FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Golden Brown
One of my all-time favorite songs; the harpsichord is simply delightful!
Are you familiar with their Vladimir sequence?
"Thank you my fatherland, for helping me to be totally re-integrated and normalized."
Bonus:
"To the Advisory board for the development of cultural visits to sympathetic states: Dear Sirs!"
The Wayback Machine is your friend. I'm currently reading cached copies to my wife in the evenings. I also should mention that the audio books are excellent for long road trips.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
...Kulak is your example of a typical poster? With a post about how he doesn't post here any more?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I'm not going to discuss murder methods in depth on an open forum that has a bunch of murderous lunatics on it.
This is a sound policy and I endorse it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
There's a poem I learned as a kid:
If you have to wash the dishes, such an awful boring chore
If you have to wash the dishes, 'stead of going to the store
If you have to wash the dishes, and you drop one on the floor
Maybe they won't make you wash the dishes any more.
You don't want to do the job, so you do a bad job on purpose.
There's a piece of advice I heard from a re-enactor once:
If the King orders you to dig a pit in the middle of the jousting field, maybe it should take you the rest of his term to find a shovel.
This isn't about not wanting to do the job, it's about not wanting the job to be done at all.
Sir Frederick: there are four words to be included in a proposal if you want it thrown out.
Sir Humphrey: Complicated. Lengthy. Expensive. Controversial. And if you want to be really sure that the Minister doesn't accept it, you must say the decision is "courageous".
Bernard: And that's worse than "controversial"?
Sir Humphrey: Oh, yes! "Controversial" only means "this will lose you votes". "Courageous" means "this will lose you the election"!
And now we reach true bureaucratic sophistication: manipulating your boss into not ordering the job done in the first place. Wag-The-Dog. Top-from-the-bottom.
Cohen: Sell it all. Today.
Tuld: Is that even possible, Sam?
Sam Rogers: Yes, but at what cost?
Tuld: I'll have to pay.
Rogers: Really?
Tuld: I think so. Where is this going to come back to us?
Rogers: Everywhere.
Tuld: Sam, I don't think you seem to understand what your boy here has just said. If I made you, how would you do this?
Rogers: Well, you call the traders in for their normal 6:30 meeting and you be honest with them -- because they're going to know it's the end either way. So, you're going to have to throw 'em a bone, and a pretty big one. And then you've got to come out of the gates storming. No swaps. No nothing. Forty percent done by 10:15. By 11:00 all your trades have to be gone, because by lunchtime word's going to be out. And by 2:00 you're going to be selling at 65 cents on the dollar, if you're lucky. And then the Feds are going to be in here, up your ass, trying to slow you down...
Rogers doesn't like the order he's been given. He thinks his boss's plan is disastrously bad. He still lays out the best method to accomplish the stated objective, even while that they shouldn't do it.
That's what I'm asking for: a clear-eyed assessment saying "we have be3en ordered to withdraw by this date, here's the problems we have to overcome, here's the resources we need to do it."
The paper you linked is... not that. I'd say it's pretty disappointing, but honestly I wouldn't expect much better. It's "informative" in the loosest possible sense of the word, which is I suppose exactly what its authors are paid to be. My impression is that it's written so that, no matter what happens, its authors can be considered prudent.
Again, you understand the concept of malicious compliance and bureaucratic wag-the-dog. You're aware that the US military is not immune to these activities. Why do you believe that what we saw in the pullout was entirely or even mostly the result of policy set by the president?
As politely as I can, two of those three qualities are rather fundamental job elements for the job the man in question took quite a lot of effort to secure.
"Tactics" - How to win a firefight or a battle. "Strategy" - How to string together a series of tactical victories into an overall victory. "Bureaucracy" - What drawer the papers are filed in and who does the filing.
In the abstract, an Executive is supposed to decide what value a war offers, when to fight and when to make peace. He has final command over the top-level strategy where it impinges on that question, but below that the details are down to men who have made those details their lives' profession.
Likewise for Bureaucracy; an Executive should be concerned with questions of policy, not with the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of getting the folders handed round. What we are seeing now with Trump and DOGE is not, in fact, how any of this is supposed to work; a President is not supposed to have to micromanage his underlings to ensure they are performing their jobs competently and in good faith. Likewise, the President should not be having to inform his generals about the Afghan fighting season and suggest to them the proper way to account for its effects on the pullout. He should, in fact, be able to give a date for a pullout a year in advance, and our troops should be able to pull out on that date with no further input from the President other than signing and approving the orders. I'm bewildered as to how it could possibly be otherwise.
As the President of the United States, Biden was literally the signature authority of American strategy.
Indeed. So, keeping the date fixed, what did Biden need to do to make the pullout not a disastrous fuckup on the part of the US forces? What, specifically, did he do wrong? I'm not accepting "pick another date", because I don't buy that a year's lead time was insufficient to plan a better pullout. I'm not buying that he forced a bad plan through over the objection of the pentagon unless I see the actual orders.
Those were very much strategy and inter-governmental bureaucratic issues, which were precisely the job of the Commander in Chief and Chief of Executive- Joe Biden- to perform.
How? What was the president of the United States supposed to do to make this operation not a hilarious fuckfest?
With Benghazi, I think I have a reasonable answer to that question: Clinton and Obama slow-rolled response out of political concerns. With Mogadishu, I think I have a reasonable answer: Clinton denied heavier assets for the snatch, and when things went bad "joint" operations were a huge mess to coordinate, and also a whole lot of things went very wrong. For this, if I'm supposed to blame the president, I want to know specifically what the President did, and until I have specifics my assumption is that the people actually drawing up the plans are at fault when a plan is a complete mess.
But when you raise issues like these, it makes it sound like you believe that the American military is the part of the US government responsible for planning and handling a lot of things that the military isn't actually responsible for in any non-military-dictatorship that I can think of.
You got me! I assumed the DoD was in overall control our presence in Afghanistan, given that it was still an active war. I'm happy to withdraw the relevant questions and resubmit them as "why the fuck is the state department this incompetent?" ...Though that surprises me somewhat less. It still seems like a pretty important question, though, and it seems to me that there are probably people who were paid a considerable salary to run this shit, and those people should probably lose their jobs and possibly go to jail. They seem to have done a really bad job, and if they are not removed they are probably going to continue to do a bad job wherever they are placed next, no? But a considerable amount of the clamor I heard was specifically over the military side of things, and the military side of things isn't the state department. And again, this looks to me like basic competence failure, to the point that I'm suspicious.
My argument isn't that the military should be running diplomacy. I am happy to complain equally about the State Department. My argument is that agents of the federal government were given a job, their implementation was disastrous, and I see people on the Right saying "well, it's all Biden's fault", and people on the left sort of shrugging their shoulders. I loath Biden, but I'm not going to blame him unless I have some actual explanation about what, specifically, he did wrong. And so far, all I've got is "he timed the pullout during the fighting season". I'm not buying that, and I don't think you should buy it either.
It is not actually the military's job to run the other branches of the government well, even if it becomes the military's job to clean up and mitigate messes that result.
That's an entirely fair position, and again, the same question applies to the State department and whoever else did not comprehend what "we are pulling out in a year" meant.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I'm quite looking forward to my daughter being old enough to watch the series.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I'm pretty sure I could find a Victorian committing suicide over the fallout of their adultery if I worked at it. "Much closer to adultery than cannibalism" would be my intuition, at any rate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Unacceptable like cannibalism, or "unacceptable" like adultery?
I absolutely agree with you that if people don't agree on how to use labels, communication grinds to a halt. I believe one of the greatest disconnects in the USA is that a vocal group of people have started to try to change the definitions of words which is destroying the national conversation
Presuming that this group of people is more or less Red Tribe, this seems like a statement that should be testable by objective evidence. Woman, Rape, Racism, Sexism, Feminism, Child Abuse all seem like words whose definitions have been radically altered, where it is a matter of objective fact who is doing the altering.
...but then again, I don't think the national conversation is happening between online reactionaries.
This seems wrong in two ways: first, because the conversations here have had a direct relation to the conversations happening nationally, and second, because a number of the views we've been discussing here have just been championed by the victorious candidate in a national election as well as a number of lesser cultural arenas. The online reactionaries are engaging with the national conversation, and what's more they're currently conducting a wildly successful offensive.
I think real feminists are quite boring; hence you don't heard about them on reactionary websites.
The Motte might be described as a "reactionary website". I don't think that's a fair description of either Vox or the state of California, or the Biden administration. Vox and the State of California and the Biden administration are the ones claiming what you (and I!) call sexism is actually "Feminism". And you still seem to side with them, so apparently this isn't a deal-breaker for you.
If a group of adults are talking about horses and a kid comes over, points to a mule, and calls it a horse, you don't suddenly debate the definition of a horse. If he wants to go find others who want to call a mule a horse and make a group, then you have a weird bunch of people who don't know what the hell a horse is.
Alternatively, if this weird bunch of people declare that a mule is a horse, and organize and swing elections for the "mules are horses" party, and write and pass laws that mules shall be considered horses, and then enforce those laws with the power of the state, you don't get to pretend that everyone knows mules aren't horses and it's silly to even discuss the subject. Clearly, they don't know that mules aren't horses, and enough of them don't know it that they'll send the police to arrest you if you disagree too strenuously. Nor is it silly in such a situation to point out the difference between your claimed principles and observable social and political reality, most especially if you are voting for the "mules are horses" party and urging others to do likewise and sharply disapproving of the "mules are not horses" party.
In my opinion, yes, they did beat you into submission, and therefore weren't very good Christians.
I disagree. "Pain" and "Harm" are not synonyms. Pain can in fact be harmless. It can even be beneficial, when necessary to achieve a greater good. A spanking hurts, but so does exercise. So does play; I loved playing paintball as a kid, and getting hit by a paintball was way, way more painful than a swat with a belt. Sword fighting with boffers also involved inflicting pain for idle amusement, and it was totally worth it. Blocking a soccer ball with my calf once left me with a huge purple bruise six inches wide, and right when it was fading blocking another soccer ball left a new six-inch bruise inside it, like a bullseye; it made walking notably painful all week, and the week involved a ton of walking. By contrast, no spanking I received ever left bruises, or even lasting pain at all.
Having been a child, I observe that children are foolish and selfish by default, and their reasoning is remarkably deficient; this is often true even of adults. Pain cuts through all of that; children fear pain unreasoningly, instinctively, even when the pain is actually not all that bad. Eventually they learn that the anticipation and fear are actually worse than the sensation itself, and this level of mental maturation is the point at which corporal punishment stops being effective; in my case, it was the point at which I toughed out a spanking with only minimal distress, at which point my parents transitioned to other methods of discipline.
And discipline is, in fact, the point. Spankings weren't done out of anger, and they weren't done arbitrarily. Sure, they secured my submission. My submission needed to be secured, because I was a foolish child who did not understand the value of discipline, and so had to have it imposed on me until I could learn to value it through experience. Learning discipline is obviously good for any child, and the fact that the child does not recognize this in the moment is easily explained by the fact that they are a child, hence of extremely limited understanding and perspective. In hindsight, I recognize that spankings were very good for me, and wish that my parents had used more discipline, not less. I do not think this is any form of false consciousness, but is a rational assessment of my own experience. Maybe it was different for you and your parents; all I can judge is my own experience and the experience of those I observe around me. And as you say, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". When I was a kid, I wanted unlimited chocolate and Nintendo and no school. Now I recognize that these desires were immature, and I had to be taught that by parents who loved me, wanted the best for me, and prioritized my long-term welfare and flourishing over my desires for immediate gratification. How could it be otherwise?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
"Do not participate in massive unprotected orgies" is an intervention that can be equally applied to both straights and gays. And in fact, straight people were already de facto banned from participating in massive unprotected orgies based on the many, many restrictions placed on gatherings. And yet my recollection is that gays thumbed their noses at the rules, and were allowed to, even when it was causing a mini-pandemic within the pandemic.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Inukai's last words were roughly "If I could speak, you would understand" (話せば分かる, hanaseba wakaru) to which his killers replied "Dialogue is useless" (問答無用, mondō muyō).[1][better source needed]
...That will stick with me for a while.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Blame, Biomega, most Tsutomu Nehei, especially his earlier works seems like it might fit this category. Possibly the "three shakes" chapter of A Sum of All Fears? Chernobyl, come to think of it, which chains to Roadside Picnic.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I reflect rather than endorse. I think there's a pretty clear political division, though, looking back over history, so the argument seems colourable.
I just feel like if I said something along the lines of “I think you’re being obtuse/pedantic/ignorant/childish/naive about this topic” to someone on here I’d be justifiably moderated, so it’s tough to feel like I’m getting dealt a lot of “you’re a troll, you don’t really believe these things”.
One of the ways I've survived so long here is to learn to frame statements like this as explicitly subjective.
Compare: "No one could possibly believe something as stupid as [X]"
"I don't understand how someone could possibly believe this. What's the chain of logic?"
Boiled down, these statements have roughly equivalent semantic content, but the connotation is entirely different, and the likely range of responses is very different. I'm not close to perfect, but I try not to depart from this model unless I'm fully prepared to bury my opposite in citations.
There is a way of writing that encourages real conversation, and there is a way of writing that discourages it. We are trying, very imperfectly, to encourage the former and discourage the latter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
He accounts for the existence of "gay men" as a population distinct from men having sex with other men.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
From another book, then:
God made Darwin2500 to train the faithful.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
"Women are human beings, men are human doings". Men are valuable because they can do stuff for you, women simply are valuable, innately and without meaningful argument. Advocates of this assessment generally hold that it emerges from biology: sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. A tribe that loses three quarters of its men will bounce back in a generation, while a tribe that loses three quarters of its women will bounce back maybe never.
The claim here seems to be that "Gay" connotes innate nature, "being", rather than activity, "doing". Hence, the women's label?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
To me, by your logic Jesus should have submitted to the judgement of the Pharisees because a majority of people agreed with them and yet we can all universally agree he was right to call them un-Christian and he was right to flip tables in the temple.
He actually did submit to the judgement of the Pharisees. Also, he didn't call them un-Christian, he called them un-jewish, and "we" certainly dont all universally agree with that assessment; I'd imagine the Jews here beg to differ, and the argument that Christianity is innately left-wing is a common one among our right-leaning atheists. There are a number of posters here whose ideology disagrees strongly with a plain reading of Jesus' teaching.
God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves. A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian.
If people don't agree on how to use labels, communication grinds to a halt. The Rationalists had a whole thing about this: tabooing words. Just pick a different word, even a random word, to denote that the concept's proper label is disputed, and move on to talking about the contents instead. Or if you insist on your label, just understand that you're pretty much the only one using it that way here, because you're one of a vanishing few using the word that way anywhere. So when people don't instinctively use the word the way you prefer, have a little charity.
A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian.
...My parents tried to raise me in a God-approved fashion, and they definitely used spankings with a belt or a wooden spoon, particularly when I refused to submit. Would you say they "beat me into submission", and was their purported Christianity false?
The way you are using language is doomed. Assumptions, axioms, are necessary to think, let alone communicate. But you need to be conscious of the fact that the map is not the territory; axioms can be wrong, and if you're going to adopt them, you need to have a clear view as to why, and what they are costing you specifically. If you treat them as a brute fact of reality, then it becomes difficult to impossible to communicate with others who don't share them. Like above: I am now doubtful that you and I share a common understanding of "beating children" or of "Christianity".
I respond to you for the same reason I respond to most other people: I want to understand how you, an individual human, thinks. This is valuable to me because I want to understand and be understood by others. What else would the point of any of this be?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’ But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
"There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror." -Karl Marx, 1848
"Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ... Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people." -V. Lenin, 1918
To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. — Grigory Zinoviev, 1918
Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.— Martin Latsis, Red Terror
...And of course, these quotations describe the policies Communists actually used when they seized power. The idea that identifiable classes of humans were evil by nature and would need to be exterminated to secure Utopia was explicitly baked into the ideology from the start.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
By the bye, I am gratified that your bones are not decorating some barren Alaskan slope.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Do you believe principled support for free speech is a thing that can exist? Do you believe it currently or ever has had a significant constituency?
The argument when I was a kid was that there were people we very definitely did not like saying things that we very definitely did not like, but we should let them speak anyway because protecting them protects everyone else. That consensus collapsed. The "witches" metaphor was, in my view, an attempt to analyze the collapse and salvage something from it. I'd argue that effort is various flavors of doomed wherever it is made; words are powerful, hence dangerous, hence defended against. That being said, I am committed to making the best attempt of it possible, and I am confident the other mods here are as well.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I think most of us who considered the original metaphor have realized that, whatever label we might prefer to apply to ourselves, we are in fact witches by the lights of the other side of the culture war; that is, we are not at risk of being targeted because of a mistake or a misunderstanding, but because those doing the targeting wish to target people with our actual views. We are not temporarily embarrassed members of "polite society". We left "polite society" behind a long, long time ago.
I've argued at length against the HBDrs and race-essentialists and white-identitarians here. All the same, here at least, I've long ago bothered arguing over the label "racist"; the people using it know what they mean, and I know what they mean. We both agree the Progressive definition of Racist applies to me, and there's no amount of MLK quotes that will change their mind.
For some perverse reason, it cracked me up the first time I heard it, and every subsequent time since. The song came on in a playlist, and with zero context but the music and that line, I knew exactly what I was in for, and loved every minute of it.
There's no accounting for taste!
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