FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Argh.
Because there's a "new user filter" baked into the codebase that we can't remove, and it auto-filters posters who haven't gotten above a certain threshold of cumulative upvotes, and because other then a very small greyed-out icon, the only way for mods to see which posts are filtered is to check a separate page.
Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness? That’s news to me.
One of Feminism's main pushes 2014-2020 was explicitly to make sexual misconduct allegations require less proof and to have more consequences, and to increase the rate of report generally while explicitly arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed. Notable early examples included Atheism+, #ListenAndBelieve, Jackie's story, #TeamHarpies, We Need to Talk About Jian, along with too many smaller ones to name; on a policy level, we had the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter implementing these as policies in the university system, and "affirmative consent" laws in California. This led to #MeToo, which culminated with the farce of the Kavanaugh accusations. This is a very abbreviated list, and this particular set of demands has been at least arguably the dominant one within Feminism over the last decade.
Maybe you are an atypical feminist, but to the degree that Feminism is a coherent category that can be analyzed, "dramatically lower threshold for sexual assault accusations" seems very clearly to be one of its most prominent characteristics.
And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?
I would define it as a woman who does not identify with the presently-dominant ideological form of Feminism. This would describe my wife, sister and mother, as well as a number of other women in my life.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Plenty of politicians/movements have proven capable of picking their way through hostile bureaucracies without tearing the whole thing down.
Could you give some examples?
Thanks you for the effortful post, and Jesus Christ on a cracker, what a mess.
What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?
This is not an easy question to answer. Complicated opaque processes require trust, and if trust is broken, you're left with a question of balance between false positives and false negatives in your oversight.
First, it's worth pointing out that, at least in my view, trust has been broken here. The DoD is a bureaucracy, with all the attendant moral hazard that label implies. We know they can be incompetent. We know they cover their incompetence when they can. We also know they can be malicious: we have the papers out of Afghanistan showing that DoD leadership was lying to the public for two decades, and we have numerous examples of them lying to Trump to circumvent his direct orders, and even bragging about it publicly.
More abstractly, at some point, "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" ignores the fact that malice is easily disguised as incompetence in a complex, opaque environment, and also the fact that sufficiently advanced incompetence is isomorphic to malice, and the DoD over the last few decades has, in my view, cleared this bar.
There's been several threads of discussion above about the DOGE versus USAID; one side of those threads is "why not just do cuts in an orderly fashion?" The answer that keeps emerging is "we don't trust the bureaucracy to cooperate in good faith, so it is better to treat them as hostile and simply cut everything." You seem amenable to that explanation. If I asked you "what would convince you that USAID is simply compliant rather than maliciously compliant", what would your answer be?
Or maybe it's a bit simpler. If someone can present a DoD planning document stating "if you issue these orders, here are the negative consequences", and Biden signed it saying "do it anyway", that would be a pretty open-and-shut case of this being Biden's fault. Only, I'm pretty sure that document doesn't exist.
Further, reading through the description you've provided, I find a lot of the items seem to simply kick the can down the road. Okay, the Taliban has a known fighting season. We could have avoided the known fighting season, but that's been scotched. But by your explanation, what happens next should be predictable, which means our extraordinarily-well-resourced DoD should adapt to the change in circumstances. That adaption doesn't appear to have materialized. I understand that the enemy gets a vote, that the DoD and our military personnel are also human, that morale on the very end of a twenty-year mission was probably not high, and that requests for additional resources for an operation explicitly aiming at reducing resources to zero is not going to work well. All of these are plausible forces pushing against success.
But at the end of the day, our military's job is to take a mission assigned and execute it done with a high degree of professionalism, and that very evidently did not happen here. To the extent that constraints complicate matters, it is their job to work the problem and deliver a solution. To the extent that the mission was simply not possible within the given constraints, they need to say so (and I don't expect they actually will; Yes-Manning seems to be endemic throughout the officer corps of at least the army and navy, from what I've observed.)
Likewise with the paperwork. Why is all this paperwork being kept in an office in Afghanistan? We have telecommunications. There were no backups in Washington? Those backups weren't integrated into the bugout plan? There was no way to keep this important data other than in paper files in a cabinet in Kabul?
I am not inclined to hold Biden accountable for the outcome because he is neither a tactician nor a strategist nor a bureaucracy expert. I can readily believe he imposed restraints: get out of Afghanistan by one year from now, in time for the 9/11 anniversary. A year is a pretty damn long runway for an event that should have been pre-planned in detail twenty years ago. If there was not a plan on a shelf for this eventuality, that seems like a failure on the part of the planners. What if an actual hot war kicked off, and we needed to pull our forces out of Afghanistan not in a year, but by the end of this week? There was no plan for that?
And again, I appreciate that hindsight is 20/20, and it's all very easy for me to say, having never been involved in the un-invasion of Afghanistan. But I don't actually trust the DoD, and that lack of trust arises from what seem to me to be sound reasons. If I'm expected to blame political leadership, I want a paper trail of explicit warnings that the leadership explicitly ignored and efforts to compensate that the leadership explicitly overruled. If the system is, as I suspect, built more or less entirely around preventing such things from existing, well, that's one more reason why I don't trust it, and why you shouldn't either.
Alternatively, maybe that paper trail does exist, in which case I'll be happy to update.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, but the US isn't going to collapse because social security becomes insolvent.
The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, in a social context where the taboo on political violence has been trampled to nonexistence. Many millions of people are openly cheering for political assassins at this present moment. Many millions more have already demonstrated their willingness to shred the basic constitutional, legal and social protections of those fellow Americans they consider their outgroup, without apparent limit.
If you think "a lot of economic turmoil" is survivable under these conditions, it seems to me that you are stretching optimism beyond the bounds of credibility.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Why would delaying the withdrawal or specifying the anniversary of 9/11 for the pullout date cause the specific failures we saw?
I'm not a Biden fan, but I do praise him for actually getting us out of Afghanistan. Likewise, my prior is that the US military should be able to pull out of Afghanistan in good order on a specified date more or less regardless of what the Taliban or the locals do. To date, I've seen no reason not to assume malicious compliance on the part of the military brass, something they very clearly are willing to do given the bragging about straightforward insubordination and deceit under Trump.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Is there some method for preventing you from wearing a mask and beating the vagrant senseless with a baseball bat?
Which is a worse problem: a fire, or the arsonist who set it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
President Clinton established that profound moral corruption was no bar to Presidential office. President Bush II established that reasonably sound moral character was insufficient to prevent disastrous misrule. President Biden killed any possible appeal to formal rule of law, and did some dancing on the grave of the moral character question in the bargain.
There aren't really a lot of valid norms remaining upright at the moment. In 2016, Democratic candidates stumped on the policy of taxing religions they didn't like and publicly laughed at the idea of Constitutional restraint for their desires. With this last election, I note that numerous Blue Tribe commentators explicitly dismissed the actual person murdered in the attempted Trump assassination, because he was a Trump supporter and therefore fair game. Likewise, one notes the Luigi fandom. If you're worried about people endorsing murder, there's no need to speculate about hypotheticals when we've got live examples around us at this very moment; likewise for other forms of extremism.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I weep at the loss. Yet, this forum has a specific purpose, and we have instituted rules to achieve that purpose. I know better than anyone that there is a point past which further discussion is fruitless, but when one reaches that point the proper thing to do is to leave for greener pastures. And there is, I think, still a fair amount worth discussing; note all the blackpill predictions in the runup to this last election; while those predictions came very close to being correct, "very close to being correct" is still a synonym for "incorrect".
But at the end of the day there is a correct answer, the people who put the pen to paper did so for specific reasons. I think Christians are forced into a wrong interpretation.
So you assert. And if we assert back that in fact our interpretation is correct, what then? From an inside view, we could argue over the verses themselves. From an outside view, we could observe that Christianity has been an absurdly successful religious and cultural force by pretty much any metric you could select, and despite reports of its demise for the last century continues to wield considerable (and in my view growing) influence even now.
Of course they believe their interpretation is correct, although frankly speaking they mostly just ignore the Old Testament except as setup for Jesus.
I certainly can't speak for all Christians, having not met most of them. When I was a child, the Old Testament was my favorite part of the bible. When I was a youth, it was my least favorite as I found it strange and disconcerting. With maturity, it now seems of a piece with the New Testament, and many of the parts that seemed harsh and unforgiving now make good sense. The churches I've attended did not ignore the Old Testament, but they certainly treat them as "setup for Jesus" since that's, you know, the central thesis of our entire religion. This is the thing you do where you frame the discussion on the assumption you are right and everyone else is wrong. You haven't elaborated on how Christians supposedly do this, or why you believe they do, so what response is possible other than "no, that seems incorrect"?
If one believes that the correct way to read the OT is as setup to the NT, what's the proper way to argue that with you? Your argument that Christians "mostly just ignore" the OT is absurd on its face, given the amount of Christian teaching, commentary and theology centering on the OT. Your claim that Christians are "unequipped to properly analyze" the OT because their "religion is so deeply rooted in the mythos itself" seems to be an attempt to disqualify people with a deep knowledge of the subject at hand because they care too much, as opposed to dispassionate, detached observers of the Judaic mythos such as yourself. Is that about the size of it?
I contend that we do not, in fact, ignore the OT, that many among us study it in great detail, and that we are no more unequipped to properly analyze it than you are. Make an argument if you have one, but spare me the empty, pompous pretense of sophistication.
...That will stick with me for a while.
More options
Context Copy link