is obviously unsustainable for our existing system. Rule of law requires common trust in the law and its application, and it, together with the rest of our sociopolitical systems, exist to constrain the scope and scale of civil conflict. These limiting systems have evidently failed, and those that remain are observably blowing out as the culture-war blast front washes over them in sequence.
As I see it, our current choice is between a near-total collapse in federal authority and semi-peaceful balkanization on the one hand, and large-scale fratricide on the other, with the latter being significantly more likely given our current social trajectory. I've been arguing this for a long time, this is just the latest data to illustrate the point.
None of this is new, surprising, or unexpected. I and others saw it coming a long way off. Some of us see what's coming next a long way off too. If you are a Blue living among Reds or a Red living among Blues, you should move.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
you (and others!) can manually give him upvotes, and hopefully he'll eventually get out of the filter. This would in fact be greatly appreciated.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Show Burke or Chesterton the system being destabilized, and I'm skeptical their conclusion would go the way you claim.
What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision
That is fundamentally not what is happening here. The question is not whether the Supreme court has made a good decision in this case. The question is whether the Supreme Court is capable of delivering a good decision in any case.
And to a fair degree of precision, the answer is, "No".
We have numerous examples of what an actual Supreme Court victory looks like. Desegregation enforced by Paratroopers dispersing peaceful protestors, including children, with fixed bayonets is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. Obergefell, which overnight fundamentally reshaped the law nationwide with strict enforcement and zero mercy for resistance or dissent is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. A Supreme Court victory means you get your way, and those who disagree are shit out of luck.
It turns out that Red Tribe is not allowed to have actual Supreme Court victories. Red tribe supreme court victories apply only where Red Tribe has secured unassailable political power; Blue Tribe strongholds are free to ignore the rulings at will, and it turns out that when they do so, the Court will back down rather than escalate. We have stress-tested the formal mechanisms of the Constitution and its adjudication to their limits and perhaps beyond, and they simply were not able to handle the load. That is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. The important thing is to realize that the formal account of the system is in fact a lie, and that the necessary power will not be found here and so must be found elsewhere.
The Constitution is a scam. Perhaps it can be a useful scam, to the extent that knowledge of its insubstantiality is not yet fully general; it is likely possible to still get people to trade actual value for its paper promises. I will not be one of those people ever again, though, and you shouldn't be either.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
It seems you are appealing to an "is" and handwaving the "ought". As it happens, I disagree profoundly with your assessment of the "is"; it does not seem to me that "Elites" are in a position to impose their will on people like me indefinitely, and it seems likely to me that my tribe is well-positioned to press the issue at some length. If I had persuasive evidence to the contrary, that would be a rather different conversation, but it seems to me that the "ought" half of the question deserves analysis.
On that one, it appears I was wrong right out of the gate, but I'm waiting to see the actual fallout. The whole thing seems deeply fishy for a number of reasons, but what will clear it up will be subsequent events. If either or both of them dedicate significant resources to striking at each other, then that will confirm that the breach is serious in nature, and that will bode extremely ill for my faction. In that case, I'd side with Trump over Elon, but reluctantly; more generally, this would be evidence that our leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional, and I would expect that to manifest in other ways in relatively short order.
What updates beyond this would you recommend? Where do you expect the thinly-veiled minecraft references to be directed?
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