FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
In an actual scenario where they start a civil war and win, why would the Reds not rule with a jackboot?
Because oppressing people is an unproductive pain in the ass. I've already written off California. If the population of LA wants to live in a shithole, they can do that to their hearts content. People who don't want to live in a shithole should move somewhere else. It's the same reason the Union, post-civil-war, didn't enslave or exterminate all the southerners; as modern Progressives frequently note with frustration and regret, they weren't actually Progressive enough to apply final solutions to the Southern Problem, and so peace resumed and the rupture largely healed.
You are correct to note that this is not something one can actually be certain of across the tribal divide, and not being ruled by people who hate you applies equally to Blues as it does to Reds. The goal should be to find a way to secure that goal that doesn't involve ruling lest you be ruled. Maybe there is no such way and we are doomed to fratricide, but I think my hope is better.
I wouldn't trust any belligerent in the culture war to be magnanimous in victory on the best day, and here we are in a subthread where we're actually talking about the blog by some redtriber who is very openly fantasising about jackboots and lots of other redtribers are assuring us that he is very important and influential.
Who in this thread, specifically, is assuring you that he is very important and influential? I do not think he is important or influential to any significant degree. If his views ever gain prominence, well, second amendment solutions apply for people like him as well.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
To what degree and type of values-coherence do you require?
Have you read Conservatives as Moral Mutants?
And yet, fundamentally… it’s not true that conservatives as a group are working for the same goals as I am but simply have different ideas of how to pursue it. It’s not true that conservatives simply think that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy or that economic growth works better than foreign aid to help the global poor or that, as regrettable as it is for gay couples who long for children, children will be severely traumatized unless they are raised by heterosexuals. I would certainly prefer it to be that way. I want to have respect for all belief systems; I want to believe we’re all working for the same goals but simply disagree on certain facts.
But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.
So it goes.
That's an example of what not enough overlap for society to function looks like.
Zunger was straightforwardly correct:
No side, after all, will ever accept a peace in which their most basic needs are not satisfied — their safety, and their power to ensure that safety, most of all. The desire for justice is a desire that we each have such mechanisms to protect ourselves, while still remaining in the context of peace: that the rule of law, for example, will provide us remedy for breaches without having to entirely abandon all peace. Any “peace” which does not satisfy this basic requirement, one which creates an existential threat to one side or the other, can never hold.
i am indeed a Christian. I don't require people to also be Christians to live in peace with them. I don't require the laws to be Christian laws to live in peace under them, since there is very little the law can do to secure Christian ends. I am happy to cooperate with people who disagree with me on some things to achieve the other things that we do agree on. I am willing to extend liberty to others to the extent that they are willing to extend liberty back.
On the other hand, the more cohesive my community and the more fringe the demand of tolerance from those at its fringes, the more it seems to me that people who are incapable of fitting in should simply go somewhere else. This principle works the other way: I and mine should not casually intrude into the lives and communities of those alien to us. We should interact with those we can tolerate, and those we cannot tolerate we should separate from and avoid. This is not out of any high-minded principle, but only the practical wisdom of circles of concern. People far away are not generally as much of a problem as those close by; you are never going to conquer the whole world and institute global utopia, so the best thing is to make your bit as good as possible, and let those far away do as they will.
There is no definable "line". Either people are willing to cooperate or they are not. Either you can tolerate others or you cannot. Both maximizing and minimizing tolerance have serious downsides; you need a happy medium, and there is no way to rigorously define where that medium is. There is no way to codify it into a set of legible rules. If you have too much tolerance, values drift and society collapses. If you have too little tolerance, you fall into purity spirals and infighting and society collapses. There's no substitute for prudence and sound judgement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
But, really, do you actually think, prosaically, that's what 1890 was like?
no, but he often gives the impression that he thinks that's what 1890 was like, and I don't trust him to actually moderate in the heat of the moment.
I think you are right about your assessment of dysphemisms. Sometimes one needs to accept a label to stop it from having leverage on one's thinking. On the other hand, the solution to being called a monster by progressives is not actually to become a monster.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
The briefest, most accurate description of Kulak is that he is a pagan who worships violence itself.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
I observe that Blues tried and failed to make peaceful revolution against them impossible.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
In his recent "Genocide", for example, you can see that he differentiates between legitimate genocide, when a defeated group refuses to stop fighting, and illegitimate genocide, such as the Tutsis in Rwanda, which was committed "for utterly trivial, wicked, evil, and frivolous reasons".
I am skeptical that the difference between these two is meaningful. How does this model apply to the Melian Dialogue?
This is a recurring theme in Jim's writing, explaining goodness in terms of game theory and material consequences.
Goodness, at least my own understanding of it, is not reducible to game theory and material consequences. Based on your description, Jim does not appear to have any meaningful understanding of Christianity, and I certainly do not appreciate his appropriation of my faith for his own ends.
It may in fact not matter whether you get your ethics from Jesus or Darwin; I do not observe Jim to be winning to any appreciable degree, and do not think his fortunes likely to change in the future. I observe that many people have proclaimed Darwinian fitness where Darwinian fitness did not in fact exist. I note that my own values appear to by highly adaptive, but it seems to me that a good deal of what makes them adaptive is a willingness to adhere to them whether they appear adaptive or not.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Why not move somewhere else? Why nuclear bombardment? Why do you ignore forms of defeat that do not result in Reds ruling you with a jackboot; for instance, a new norm of strong federalism where Blues have blue laws in blue places and reds have red laws in red places? There's also the part where Reds would survive Nuclear bombardment a whole lot better than blues, and would in fact likely rebuild; the threat here is asymmetric to your side's disadvantage.
If Blue Empire were eternal despite all we Reds could attempt, if we were crushed as badly as the Christians in 1600s Japan, I think I would flee elsewhere before resorting to nuking the country. No evil rules eternal; sooner or later, often sooner, it burns itself out.
I think you are making a similar mistake to Jim; you also lack the inner coldness-of-heart, are also carried away by the narrative glories. You lack temper to lose.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Thank you.
I'm generally skeptical of the term "fascist" for people who don't choose it themselves, but don't particularly disagree. If the Jim Party somehow secured power where I live, I think fighting them would likewise be the morally correct option, and would have every confidence of victory.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
But, if I’m reading you correctly, ultimately your end goal is to form a regional society of people who share your moral intuitions.
Sure, or enough of them to limit the scope and scale of political conflict to something survivable.
If Blacks and Browns refuse to relinquish Blueness, or at any rate refuse to become sufficiently compatible with your Redness, doesn’t that mean you will either have to quell them or expel them?
If they can't secure blue power by winning a vote, and they can't compromise law enforcement, why do they need to be either quelled or expelled? If they are content to live as a political minority, well and good. if they are not content, they can move somewhere that seems more congenial.
What solutions were you envisaging?
Blue Power comes from several sources, among them political machines, long-term control of the knowledge production and dissemination apparatus, entrenched bureaucracy, and entrenched legal precedent. The foundations of most of these sources are visibly decaying. Without them, I do not think Blue Tribe is capable of the sociopolitical closure they threaten. Without that threat, the geographical sortition that has been ongoing for well-over a decade should make it possible to simply allow them to stew in their own shitholes, far away from me. and if not, the sword will remain a viable option for the foreseeable future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Speak plainly, please. What is the relevance to the present discussion?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Does that make me an extremist as well? If so, which kind?
Yes, it makes you a Blue Tribe extremist. It also means, in my opinion, that you lack imagination.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Agreed. But I think many conservatives do not want a bloodless solution. They want to overcome liberalism's tolerance of mediocrity and comfort. They want a return of martial values and spirit. They're Occidentalists, seeing bourgeois values as soft and unworthy of emulation.
Can you give some examples of these "conservatives" of which you speak?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
So then a progressive effort to scrap that, you'd just be indifferent? Waste of time to try and do anything about it?
No. You use the progressive efforts to coordinate united opposition from your own tribe. Such opposition has, in the past, involved both voting and passing laws in some cases, and shooting federal agents and bombing federal buildings in other cases. What you cannot do is assume that "playing by the rules" is the sum of valid responses, because "rules" do not work the way the "play by the rules" narrative assumes they do.
Blue efforts to kill the second amendment de jure or de facto should be resisted, because even as a corpse the second amendment is a powerful rally point. But at the same time, one must remember that the second amendment, alive or dead, was only ever a tool, and the aim that tool was designed for must be pursued regardless, within or without the law as may be necessary.
Responding to the edits:
It sounds like you want to go back to the 90s; Jim wants to go back to...I don't know, the 16th century and also kill a lot of people in the process.
"Where did things go wrong" is an important element of social critique. My answer is that things went wrong with the Enlightenment, which was not the triumph of rationality over superstition, but rather the opposite. That's a long and involved conversation, though.
I do not think my model is accurately summarized as "go back to the 1600s", more along the lines of "stop making a simple (but for some highly lucrative) mistake we made in the 1600s and have been continuously making ever since." This would be a better summary:
The empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality were never rigorous in any population-level sense. Superstition and ignorance changed their masks, and nothing more. Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down and we have had a moment to collect ourselves, a modest amount of actual skepticism and curiosity and a memory broader than the last fifteen minutes is sufficient to tear the whole rotten edifice wide open.
Skepticism, rationality and empiricism, and even instrumental materialism, do not mean believing that studies show.
In any case, I do not wish to "go back to the 90s". Free speech and human rights are a spook, "rule of law" is doomed because no set of rules can ever constrain human will. Values-coherence is a prerequisite for the formation and maintenance of a functional society; the aim is to achieve values-coherence with others, band together for mutual benefit and defense, and prevent rule by those who hate you.
As with all these conversations between "normie" right-wingers and people like Jim, the distinguishing factor is race. Race is of paramount importance, and by extension immigration and demographics are the only issues that matter.
That is certainly one point of contention. Jim and similar "right wingers" believe that the problem is blacks and browns, and wish that Reds and Blues could coordinate against them. I believe that the problem is Blues; if it were possible to coordinate with Blacks and Browns against them, that would be an entirely acceptable outcome. Browns and Blacks are a problem to the degree they empower Blues; if blue power is broken, disputes with blacks and browns are solvable in any number of ways.
Depends on what outcomes you're referring to.
Blue Tribe's goal is sociopolitical closure, to shut anyone who disagrees with them out of the economy, the political arena, and to the greatest extent possible society itself. In the classic formulation, they aim to make peaceful revolution impossible, and to the extent that they succeed they make violent revolution inevitable. The part people have missed, though, is the degree to which they have not succeeded in making peaceful revolution impossible.
Too broad of a statement to analyze, need specifics. Aren't these things that Blue Tribe blame the Red Tribe for as well?
Sure, and they're occasionally correct, after a fashion. But let's put it bluntly: the first amendment does not protect my speech, and the second amendment does not protect my right to keep and bear arms. What protects my rights is my ability to coordinate action among those who share sufficient values with me to be allies. There is no way to share power long-term with those who do not meet this basic criterion.
I think you misunderstand the far-right position. Jim thinks we're past the point of no return because 50% of newborns are non-white. What's your political solution to that?
Creating a polity where Blues hold no sway, and hence browns and blacks are not an appreciable problem. encouraging blacks and browns committed to blueness to leave for blue areas seems like a pretty easy and bloodless solution. to the extent that this is not possible, it is because Blues still have too much power, which is again a problem I think we are in the process of solving.
No, you're just operating from totally different first principles.
Indeed we are. His are wrong and foolishly so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
I think there's less foolishness there and more evil; the pursuit of a good end by bad means has long since given way to a pursuit of a bad end by bad means.
"Evil" and "bad" are meaningless unless one shares values-coherence with the people with one communicates, which is not true for Jim or people who think he's correct, and cannot in general be assumed here. I certainly do consider him evil and agree with the rest of your analysis as to why, but I try not to assume that others share my moral values.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
With respect, I think you're trying to have it both ways; you call yourself as an "extremist", but your suggested proposals and the congeniality with which you express them are not really outside the mainstream in 2025.
I am on record that large-scale, open-ended political violence is a preferable outcome to the political outcomes Blue Tribe appears to me to be aiming for, and further that I believe Red Tribe can and will decisively win such a fight. I have argued at length that the Constitution and rule of law are dead, and that their corpses provide little advantage to our present situation. I have argued at length, and continue to argue, that reconciliation between Reds and Blues is probably impossible in the foreseeable future, and that the culture war is terminal for our society as presently constituted. If you think that these positions do not qualify me for the label of extremism, I'd be interested in hearing your arguments as to why.
What separates me from Jim and his ilk is that I have a better understanding both of why that violence should be delayed as long as possible, and why we have advantages in executing it that are not necessarily compromised by such delays. If I am not mistaken, Jim himself, and certainly many others like him, argued that we were already past the point of no return, that political solutions were impossible, and that in fact we had already compromised our ability win an outright fight, leaving fighting immediately as a desperate last resort. And then the 2024 election happened, and suddenly our position is considerably better.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
I am a right-wing extremist. I am aware of "The Dread Jim" from many previous discussions through the various iterations of this forum.
His proposed solutions are not feasible, nor are they necessary, nor does he appear to possess insight or a track record that makes him worth listening to or discussing in any significant way. He, like many similar "right-wing extremists", appears to be possessed of a combination of panicked fearfulness and abstracted zealotry aimed at a sort of imaginary, narrative-based glorious final battle. He, like many others, lacks the necessary coldness of heart to effectively prosecute the culture war.
His suggestions are similarly foolish.
- eliminating voting rights is unnecessary if federal power can be annulled and Blue cultural and political power centers neutralized and demolished, which by all evidence appears to be much easier to accomplish.
- Rolling back LGBT's influence on our society does not require exterminating LGBT people, only creating general awareness of the concrete harms their movement has caused and an understanding that their social control can and must be resisted. This, again, appears to be working.
- It is a very good idea to roll back feminism and "women's rights" generally. As with LGBT, what this looks like is establishing common knowledge of how these movements have catastrophically overstepped, the concrete harms they've caused, and the ways we were better off before them. Women having the vote is irrelevant if we neutralize the unaccountable power that vote is meant to enable. Relationships between men and women, whether spousal or familial, are not advanced by the sort of iron fist Jim advocates. Loving relationships can exert a level of stabilization, security, and sound life decision-making that Jim's preferred forms of tyranny can never achieve.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
I read him for a while in the dark days, but pretty quickly noted that he made a lot of predictions that did not pan out, with zero effort to calibrate. I concluded that either he was smart enough to be deliberately manipulating his audience, or else he was stupid enough to not recognize the pattern. Either way, not worth listening to.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
First, the argument from exhaustion: because we've been trying to fix these problems for the better part of a century. Many hundreds of thousands of smart, capable, hardworking people have dedicated their entire lives to solving these problems for multiple generations, across fifty different states, and have uniformly failed every single time, on every single approach to every single issue...
Second, the argument from blindness: we have no way of effectively measuring the problem we're trying to fix, other than by raw outcomes. The dominant narrative holds that bad outcomes are caused by racism, but there is no detectable racism gradient. That is, there do not appear to be places in America that are noticeably more or less racist in any coherent or useful sense, as measured by outcomes, despite a wide range of policies, populations, and cultural norms...
Third, the argument from dementia: we don't approach the problem in a systematic way, we don't learn from our failures, and we don't even keep track of what's been tried or what the outcomes were. The realities of politics, policy, media narratives and public attention span and engagement mean that there is no consistent train of thought, no effective accumulation of experience. People can and do spend their whole lives pushing solutions that were proved to be a dead-end a generation ago. For obvious reasons, this makes the previous problems much worse. It's not just that we're stuck in a maze, and it's not just that the maze is extremely vast, it's that we aren't capable of remembering what turns we took. For an example, look at the ubiquitous claims that bad educational outcomes are caused by differences in school funding between majority-white and majority-black schools. Note, halfway down that article, the following sentence:
The analysis does not include federal dollars, much of which is targeted to the poorest communities.
You will find a similar sentence in most articles on this subject, because those federal dollars completely close the gap. Less educational funding for black students looked like an obvious example of low-hanging fruit, so we fixed it by using federal money to compensate for differences in local funding from disparate tax bases. Only, the disparate outcomes didn't go away, and so people willfully ignore that the solution they're advocating has already failed...
Fourth, the argument from sociopathy: powerful institutions are incentivized to aggravate all of the above problems, because doing so provides significant short-term benefits at no appreciable short-term cost. Blacks get the soothing reassurance that all their problems are the fault of the out-group, not the inevitable result of their own bad individual choices. Progressives get a profoundly loyal block of supporters, and a massive rhetorical cudgel to beat the out-group with. And of course, the alternative is admitting "things suck, and we have no idea how to fix them", which is never going to be a winning answer, despite it being the truth. At this point, any solution is pretty clearly going to require a minimum of decades of constant effort, and the reality is that on the timescale of our existing political system, decades-long solutions are effectively impossible. Lying provides immediate and significant benefit at no cost, and not lying imposes significant costs with no compensating benefits. The result is that lying is adaptive, so our political and knowledge-production systems are absolutely overrun with liars...
Fifth, the argument from senescence: we do not get unlimited attempts at a solution to the racial justice problem. Attempted solutions burn social cohesion, and we are running out of social cohesion. Despite popular narratives, this is not primarily a problem between Conservatives and Blacks; Conservatives and Blacks mostly don't live near or exercise power over each other, so there's not all that much cause for direct, serious object-level conflict. No, the problem is between conservatives and Progressives, who are locked in a direct and extremely damaging culture war due to incompatible values...
Mottizens: do you have a good relationship with your parents? More specifically: do you try to make them proud and live up to values they inculcated in you? Or do you think about failings they had, and try to orient your life toward avoiding those?
I have what I think is a very good relationship with my parents. They currently live with my wife and I through the working week, and help care for and teach our children. We attend church together. My father and I take walks in the evening where either he listens to me lecture about the news, or I listen to him lecture about theology and church history. It's a really good way to live.
My parents both certainly have their flaws, but I still consider them a model for myself and for my children. They did their best to filter out their own trauma when raising me and my siblings, and our childhoods were, I think, much better than theirs. I aim to do the same for my children, and try to help where I can with my numerous nieces and nephews.
This is a thing where my brain just declines to recognize the danger. Even aside from the strength issue, most 12 year old girls are just not terribly coordinated.
My thinking is less from playfighting girls, and more from a childhood spent playing with knives and cutting myself a fair bit in the process. Sharp knives require very little force to cut or to pierce, and the motions needed are natural and instinctive. Fuck up the disarm and you can do all the cutting yourself, just bumping into the edge whilst trying to get to the limb behind it. And sure, a tweener girl is likely to have the aggressive mindset to go on the offense, and may be uncoordinated enough that you can just grab her wrist before she can flinch, and probably that knife is even pretty dull because she probably doesn't know how to sharpen it. Probably.
My claim is not that a girl so armed is certain or even likely to win a fight with an adult man. She is not. My argument is that a tweener girl brandishing a ~7-inch chef's knife is making a very serious threat, because a knife can hurt you very badly with very little force.
The marker test is going to tell you mostly about the point. Get a cardboard box and a hot-glue gun, glue together two layers of cardboard and then cut out the knife shape with a boxcutter. paint the edge with food coloring or acrylic paint or whatever. tell her she gets ice cream if she gets a line on you. there's a big difference between trying to get past a quarter-inch of marker tip, and trying to get past six or seven inches of blade.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Did the adults actually throw the kid to the ground and kick her in the head? Is there any evidence of this in the video or from the aftermath: dirt on her clothes, scrapes or bruises, bloody nose, split lip, any evidence of physical harm?
The GSG excerpt above talks about three girls; the two sisters in the
Someone else in the thread has cited hospital records of treatment for a concussion, so it looks like there was in fact violence inflicted on at least one of the girls.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
hatchets like the one she has are quite easy to "conceal" in what she's wearing. handle down the back of your pants-leg, belly of the blade hooked over the hem, shirt covering the blade. It'll almost certainly print in a variety of ways and make moving and sitting a bit awkward, but nothing prohibitive.
The one that's going to be hard to conceal is the chef's knife, unless she has some sort of sheath, which in my experiences knives like that don't tend to have and kids don't tend to think of making. A long blade sitting against your flesh is not a recipe for safety. There's also not enough structure to hook the hemline reliably, and you don't want one of those dropping down your pantleg along your thigh and calf and into your ankle and foot at an inopportune moment.
The statement is interesting to me to the extent that it's the girls' story, and therefore something fixed that we can measure against further solid evidence. I'm skeptical about how "retrieving" a hatchet and chef's knife works, but it's at least plausible. But as for the rest, it's he-said-she-said; I disagree with comments here that kids brandishing blades isn't a lethal threat, we have no actual proof of the inappropriate sexual remarks and I learned a long time ago the hazards of "Listening and Believing", but also I'm keenly aware that foreign males treating native girls like whores is in fact a serious problem and one the current establishment has proven they will expend significant resources to cover up; but then, this guy making passes at kids in front of his sister seems pretty odd.
At this point, as far as I can tell, all the points that seem morally significant to me have zero solid evidence behind them:
- Who approached who?
- Did the adults make "inappropriate sexual remarks" toward the kids? What were those remarks, specifically?
- What did the kids say back?
- Who initiated assault?
- Did the adults actually throw the kid to the ground and kick her in the head? Is there any evidence of this in the video or from the aftermath: dirt on her clothes, scrapes or bruises, bloody nose, split lip, any evidence of physical harm?
What we actually have on video is pretty much useless for answering the above questions. Notably, I'd argue that knife-and-hatchet brandishing can in fact be morally-legitimate self defense, and so can knocking a minor assailant down and then kicking them while they're down, including in the head. Whether the weapons were carried or retrieved seems entirely irrelevant to me.
I'm given to understand that Urban England does not suffer from a paucity of security cameras. I have a strong presumption that this event was captured on video. I want to see that video. If it shows anything other than the girls approaching the adults and immediately brandishing or initiating assault, the girls are, in my opinion, in the right. The longer we go without seeing the video, the more my priors shift toward the girls being in the right. I see no reason to blindly trust the authorities or presume that their secret judgements are valid, and my priors on their interest in an incident like this one are fairly strong.
I'm aware, believe me. We're trying to make the best of the time we have. And at the same time, our family situation would be much worse-off without them helping with the kids during the workweek. It's been really, really good for all of us.
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