FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Didn't you just say that your side will not accept a crazy guy with a gun explanation?
I am not going to accept a "shooters are usually crazy people, he was probably just a crazy person" explanation until I see concrete evidence that he is actually crazy. None has been presented. I am doubtful that any will be forthcoming, but stand to be corrected.
This is A) not true
I think it's pretty true, but welcome additional precision. What portion of the left-wing internet is some degree of happy that he's dead, in your view and experience?
...and B) "murder and suspected jaywalking".
I disagree. Blues do not appear to me to have a consensus that Reds being murdered is something to be concerned about. I find that lack of consensus concerning in its own right.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota?
There was minimal uproar over that assassination because the assassin was a former colleague of the victims who appears to have gone very unambiguously and very publicly crazy in the runup to the shootings. We had considerable discussion of the assassinations at the time, including a number of people, myself included initially, claiming it appeared to be ideological and was a very big deal. Only, by the next day he was in custody and we could read excerpts of his ramblings, and had testimony from his friends and neighbors showing that he had very clearly gone crazy.
People are ringing their hands in this thread because one of the most prominent political activists in Red Tribe just got very publicly murdered, and leftists were visibly celebrating his murder within literal seconds of the shot being fired. I understand that people pointing out this reality might distress you for a number of different reasons, but this is, in fact, very direct and undeniable culture war.
Further, it seems to me that Red Tribe does in fact pretty clearly have the moral high ground here. As I mentioned above and can substantiate at some length, there does not appear to be any substantive evidence that the Minnesota killings were ideological, and there was no widespread public celebration of the sort we are seeing even before that became clear. This is not me attempting to gerrymander definitions, this is the plain facts as I see them.
The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade. They have repeatedly and communally celebrated political murders over that time, have grown increasingly shameless at doing so, and they are again doing so at this moment, all over the internet. This does not appear to me to be a "both sides" problem. It is not going to be resolved by "touching grass".
All of those are indeed weak evidence that he was Red-aligned, which was why at the time I bet he was actually Red-aligned. But then I actually read what he'd been writing and posting shortly before the attack, and what some of his colleagues reported of his actions, and that gave much, much stronger evidence that he was in fact just insane.
They caught him alive, IIRC, they have all his devices and all his possessions. If someone can point to any actual evidence that his attacks were motivated by anything resembling red-tribe political ideology, I will be happy to count him as a Red-aligned ideological killer.
Over the years, Boelter would reach out with what appeared to be exponentially ambitious endeavors, Kalech said: "What he wanted to take on, I think, might have been bigger." Boelter wanted to end American hunger, according to another project's PowerPoint. And while the idea would require massive changes to current laws and food regulation, it appeared Boelter dismissed that as surmountable if only elected officials could get on board. "American Hunger isn't a food availability problem," the presentation said. "American Hunger is a tool that has been used to manipulate and control a vast number of American's [sic], with the highest percentage being people of color. This tool can and should be broken now, and failure to do so will be seen as intentional criminal negligence by future generations. We should be embarrassed as a nation that we let this happen and have not correctly [sic] this injustice 100 years ago," one slide said. One slide described how his own lived experience informed his idea, referring to him in the third person: "several times in his life Vance Boelter was the first person on the scene of very bad head on car accidents," and that he was able to help "without fear of doing something wrong" because he was "protected" by Good Samaritan law – which could and should be applied to food waste, the slide said....
To keep an eye on which lawmakers supported the necessary legislation, "there needs to be a tracking mechanism," the presentation said, where citizens could "see listed every singe [sic] elected official and where they stand on the Law (Food Providers Good Samaritan Law)." "Those few that come out and try to convince people that it is better to destroy food than to give it away free to people, will be quickly seen for who they are. Food Slavers that have profited off the hunger of people for years," the 18-slide, nearly 2,000-word presentation said.
You tell me how this sounds like a Red Tribe grievance.
@Skibboleth is flaming out because he is a die-hard partisan whose goal is to pretend to be reasonable, and his side is having a very bad week. We actually discussed the Waltz shooting at some length at the time, including considerable speculation about motives. The shooting happened in the middle of the night and IIRC by the next afternoon they caught the guy and had established that he was legitimately crazy, so the conversation died out. The arguments he is presenting above are specious, but he puffs up big, neglects the detail and shouts in outrage, so mostly people don't notice.
What we are seeing now is legitimately way, way worse than the Minnesota shootings. We have video of people in the crowd jumping and screaming for joy within seconds of the bullet's impact. the entire left-wing internet is either openly celebrating his murder or feigning smug disinterest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
That is in exceptionally poor taste.
People do these things because they believe they will be popular with those around them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Is national polling representative of the left as a whole?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Black rifles are primarily useful as a political rallying and coordination point, not for their (considerable) efficacy in a rebellion against the government. Their absence does not significantly impede such a rebellion.
but he tracks to right wing and is more likely right wing than left.
How, specifically?
I followed this at the time, and my prediction was that it didn't look like a crazy person (obvious premeditation, use of tactics, use of a mask, etc), and seemed more likely to be a right-winger than a left-winger, given the available evidence. But then more evidence came out, and what it showed was that this guy had been fairly apolitical but mental-health-wise marginal, and that recently he had gone cuckoo-bananas based on his public pronouncements, in a way that did not map to the red-blue split.
I was, from the start, prepared to believe that he was motivated by right-wing ideology, and I maintain that the prior for any murder of politicians should be that the act is political. But in this case, he genuinely seemed to believe that (IIRC) he'd figured out how to end world hunger by outlawing food waste at the federal level, and thought the politicians who weren't listening to him were on the side of Big Hunger. That is not right-wing ideology. That is actual craziness.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
It is difficult to properly phrase a cognitohazard warning. I am sorry that I am not better at it. Please consider that I mean this genuinely and in good will, and am not attempting to play some sort of complicated word game.
A lot of people here historically and currently believe that this is all business as usual, that the spiraling escalation of the culture war is more or less a sideshow to the more meaningful features of modern society. They are wrong. The increasing violence, and the increasing support for violence, is very bad, and has a high probability of making everyone's lives much worse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools?
Yes. No matter how many school shootings happen, there is approximately a 0% chance that a significant number of Americans will conclude that what we need is more of them. Not so with shooting politicians.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
It's a one-human to another warning, not a mod warning. I also am attempting to provide clarity. It is difficult to phrase a cognitohazard warning properly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Please do not use this space to workshop ways to make the world a significantly worse place.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
It's possible. It's not the way I would bet, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Yes. We've been burning social cohesion to resolve those issues. We are out of social cohesion, so we're burning other things now: norms, laws, institutions, credibility of social movements. At some point we run out of things to burn, and the darkness closes in.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
What is of moderate interest to me is that the report as of now is that a single shot was taken from a rooftop 200 yards away. That is not Zangara stepping out of the crowd. Assuming that detail is correct, that is someone who knew what they were doing.
200 yards is not a particularly notable distance for a scoped rifle. The level of competence here is someone who bought a scope, mounted it, and then spent 20-30 rounds at a range zeroing it.
Very much could get swept away as a “crazy guy with a gun”.
No one in Red Tribe is going to accept that a famous Conservative activist being sniped on a college campus can be summarized as "crazy guy with a gun".
By next Monday, there will be no shortage of salient examples about how the shooting was his own fault, or a good thing actually, or understandable because he was such a scumbag. No one here is going to be willing to argue that a large plurality of Blue Tribe, and likely an outright majority of young politically-active blues outright don't support the shooting.
I am highly confident that the assassin here is not going to be "crazy" any more than Hodges was "crazy".
Maybe I'll be proven wrong. I doubt it, though.
[EDIT] - MSNBC is saying that nobody knows nothing: "we don't know if it's a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
You appear to be making an argument that demands for citation are being used as, as another commenter put it, a filibuster against evidence other commenters don't want to look at. This may be so, and this is in fact the behavior your pasta is meant to highlight, but it seems to me that these are in fact inflammatory claims, that the citations should in fact be provided, and that while some here might be trying to filibuster in this manner, the user you are responding to is not, and it has drawn a number of reports.
We have a rule about proactively providing evidence for inflammatory claims. We also have a rule against low-effort engagement, which copypasta certainly is, and in fact your last warning was for copypasta. Your warning/AAQC ratio is about 3:1, not horrifying, but not great either. I am giving you a one-day ban; please read the rules posted at the top of the page and in the sidebar, and make an effort to understand and follow them. If you disagree with what you see here, just say so. You're allowed to do that. You are not allowed to do this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
or at least half of these, a scientist could point to real data, but they misinterpreted or fudged the data.
For all of these, a human wrote symbols on a page, and then some other human read those symbols and assumed they accurately reflected ground truth. Coincidentally, I am pretty sure this is exactly how people came to believe in the phoenix. I do not see why I should consider the Phoenix as meaningfully more fantastical than the snail darter. Both are creatures that do not exist, whose salient properties are entirely fictitious.
Why would it be gullible to believe in “growth mindset” if there are studies on it, but then later studies disproved it?
Yes, because "studies" just reduces to "authorities said so", and who these authorities are and why they're considered authorities doesn't seem to ground out in any rigorous scientific process, now or ever. "Studies show" is an assumption of reliability, in the same way that people used to assume Plato or Aristotle or whoever were reliable. I see no evidence that it is any more rigorous that the authorities that preceded it. Sure, you can up the reliability by carving away the worst examples via arbitrary hindsight. And I can do the same for the ancients; I bet Pythagoras' math is pretty solid.
The issue here is that the common person is led to believe in the findings of popular science, because schools teach that.
It appears to me that scientists also routinely believe the findings of popular science as well, for similar reasons. People trust authorities to be reliable, and the important word in "consensus reality" is consensus. Also, scientists remain people.
If I make a claim like “prayer works” or “God does miracles”, even someone with a very low IQ can tell that prayer does not work as claimed, and that miracles appear to have stopped around the same time that scientific instruments and recording came along.
IIRC, we actually have records of first- and second-generation Christians writing about how miracles had dried up over the course of their lifetime, and the bible itself records numerous instances of fraudulent or illegitimate miracle-workers or magicians. And this about a millennia and a half before scientific instruments and recording came along. Nor is it obvious to me that "prayer does not work as claimed", in contrast to "most people do not understand how prayer is claimed to work".
But more importantly, the point is not that people used to believe in things that did not exist, that they had no good reason beyond appeals to authority and peer pressure to believe existed. The point is that people never stopped believing such things, and continue to believe them to this day.
The issue of superstition is an enormous stumbling block that prevents tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, from ever considering religious activity.
...But notably does not prevent them from believing any variety of other superstitions, so long as those superstitions are framed as "scientific". There is no functional difference between sacred oil and patent medicine; it's a paint job, that's all.
But trust in reasoning doesn’t normally suffer.
No it doesn't. That's how they keep getting fooled; science was used to lie to them a hundred times before, but that was all isolated bad actors; this new claim is of course trustworthy, because it's science! Everyone knows that, how silly could you be to doubt it?
Sure, but the phoenix and the pelican in question are pretty crazy creatures to believe in. If they believed these creatures existed based on testimony, and believed it for centuries, then they had a default level of gullibility that has been lost since the advent of science.
Efficient central planning.
Iron laws of history.
New Soviet Man.
Sluggish Schizophrenia.
Lysenkoism.
Sparrow Extermination.
Rape Culture.
Stereotype threat.
Growth Mindset.
Structural racism.
Gender Identity.
Masks stop the spread.
The wage gap.
The science of Criminal Rehabilitation.
How long do you think we could make this list if we actually tried to be rigorous about it?
No "default level of gullibility" was lost with the advent of science. The overwhelming majority of people do not understand science and do not base their beliefs on scientific rules. Not even the overwhelming majority of scientists do this. I am skeptical that even a slim majority of scientists do this even with regard to the science they themselves personally conduct.
If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do >Y creation, then why is it good to cap them artificially? Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs.
With the labor force constrained to the people currently living here, when we want to do >Y production, we can bid up the wages for it, or we can figure out ways to produce more efficiently, both of which are strong, socially-positive alternatives to simply capping production. Importing more workers achieves neither.
As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.
You have gall, I'll give you that.
The other effect keeping to a fixed pool of labor provides, it seems to me, is that there is less incentive to simply write off the sort of people you evidently hold in such contempt. If we cannot simply export jobs or import cheap foreign labor, we have a vested interest in keeping our people from turning into human waste, and a vested interest in salvaging absolutely any of them that we can. It appears to me that you are rating these people as worthless in order to continue the process by which they lost their worth.
I was recently reading an article about drug problems, and it mentioned the communities that have been blighted by drugs "since the economic upheaval of the 90s". the 90s was when we started buying in to the pitch you're making here. I remember that pitch when it was new, how there would be some disruption but the economic prosperity would lift all boats. I remember small towns with their town squares, full of bustling businesses and broad-based prosperity. I drive through some of those old town squares now; they're uniformly ghost towns, boarded up and crumbling. We were foolish to buy the pitch then. Buying it now requires a special sort of derangement.
Adopting your view necessarily means devaluing our countrymen. If I'm going to devalue my countrymen, I'm going to do it for more fitting reasons than pecuniary interest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Transmetropolitan had the "Revivals", where society healed and thawed out the cryopreserved as a government program, knowing that they'd be unable to handle the future and would essentially become mentally-ill homeless. It had a sort of poignant plausibility to it.
Or there's always the []publicity stunt option](http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=558).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
I'm annoyed by the "imported" framing. Biden didn't wake up one day and go out of his way to coax ten million people into coming to the US.
My understanding is that Biden's administration expended significant effort, resources and taxpayer dollars to directly facilitate the entry of foreigners into America in very large quantities. This included far more than passively declining to enforce our numerous laws against illegal entry, and included flying planeloads of such people into the American interior on the Government's dime, and then releasing them into our communities, possibly while directly subsidizing their material needs. It also involved things like expending government resources to remove and to attempt to remove border obstacles, with the goal of directly facilitating illegal border crossings by foreigners.
My understanding is that positive actions like this resulted in millions of foreigners settling in America, in addition to millions more who were able to cross because of Biden's additional, "passive" refusal to enforce immigration laws and the border generally. Am I mistaken?
Let this not be mistaken for a pro-open-borders argument on my part.
Okay. What's your view on the proper way to enforce immigration and the border? If we are not letting literally anyone who comes in, who should we let in? What's your understanding of how many people have come in during Biden's administration? Was that number about right, too high, or too low? What should it have been, and what should have changed to prevent immigration past that amount?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
This issue (freedom to speak, share and view anything, including seedy content, on the internet, regardless of what the state thinks of it – and "payment processors" are the government by another name, considering the existing interlinkages and their monopolistic market share) in particular both infuriates me like no other, and somehow makes me understand and even sympathize with libs' thinking on immigration.
What's your stance on CSAM? Do you bite the bullet or break out the carveout knife?
If you bite the bullet, you are unelectable, as all but the lizardman's constant disagree strongly with you. You have principles, and zero access to power.
If you provide a carveout, you have no principles, and we are in fact just haggling over the price.
How do you convince people that life was better when they were really "people" in the same way men are without a jackboot?
The past is not an unknown world to us. We have solid evidence of what the world was like before the progressive era, and it did not consist solely or even primarily of dehumanized women and tyrant men. Men and women have loved each other and cooperated together for all of recorded history, and they can do so again. The brave new progressive world has made both men and women wretched. Currently, it is expending vast effort to try to paper over its deficiencies on behalf of women in particular, usually by the use of blatant social and legal double-standards. Remove some of these, and maybe we can get back to something resembling constructive engagement once more.
This is the inverse of your criticism of Jim. Jim believes you that the past was pure evil, and wants to return that evil you both agree we've lost to the modern world. I do not believe you that the past was pure evil, and want to return the non-evil we've lost to the modern world. Your system has not solved men abusing women. It has not solved rape. It has not solved sexual harassment or coercion. I believe my system can do better on all of those things that yours, and I think we can and possibly have proven it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
So, what, a pathogen keyed to ethnic genetic markers? Or maybe something that goes for corn or wheat, cause a famine? See, I don't dream of things like that, because my enemies aren't a race, they're an ideology. The line between good and evil really does run through every human heart. In any case, if Scott was right about thrive vs survive, it doesn't really matter what sci-fi superweapon you choose. However you create an environment favoring survival, we are the side that specializes in survival. To the extent that you change your own faction to increase your tolerance for survival conditions, you likely also reduce your ideological variance from people like me.
I would need a way to make sure the red tribe wouldn't be able to complete an AGI for that to be reasonable, but on the whole, I would agree.
I generally don't spend much time worrying about superintelligent AGI. It seems to me that if it happens, there's not going to be much we can do about it, and my understanding of Alignment in the MIRI sense is that it's a pipe dream. I am very confident that coherent extrapolated volition doesn't exist, and neither does anything resembling it. Humans are not going to be able to code an omnibenevolent deity, so either they aren't going to be able to code a deity of any kind, or else my plan is to be conveniently dead before the Torment Nexus is finished booting up.
I appreciate the update on this. @MadMonzer as well who added additional detail here.
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