FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
You must see how that just sounds like "separating from family made me feel worse".
I was not separated from my family in any sense but the spiritual. I spent lots of time with them throughout my time as an atheist; I was the "cool uncle" to their kids, I lived close to my parents and spent much time with them, I relished our time together. But I did not want a family for roughly the same reasons I didn't want to believe in God: it would interfere with my various habits of pleasure-seeking and vanity. Over time, it became undeniable that I had much the worse end of that trade-off.
All sorts of people have all sorts of experiences; I can only speak to mine, and what I've observed second-hand in those I know. My observation is that sin makes people miserable, generally in fairly obvious ways, and that both I myself and others I observe construct elaborate justifications why their misery is the fault of anyone other than themselves and their own choices. Sometimes this is even true, to a limited extent: people really do harm each other very badly, and it is certainly possible to have been harmed, wronged, damaged by the actions of others. But it is also possible to harm one's self, and people do so all the time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
More, I think. Have you seen a "new atheism" analogue for Simulation theory, Singularitarianism or the Doomish? I observe that a lot of the objections to theoretical violations of Materialism do not appear to be principled. There's a pretty noticeable gap between "do I have to believe this" and "do I have to not believe this", and a lot of human thought observably lives in that gap.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye'll have had experiences . . . it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.
From personal experience, embrace of sin observably eats the self away even while you are still living. I could see myself becoming noticeably less human over time, more wretched, more insectile, ingrown in a miserable spiral of decay. And the reverse was true as well: pursuing Christ made me more human, allowed me out of myself in ways I had not been able to achieve while chasing appetite and pride, bitterness and vanity. I left Christianity because I believed it was making me miserable; as an atheist, I grew considerably more miserable, and eventually the contrast between my own life and the lives of my Christian family members grew too stark to ignore. I returned to the church, and my life now is incomparably better.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
I suppose the way I'd put it is that, in my view, He's got a good pitch. That is, I find the deeper claims of Christianity map well onto the world I observe: things like sin and its consequences, What it has to say about how humans work, what is necessary, which things remain constant over time, etc. It promises things that I want, and in my experience it delivers on those promises in tangible ways in the material world. The arc of my life diverged markedly for the worse when I became an Atheist, and diverged markedly for the better when I became a Christian again. I don't expect my personal experiences to be persuasive to people who are not me, but they are very persuasive to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Model the Christian God as a superintelligence, and the physical universe as a simulation. Then drop the usual model that any reality below the observable one should be assumed to work the way the observable one works. Consider that, if there were a deeper substrate reality under this one, you know nothing about how that reality operates at all, and none of our assumptions about the function of the universe necessarily obtain.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
I assumed it was this.
I used to be a pretty big 9/11 truther, and suppose I still am in a fairly limited form. I dove deep on the pentagon evidence back in the day, and concluded that there was nothing to it. The usual claim was that what actually hit the Pentagon was a tomahawk missile; supporting evidence presented was the absence of large airliner engines in the wreckage, the presence of a much smaller turbofan engine, and arguments about the shape of the hole in the pentagon itself.
From memory, I've seen strong arguments that the main engines are absent because when a large jet engine running at full-speed hits thick reinforced concrete, it tends to shatter/explode. The small engine found was likely the airliner's APU, a small jet engine located in the back top of the fuselage under the tail, used for generating power for in-flight systems. Its positioning would give it the maximum protection from the impact due to the structures ahead of it crumpling. Other evidence included a shipping container in the area that had been clipped by the plane's wing on the way in. I'm pretty sure it was a plane.
For me, a lot of "9/11 truth" became less plausible not due to the accrual of physical evidence, "evidence" in cases like this being something of a loaded term for a variety of reasons, but because the expected consequences that most of those theories predicted did not come to pass. Bush did not suspend elections nor make himself president-for-life. Institutions rolled on much as they had previously. If 9/11 involved a layer beneath the "official story", (and it pretty clearly did, see the stock trades for an example of where it seems inarguable that we aren't getting the full story), I think it's pretty clear that the hidden part of the story did not represent a significant discontinuity with the way our system in general worked before or after.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
My understanding, admittedly second-hand, is that more than one of the female jurors have admitted on camera to arguing their position based on their own "expert opinion", ie based on evidence that was not actually admitted in the trial proper, and that this is in fact serious misconduct. Can anyone else shed more light on this aspect?
Pretty sure it's one of either Muggeridge or Menken, the anecdote being mentioned in Scott's review of their autobiography.
[edit] - It's Muggeridge.
Yeah, that's basically my thesis. Greater social cohesion means the effect of cultural trends is significantly magnified, and the Progressive cultural trend was extremely strong even in our world, where social division was strong and deep. I guess our point of disagreement is that I see Communism as an obvious continuation of the Progressive project right back to the Enlightenment itself, so if you strengthen the Progressive push, you strengthen the Communist push as well, and I think beating back Communism was a near-run thing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
My understanding is that the US provided a very large amount of the anti-communist energy throughout the Cold War. Canada I think is too close to the US to disambiguate. Australia I don't know much about. My understanding is that England was profoundly compromised by Communists top-to-bottom, and that's in the real world where the US is working as hard as possible to drag them back.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
Without the history of slavery, probably there's a lot less conflict in American history. Most likely the Civil War doesn't happen, and the country is much more cohesive rolling into the 1900s. You have no bitter division to pre-seed conflict with modernism as it rolls out; in our actual timeline, a large proportion of elites went hard for socialism/communism around the turn of the century, through the 20s and into the 30s, and the south generated much of the serious resistance to Communism in the 40s, 50s and 60s. How much of that resistance is catalyzed by the acrimony of the civil war, reconstruction and the Jim Crow years?
No articles or references, just a lot of reading about modernism and its leading lights.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
No, it's a Russell conjugation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
My read of the historical evidence is that, in this scenario, we probably would have gone Communist in the 20s-30s, and things might well have been considerably worse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Conspiracy theories are typically things that allege multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public.
...Not convoluting the definition, but leaving it to obviously include most of the examples given while simply asserting that it does not fit them is also a strategy, I suppose.
"Trump is a Russian Asset" alleges that Trump and many members of his staff are working for the Russian government, their cooperation being secured through some combination of kompromat, bribes and ideological alignment. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". This is your reminder that this particular conspiracy theory was a paid op by Hillary Clinton, that Obama appears to have been at minimum aware of it and declined to intervene, that Obama's senior officials were directly involved in its implementation, and that it was pushed to the hilt by every major media organization in the country for multiple years, with devastating political consequences and zero accountability.
"The police routinely kill unarmed, innocent black men" claims that police routinely cooperate to murder innocent black men and then to cover up these murders as legitimate police actions, aided and abetted by other elements of the criminal justice system such as judges, prosecutors, etc. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". Engagement with this conspiracy theory is universal within Blue Tribe, and conformity is policed viciously.
"The wage gap is a real measure of sexist discrimination" claims that business owners secretly coordinate to violate black-letter federal anti-discrimination law, artificially depressing wages for women by 30% economy-wide and with sufficient cunning that they never, ever get caught doing it, because they hate women and want to exploit them. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". Less prevalent that the racialized conspiracy theories at the moment, Feminism peaked early and largely exhausted itself, but we could tack on "Rape Culture/Believe All Women/Justice Kavanaugh is a rapist" as further examples as well.
"Billionaires control the government" claims that Billionaires have secretly subverted democracy through various legal, quasi-legal and illegal actions to put themselves beyond the reach of law and bend the government to their will. It universally involves claims that multiple actors are secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public. How could you possibly argue otherwise?
"Appropriating Billionaire wealth could pay for all/most/any significant number at all of good things people want." This one does not fit your definition of conspiracy.
"High health care costs are a conspiracy by greedy capitalists." "Conspiracy by greedy capitalists" is literally in the belief-statement, and is by no means a straw-man. Millions of people observably believe this, and are willing to endorse murder as a plausible solution.
"Capitalism is at fault for [insert social problem here]" likewise observably involves claims of malign coordination by rich villains in a large and highly central proportion of real-world instances.
"Trump is a Russian asset."
"The police routinely kill unarmed, innocent black men."
"The wage gap is a real measure of sexist discrimination."
"Billionaires control the government."
"Billionaires got their money by stealing it from ordinary people."
"Appropriating Billionaire wealth could pay for all/most/any significant number at all of good things people want."
"High health care costs are a conspiracy by greedy capitalists."
"Capitalism is at fault for [insert social problem here]."
Or is it time to convolute the borders of "conspiracy theory"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
What's your understanding of the "pentagon situation"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Though I'll save any attempted lectures (which take too much finesse for me to ever deliver convincingly) for those who seem to be honestly pained by their beliefs I think are mistaken, rather than wheeling one out for OP who is always just looking for a new 'republican bad' angle.
For the record, I'll hear you out. MMT seems crazy to me, but I'm policy-starved, and politics runs on hope. If we're going to be acting as though MMT is true, I'd like to at least hear the optimistic case.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
If FC's particular brand of doomerism is not controlling (and it might be), then perhaps the most suitable tool in our Constitutional Republic for the task would be a Constitutional amendment.
Perhaps you could write it such that "balanced budgets shall not be infringed." That ought to keep things in-line.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
It seems to me that if one makes a statement for which a reasonable response is "War exists", it might be time to contemplate one's choices.
"Hottentot Morality" describes a lack of reciprocity. Through specific choices, humans can arrive in a state where reciprocity breaks down. If we in America are not in that state, we are pretty close to it, and getting closer over time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
The Republican party also gained quite a lot of political capital from their stances during this time. They were even able to effectively box Bill Clinton in and get him to balance the budget somewhat. These were popular measures that helped win Republicans elections, since there were enough voters who valued these things relative to other priorities to make it so.
The Republican party gained a lot of political capital through those stances... and then failed to fix the issue in any meaningful way, and then Bush blew the budget out on ruinous foreign wars, and Obama blew the budget out in the usual progressive ways, and now the stance itself is no longer credible. 2nd-term Obama was the point at which I personally committed to never caring about the issue again; fiscal responsibility sounds good, but you just straight-up cannot get there from here, and scarce political capital needs to be allocated where it might plausibly do some good.
Again, the idea that balanced budgets are political poison akin to cooperating in a defector's game is an overwhelmingly modern phenomenon based on how the electorate moved. The problem is the modern electorate.
How did the modern electorate get to be the modern electorate? Did 85 years of massive redistribution have anything to do with it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
It is frustrating that you're such a good writer because over years and years of reading you I've realized that all your beliefs amount to Hottentot morality in so many words.
"Hottentot Morality" seems underspecified.
I refuse to pretend that rules or norms constrain us all equally when in fact they obviously do not. Why should I? What works that way? What positive outcome is secured by such a method? Further, if stability or peace or the current maintenance of plenty requires obvious, systematic injustice, why would you think this maintainable long-term? Why is pretending it can be sustained useful? What is gained? A pleasant aesthetic ambiance between now and the inevitable shattering crash?
Democrats celebrate crime and brutality?
Whoa now, you can't just sneak that in there, that seems pretty uncharitable! Most of the Blues remaining here certainly wouldn't agree that Democrats do anything of the sort, even when you quote examples of they themselves doing so!
Which is to say, you are willing to make this accusation to me, who is speaking the truth plainly, and decline to make it to those who have actually acted on it but are willing to lie. And even then, they burned our cities; have we burned theirs? Are we running gangs of masked men to kick people's teeth in for saying things we don't like? Are we murdering their political champions? If you're going to draw an equivalence, you really ought to back it up.
...But allow me to skip much tedious listing and harangue.
The difference that you don't seem to recognize is that I'm willing to agree that these things are, in fact, actual problems, and they are, in fact, going to lead to a bad end, provided my opposite is willing to engage with the facts in good faith. Absent that good faith, I'm not really sure what you or others expect. My side lost, and was trampled down. Can you resurrect us? If you cannot, why curse me for failing to do so? I say that the culture war is a serious problem driven by fundamentally-incompatible values across broad, coherent populations, that this locks us into an escalation spiral that is very obviously going to break things we can't fix, and I'm told that I'm being a silly-billy, that this is all a distraction or an algorithm bubble, and then the next day I'm presented with a conversation like this one, where it's awful that my side is doing the thing the other side built their entire party around doing, and has consistently claimed my side is bad for trying to stop, all the way up to five seconds ago.
If you think vote-buying is bad, explain what ought to be done about eighty-five fucking years of ceaseless vote-buying. Explain what should be done about the trillions of dollars in vote-buying that is definitely going to happen this year alone. Explain how the ideals you're espousing have even the slightest connection to the world I have to live in, or how precisely they extend even two inches beyond this specific, entirely-bespoke Russell-conjugation.
Things can be destroyed that cannot be repaired nor replaced, and recognizing this fact does not in and of itself bring them back. Pretending harder doesn't change this. Cursing people who point out that you are pretending also does not change this.
In 2023, the Peronist government of Argentina tried to buy votes with total tax relief for "the working class" and free bus rides. I've been impressed by Argentinians when they didn't take the bait and still voted Milei, who reversed the law.
The wheel carried them down, now it carries them up. The wheel carried us up, now it carries us down. We probably have a Milei, somewhere; it's a big country. What we lack is a population willing to accept a Milei. We are too fat and comfortable, too deluded to accept that hard decisions need to be made, and so those who argue correctly that hard decisions are needed to forestall serious disaster simply lose. And so those of us who can recognize that hard decisions are needed to forestall disaster recognize, correctly, that the hard decisions can't be coordinated, and accept that the disaster is going to happen, and attempt to prepare as best we're able.
There's been a lot of concern about Brazilification of the US. I think it's way past that. The US is a South American society, maybe Middle Eastern. Just wrong skin color by accident.
I honestly suspect that you have no idea. And yet, you frequently speak about inevitable US victory and our impending dominance of the light-cone. I think that's unlikely. I think things go badly for us and probably for a lot of other people in the not-too-distant future, as the Belle Epoque collapses.
So it goes.
The culture war is a war, and increasingly so year by year.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Which is understandable, but ignoble behavior.
There is no durable consensus that we are circling Charybdis. The ask here is that people like me continue to act as though we are circling Charybdis and exhaust ourselves rowing away from that apparent danger, while Blue Tribe laughs at our absurd concerns and forces us to serve them the wine we're too busy rowing to drink.
To the extent that Charybdis does not exist, we should also drink wine. To the extent that Charybdis does exist, this is not an acceptable plan to avoid it. It does not seem to me that nobility comes into it one way or the other; if you require people to enslave themselves in lifelong, futile misery to secure your approval, do not be surprised when they shrug and turn their back to you.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
FDR was elected in 1932. Trump was elected in 2016. That is an 84-year gap, during which Democrats accrued massive political capital via the public purse, and Republicans expended vast amounts of political capital trying (and failing) to restrain them.
What was the point of that effort? Why should it be continued? Obviously the democrats have not and will not agree that there is any need for restraint, and obviously a large portion of America sees nothing wrong with this attitude. Are they mistaken? If so, can you persuade them of this fact to a degree that will result in them changing their behavior?
Shit, where's the modern monetary theorists up ins? Aren't we due for a lecture about how the deficit isn't actually a problem, how the National budget isn't actually like a household budget, how debt isn't real?
Say rather, you can't derive the mechanics of higher realities from observation of lower ones, and this is a point that most people theorizing about stacked realities appear to miss.
But God is not a mechanism. If a willful intelligence in a higher reality wants to talk to you, it can. If it makes claims about your reality, you can compare those to what you observe of your reality. If it tells you things about the higher reality, you can choose to believe it or not, and the perceived accuracy of its statements about the reality you are in can lend some degree of evidence for trust to operate.
In any case, what is "truth value"?
More options
Context Copy link