FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Yet! Growth mindset!
Last night, I listened to Carl Benjamin and Sam Hyde(!) independently wax poetic about the importance of Christianity and urge their listeners to go to church. Benjamin was explicit that he doesn't believe in God or Jesus at all, but considers Christianity culturally necessary. I have no idea what's going on with Hyde; I don't really follow him on the regular, but was really, really not expecting twenty minutes of commentary about God and his Church from my gold-standard sample of post-ironic schizo internet brainrot victim.
I've suspected for some time that Christianity would be making a resurgence; being a serious Christian it's sort of a required bet, but also it's seemed to me that the cultural wind has been in our favor more or less since the Woke offensive in 2014; Woke took over the way it did because the comfortable, decadent agnostic soft-nihilism that had pushed us out had pretty clearly transitioned into the "finding out" phase. Still, from my perspective, right-wing "Christianity And..." is no better than the left-wing variant.
How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord
is laid for your faith in his excellent word
what more can he say than to you he hath said
you whom unto Jesus for refuge have fled?
Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed
I, I am thy God and will still give thee aid
I'll strengthen thee, help thee and cause thee to stand
All sheltered by mine own omnipotent hand.
It seems to me that we have a conflict between companies who want to import foreigners who work for cheap and lack many legally-mandated employee protections they would be compelled to respect for native employees, and a faction now with control of the federal government who want them to pay native workers standard market wages with full protections instead. Certainly there seem to be a number of other commenters here framing it this way, including several claiming that the H1B visa system was "abused". I use quotes there, because it's pretty clear to me that in situations like this one, we say things like "this system was abused" when what we want to say, but cannot, is "they clearly broke the law". I'm pretty sure if we prosecuted these companies for violating immigration law, their legal defenses would succeed. I'm also pretty sure that a lot of people don't want them to do what they're doing, and are willing to coordinate efforts to make them stop doing it. That's the conflict, and in that conflict, as with FFL licensing under the previous administration, giving those regulated a clear, consistent, stable set of rules to work under is not a good way to achieve the regulator's objectives.
Having predictable laws that allow people to plan for the future requires law-making/law-compliance to be a cooperative rather than competitive game, where at least roughly-similar goals are held by both the rule-makers and the rule-followers. If you are in a war, preventing the enemy from planning for the future is an obviously good thing.
It seems to me that there's a pretty good parallel here to the dynamics we see in gun regulation, where regulatory agencies are fundamentally hostile to the businesses and individuals attempting to operate under their regulation, and use regulatory ambiguity and mercurial rules-redefinition as basic tools of control against people who actively don't want to be controlled. There, when getting the counterparties to comply with one's intention grows prohibitive, we see government action retreat from even-handed, routine enforcement of clear rules, instead centering on "making examples" of people more-or-less at random and with little regard to whether they crossed the line or not. When people aren't sure where the law actually is or how bad the downside for crossing it might be, they get a lot more cautious about living on the borders of the law.
Legible rules can never constrain human will. People who do not share sufficient values cannot coordinate together, and this sort of pseudo-legal warfare is one example of how that plays out, it seems to me. Look on the bright side, probably no one gets shot in the head by federal agents in a nautical-twilight raid over this one.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
What do you expect to happen over the next few years? Make concrete predictions, and note what evidence could falsify your beliefs. Then watch what happens. There's no other way to solve the epistemic problem available.
Undoubtedly FC could give you a detailed list of anti-segregationist terrorists who went on to have illustrious careers at Harvard.
Communist Terrorists, actually.
But it was largely a campaign won by sympathetic figures you knew in your community, not shitposting on twitter about the hordes of illegal immigrants coming to take your jobs and rape your families. It wasn't won by darkly hinting about how many guns you have, or congressional shenanigans or gerrymandering.
Consider the term "homophobe", intentionally chosen to frame opposition to LGBT as mental illness. Consider the sheer amount of propaganda in media and film, where anyone opposed was a violent, low-class, slovenly bigot, probably a criminal, or perhaps at best an ignorant, withered old church lady. This went on for more than a decade, and grew so hackneyed that it spawned a second-order meme of "not that there's anything wrong with that", to encapsulate the pervasive moral obligation that permeated culture. The Westborough Baptist Church was framed as the modal opponent of Gay Rights in the culture. A murder over drug money was framed as a hate-killing and blown up into national news, followed by new federal laws to combat the danger of hate crimes against homosexuals.
And as @gattsuru often notes, it worked. You won. Those you did not persuade, you shamed and abused and harassed into silence. "Protected Class" law formalized this for employment, the media and the Academy handled it everywhere else. As several Blue Commenters have straightforwardly stated it over the years, we lost, so it's our turn in the closet for a couple decades.
How fortunate that this sort of political hardball had zero negative consequences of any kind.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Shockingly enough, even the most powerful man in the world is not as powerful as numerous very powerful men and women working together to achieve their ends. But as noted elsewhere, this is not a problem we have to puzzle out from first principles; we can simply look at actual examples. Tell me, which of Trump's lies has been as damaging as Bush lying America into Iraq?
I think a literal palletload of MREs dropped out of a C130 has a pretty high chance of being an accidental kinetic weapon. Probably possible to do a bit better though.
I was thinking more hot-glue two packs to a stick and see if you can get them to airfoil like a maple-seed, or even just dump the packs out loose from, say, 200 feet up. I've never seen one of these packs, I'm going off handling MRE packs before, which were relatively light and packaged in very tough plastic.
My assumption is that Israel is absolutely trying to put food pressure on Gaza; I think there was a link in the international thread that 10% of the gazan population is now dead, and I would expect that number to increase significantly before this is over.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
yeah, I see the skepticism over cost as a challenge. 4.70 per ratpack x 2 ratpacks x 2,050,000 inhabitants = $18.8 million, so obviously the large majority of the cost estimate here is delivery. I'm pretty sure cargo planes have <10x the capacity of a helicopter with significantly lower costs per flight hour.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
You might be able to cut those costs by 3x in a reasonable way, I'm doubtful that you could drop them by 10x.
What's your estimate on flight costs for helicopter versus C-130? Because I bet you could figure out a way to drop those things out the back of a cargo aircraft by the palletload and have 90%+ reach the ground intact; from eating MREs a few times, I don't remember them being very heavy for their volume, and the packaging is durable...
Maybe ditch the Humanitarian rations and just start dropping sacks of dry beans and rice with cut-rate parachutes? Like, really optimize for usable calories on the ground for the cheapest price possible, where harm to the payload is a minimal concern.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
That is a fantastic idea, and I would strongly endorse it. how much would this cost? It can't possibly be more than we waste on any number of military or social programs of far more dubious effectiveness.
The standards should be much higher for state-led censorship efforts though.
"Should be" is not "is", much less "has been". The government has repeatedly and systematically censored the internet, over which they have no remit, to keep people from pointing out they were lying about crucial policy facts. It is not even clear that the government is what got Kimmel censored here, although if it was that seems entirely acceptable given their statutory power to preserve the common interest through broadcast licensing. Lying about a highly-charged political assassination in order to blame the victims is not in the public interest.
You are of course free to disagree and make your case here.
My objection to the claim "The lies Trump tells are dangerous in a way that should be prioritized" is that I have a long list of lies that seem obviously to be much, much more dangerous than any lie Trump has told, which have caused staggeringly vast amounts of harm and which no one other than MAGA appears willing to address. Entire wars, nation-wide, sustained violations of basic human rights, mass murder committed by government agents, serious crimes committed or enabled for political objectives are a few examples of these harms. I have waited decades to see these lies addressed in any meaningful way, only to be disappointed at every turn. These harms have, in my view, destroyed our previous political system and replaced it with rule by the irresponsible and unaccountable, which has already leaned hard into outright tyranny and is rapidly decaying into ungovernable chaos. Look at the reaction to Kirk's assassination, and imagine what it would have been like if the Butler bullet had been even a single inch to the right.
When Trump makes a statement, I assume that his word on its own means nothing, and I have every confidence that we can hash out the truth. When Biden or Obama or Bush or Clinton made statements, these were treated as truth regardless of contrary evidence and in many cases those questioning them were suppressed. And in fact, these arguments have succeeded in exactly the way I expected, by dragging previously-covered misdeeds into the light via the Streisand Effect. Concern about Epstein's connections was fringe, and now it is mainstream. Concern about unrestrained immigration were fringe, now they are mainstream. Arguments about politicization of the justice department and our security agencies was fringe, now it is mainstream.
Trump's lies have not led me into a position that appears, in hindsight, to be a position I don't want to be in. That is not something I can say for his predecessors or indeed for most of his current opponents.
A: "It was just a joke! these guys can't take a joke!"
B: "Actually, it doesn't appear to have been a joke. That's not how jokes work."
A: "Look at these losers, arguing about jokes!"
Blues are actively attempting to deny responsibility for a political assassination, for which the perpetrator and his motives are exceedingly clear. Kimmel joined in to repeat a blatant lie about the shooter's identity and allegiances on national television. From further reporting, he refused to apologize, claiming he had said nothing wrong. I am fine with him losing his job over that. Many people have lost their jobs for much less. I am happy for Blues to complain about this; it will further highlight their hypocrisy and Streisand-Effect the facts of the case that they appear desperate to deny or bury.
I think this is wrong too. The "Reds want killings" conclusion at any rate. Reds accept killings as a trade-off, because they care about other things more
...And yet, we are willing to take other actions, even costly ones, certainly effective ones, to deter people from becoming spree killers, and to stop spree killers from achieving their objectives. We are not willing to handle the problem the way Blues want it handled, but we are in fact willing to handle the problem.
I repeat: You tell me what Blues were willing to do, not say, but do, to stop the riots. Tell me what the analogous action to shooting would-be spree killers dead is for Blue Tribe with regard to riots.
Uniformed gangs on men with rifles took over a chunk of a city, declared it a no-go zone for the police, and began threatening and shooting at people. Blue Tribe not only stood back and let them do this for over a month, but when they actually murdered someone, they allowed them to retreat anonymously, made no effort to apprehend or even identify them, and did their best to memory-hole the whole incident. They did this collectively, as a tribe, systematically disabling all of our society's safety rails and lockouts in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening or punishing it when it happens anyway or even retaining memory that it had happened. I have no reason to believe they will not do it again.
Nor is this some principled stand. They did not mind aggressively prosecuting Rittenhouse or Baca or the boomer couple who didn't even fire a shot or any of the other reds who attempted to defend themselves, all the way back to Based Stick Man. No blue objected to Babbit, an unarmed woman, being shot dead on Jan 6th; suddenly rioting was very, very dangerous, actually. Antifa in Portland continue to routinely assault peaceful Reds, and the police continue to turn a blind eye. This is not a one-shot process, we have a decade's worth of data-points at minimum, and they all go the same way: our speech is violence, blue violence is speech.
If Blues "didn't want it to happen", but actively denied it was happening, attacked anyone that claimed it was happening regardless of their evidence, actively supported the people making it happen and refused to punish them, refused to take any action to stop it from happening, refused to allow anyone else to take any action to stop it from happening and fiercely attacked them if they tried anyway, and finally broadly celebrated it happening... The honest truth is that they wanted it to happen, but didn't want to accept responsibility for it happening.
Blues make accusations against Reds like this all the time, re: spree killings. We're unwilling to do what's needed to stop the killings, ie banning guns, so we want killings, or at minimum bear full responsibility for them. But we are willing to do lots of things to stop killings, from fortifying targets to literally shooting the would-be killers dead.
You tell me what Blues were willing to do, not say, but do, to stop the riots.
And the fact that we are still playing language games over this issue shows that nothing has changed, and no lessons have been learned. I cannot trust Blue Tribe to provide me equal protection under the law, because they have generated common knowledge that they absolutely will not do so. I understand that most Blues are unwilling to admit this, but the facts speak for themselves. Your arguments don't seem to dispute this fact in any substantive fashion, only to explain why they think it's a good thing. But I already know why they think it's a good thing: they believed, and many of them apparently still believe, that police kill two or three orders of magnitude more unarmed black people than they actually do, that ACAB, that we should abolish police and prisons, and that crime is either imaginary or caused entirely by insufficient leftist policy or not actually that big a deal or that the victims deserve it, as is maximally convenient for them in any given situation.
I am not willing to have my tribe reduced to second-class-citizen status, and I am not willing to allow Blues to use lawless political violence to suppress my views and political activity. If that is Blue Tribe's best offer, as it in fact seems to be, I and many Reds like me prefer war.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
You can frame it that way if you wish. The problem is that it doesn't seem like many people in the wider culture are buying it. The ultimate test for any of the claims or perspectives we offer here are subsequent events: I am confident that framing this as "Kirk unleashed the inner That's Not Funny" is not going to turn the tide.
Time will tell.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
I am not a moderator.
He may be referring to the volunteer comment-rating system that offers normal commenters to give their opinion on comments selected by automatic metrics.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
It seems as though this comment would be on-point if randomly placed anywhere in the last two threads.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
When the shooter said that Kirk needed to be killed because of Kirk's "hate", what do you think he meant by that?
They were making the case of tolerating so much more back in the late 2010s.
I think using a major media platform to blame the right for a murder of a rightist committed by a leftist, after the left has spent years publicly encouraging leftists to kill rightists, while leftists are actively working to deceive people into believing that this murder was committed by a rightist, should not be tolerated. You say that people like me have tolerated worse before. Can you give some specific examples? I'm not that picky about the definition of "like me", if that helps.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
On the federal level, the one in charge at the time was a guy called Trump.
Whether Trump was meaningfully in charge of the executive branch during his first term is an open question, given the number of his theoretical subbordinates who have openly bragged about disobeying his orders, coordinating action with his opponents, and lying to him about it since.
I am not sure why he did not mobilize the national guard at that time, would have made a lot more sense IMO than mobilizing them now to help with ICE efforts in cities which voted against him. Of course the Dems would have tried to stop that, just to make him look bad.
My assessment, both at the time and with hindsight, is that Trump understood that cracking down on the rioters would be politically-advantageous to the rioters and their leadership. Deploying the national guard now appears to me to be a pre-emption against riots starting in Blue cities, preventing them from forking him in this way again.
On a local and state level, I think most Democrat officials were walking a fine line. Making Trump look bad was great. Making themselves look bad because their town got looted was bad, but making themselves look bad because the cops shot another black guy would also have been bad. In the end, some decided that letting people riot and murder each other was preferable to their town making national news because a cop shot a black person.
I am not willing to accept them walking such a line. Blue Tribe was operating off an understanding of police violence generated by deliberate, coordinated lies by their own knowledge-production cadre. They believed those lies because the lies flattered their bigotries, and they acted on them to compromise rule of law on a very large scale and in immediately threatening ways to anyone who isn't one of them. They did this in a way that, as incidental side effects, killed many thousands of Americans and destroyed their ability to meaningfully cooperate on basic law enforcement for the indefinite future. The fact that they had sufficient intra-tribal message control at the time to make all this plausibly deniable within the tribe doesn't change the picture from across the tribal divide. Reds were not fooled, and coordinated their own common knowledge accordingly.
No, Blue Tribe wanted there to be protests. Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".
The spectrum very clearly continued on to "riots are good, actually" for a large plurality of Blue Tribe, and this was not an anomaly that started with Floyd's death. Consider the phrase "No Justice, No Peace", and where and how it has been used in American politics. Further, this was not a preference for riots in general, but specifically for their own riots.
In any case, you are correct that there is a spectrum. This spectrum is best encapsulated by the phrase "Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it". The evident sum of their desires was protracted rioting with as much of the cost as possible offloaded to their outgroup and as few consequences for their ingroup committing the violence as possible, and they were willing to break or ignore most laws to make it happen and to punish anyone who interfered. They demanded that their tribe be above the law in a way that directly threatened pretty much every member of the other tribe. They demonstrated that they were willing and able to enforce this preference in the long-term, regardless of the consequences. That is not a preference that allows for peaceful and prosperous coexistence, as I pointed out at some length at the time.
And they did all this based on a tribally-coordinated lie, and that lie killed thousands of additional black people and thousands of additional white people over the next few years.
I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view, and especially make an effort to read anything you post, because I consider you "the iron that sharpens". This one I wanted to reply to, but between crunch at work and kids didn't get around to it till this weekend. Plus, the last couple times you name-dropped me, I didn't get around to a direct response; I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do, so I've generally tried to give a bit more space lately. Anyhow, when I finally had time I just searched your name in the bar and scrolled down a bit to find "that CPAR post I missed earlier".
I disagree that it's foolish; I think Blue Tribe's dominance was largely built on propaganda, and I think the decay of the propaganda apparatus is why Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing. This has been my thesis for near-on to a decade now. I think my side will win because, to put it as succinctly as possible, we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.
I think the propaganda worked better for LGBT for the same reason it worked so well for Feminism and for the thrust that ended up as BLM; all three are core social justice narratives that lend themselves very directly to a model of bad people oppressing good people, and where a large majority of the action happens in peoples' thoughts, which conveniently for the narrative can't be read, and where even the parts happening in the real world depend heavily on the unknowable intent of those involved. Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.
I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force. And sure, most people "believed it", in that when they were polled they truthfully told the pollster that they "supported LGBT". That's a thing that can be done by lying to cover all the negative aspects of one side and all the positive aspects of the other, in an environment where one enjoys total control of the knowledge-generation apparatus.
But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved. And then it went too far with Trans, and the grip began to slacken, and the old opposition comes popping back up like dandelions as things begin to slide the other way. Not that I particularly expect Gay Marriage to be banned again, given how debauched the institution of marriage is anyway... but I genuinely think we've seen the high-water-mark of LGBT, and even if the downslope is gentle, it's still down from here. Certainly no one is ever going to buy that it's about what what adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms any more. I grew up hearing about how the lethality of the AIDS pandemic was greatly exacerbated by society's intolerance and bigotry, which showed how necessary Gay Rights were to protect the marginalized. My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history, with a compare/contrast to the handling of the COVID pandemic, because that will provide them a straightforwardly better picture of the realities of the world they actually live in.
I reflect on that plenty. I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain. I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.
On the other hand, "Cultural Christianity" is trash, and it's arguably better for Christianity itself to have good contrast between the moral order of the Almighty and the chaos of the world. I'm aware of and even sympathetic to the arguments of the Christians who wanted to impose that moral order through law, but Christianity is, at its core, voluntary. You cannot mandate love, nor loving obedience. No Christian end I can see is secured by imposing such things on the unwilling through the power of the state.
Maybe.
You've called me out twice in recent months, asking where all the worsening violence I was predicting is; and to be clear, I don't mind the call-outs one bit, and consider them entirely fair. The first time, before I could get a reply constructed, Luigi shot the healthcare CEO and the whole internet lit up with enthusiastic grassroots support for ideological murder. The second time, again before I could get around to a reply, Kirk was shot and the internet lit up again, and in much more of a concentrated and clearly tribal way. The first time, I thought it would be more charitable to just let it lie. This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down? And since no FCfromSSC post would be complete without a link to some other excessively-long comment, nor with a listing of recent violence datapoints, here's both in one from last week.
I do not think I am obsessed with small-minded, zero sum games. I am interested in what is going to happen next, and what is happening next is, it seems to me, largely determined by such games. Most people are obsessed with winning and losing, and because their values are now mutually-incoherent, cooperative victory is no longer a viable option. I think that internalizing this insight gives me a clearer picture of where we are heading, which is of course the main question we've debated for some years now.
As for myself, I am already saved. I think my side will win, but whether it does or not does not is a matter of no true consequence; nothing that truly matters to me is protected by victory or lost by defeat. I do not believe in progress, moral or otherwise. There is nothing new under the sun, all things are wearisome more than one can say. This is the bedrock truth as I understand it, and while I freely admit that it does not come naturally to me, I try to maintain a clear sight of it, even at some personal cost, even here.
No.
Kirk's murder pretty much ran over the story about the Ukrainian lady that got stabbed. I have an effort-post on that in the works, but the short version is, the local officials pretty clearly did their best to bury the story, delaying its viral breakout by two weeks, and then a lot of Blues got very visibly upset when people started talking about it. The local official's statement at the time of the murder was something like "we can't incarcerate our way out of this problem." The murderer had been convicted and released 14 times previously, with a long history of violent crime and clear signs of serious mental illness.
What I see there, briefly, is a situation where Blues are using a dominant political and social position to prevent a serious problem from being solved, while offloading all consequences generated by that problem to their outgroup. A more perfect union, to me, is one where they don't get to do that any more.
If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable. One of our original conversations was about how education sucks for black kids, and how this doesn't seem likely to change. Well, since then, we've had the "Mississippi Miracle". One of the places where education sucked the hardest for black kids changed to being a place where it sucks a lot less than it used to. That's good! That's a win! ...And my understanding of how it happened, possibly flawed or excessively simplistic, is that entrenched Blue control got broken, and actual reforms happened. I want more of that, but it isn't going to happen so long as entrenched (and pretty clearly Blue, from my perspective) structures maintain a dominance that insulates them from all accountability.
By no means.
Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition. Sexual continence and self-control were a hard sell in the 90s; now we have OnlyFans and online dating and a generation of intense porn consumption and cratering relationship rates to do the argumentative heavy-lifting for us, to give an example on one of the relevant axes. We believe we genuinely have a better way of living, and it requires only our willful action and communal cooperation, not federal law or corporate funding. The further the cultural consensus moved away from us, the more obvious and undeniable the benefits our faith offers become, even by the materialist metrics of the World. We have stable marriages, children, even, amusingly enough, higher sexual satisfaction. We can forgive and turn the other cheek; we can offer a hand up to a defeated foe, we can restrain ourselves in the heat of the moment. We have a basis for charity, in all senses of the word, to the point that the pagan Right routinely mocks us for our pacifism, for doing nothing, for being cucked. And yet, we can also fight fiercely, when that seems necessary and prudent.
Or take the example of Red states versus Blue states. It's been noted for some time that people are leaving Blue states and moving to Red ones; this is not a consequence of Red states somehow coercing or bribing these people to do so, but seems to simply be a result of differences in governance and the living conditions that governance produces.
When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.
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