FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
They are actually unequipped to properly analyze these works because their own religion is so deeply rooted in the mythos itself.
...Provided you are correct, and "properly analyzing these works" means agreeing with you. Alternatively, they have their own analysis, and while you can dismiss it at your pleasure, we are equally free to dismiss you at ours. There is little point in discussion where agreement with your bespoke interpretations is set as a precondition for engagement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
And yet, many of us are here to interact with people we disagree with, and even people whose views and behavior we find repugnant. For purposes of conversation here, I do not care if someone finds me repugnant and advocates discrimination against me. In fact, it is directly to my benefit to have such people speak freely here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Considering the track that the nation is going down, I was doing some more thinking. The approach that seemed to be the best to me is that the federal government must be weakened until it is no longer present, and let states spend their incomes how they choose and enact policies that they want, rather than viciously fighting over the same federal institutions every 4 or so years.
This is my understanding of the best likely outcome as well. Picture the federal government as a fencepost set firmly in the ground. The left and right yank it right and left over and over, and each pull loosens the earth around it until eventually it is ripped loose entirely. That is the process we are currently witnessing: a breakdown in the credibility of the federal government, as each escalation converges both sides on "valid only if we control it". The optimistic view is that such a convergence rounds down to "not valid at all", as simply rejecting validity is simpler and easier to enforce than absolute tribal control. Finding a way to leave each other alone is, I hope, simply easier than exercising tyranny over half the nation.
So what is the prudent path forward?
What we're currently seeing, more or less. Blue-Tribe has dominated the institutions and used them to secure unaccountable power. Those institutions must be un-dominated and accountability restored, or they must be destroyed. There isn't really any other option available. The mistake is viewing this as fundamentally about DOGE, or Trump for that matter. If DOGE and Trump fail, the proper course is to escalate again.
If the federal government dissolves, and each state becomes its own nation, should they still embrace liberalism as the least bad of every option? Or should countries reserve full authority to do as they please, and there are no inherent rights?
In my view, they should retain as much liberalism as they can without compromising society. It seems to me that being clear-headed about liberalism's inherent flaws makes it easier to retain more of it than one can otherwise manage. In the end, though, there are no "inherent rights" in any sort of objective sense. There are values, and some of those values are compatible. Power does what it will, and constraining its abuse is a never-ending responsibility incumbent on each individual human; no system will ever do this job for us, and if we don't do it, it won't be done.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
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
Early Communism was indeed very pro-equality, but it also viewed humans as the output of social forces, presumed that bad social forces could make bad humans, and was not shy about advocating that bad humans should be "liquidated". Once Communists gained power, this sort of liquidation was routine wherever they gained power.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Hitler's stated goals (which really are those same identity politics you are talking about) are taken to be evil, but the goals of Lenin and Mao are generally actually perceived as a deontological or virtuous good even by many of those (common in the US) who consider them a utilitarian evil.
What was Hitler's stated goal, in your view?
The Communists' stated goal was to make a better world by killing everyone who didn't fit into it, a number they generally estimated at ~10% of extant humans.
I would describe his overall argument as "Rittenhouse shouldn't have brought a gun to a skateboard fight precisely because something like that might happen."
That is certainly how I understood his argument.
There seems to be a factual disagreement about how likely Rittenhouse was to die there with Trace thinking it was a 1-2% chance, and also a moral disagreement about what likelihood of death you need to be facing before you're allowed to use lethal self-defense, with Trace's answer at "more than 2%, less than 100%".
For my part, I think (and thought at the time) that his assessment of the chance of death is entirely reasonable. I can also readily agree that the label of "Lynch Mob" is questionable unless the clear intent of the mob is murder, with the proviso that I have absolutely zero expectation or belief that this distinction will be applied in a principled fashion anywhere, ever. I also agree that Trace's core argument is "Rittenhouse probably wasn't going to die, so self-defense is inappropriate".
I find it insurmountably difficult to believe Trace or anyone supporting him would accept members of their ingroup receiving a compulsory invitation to a "skateboard fight" that the police simply stand aside for. I find it insurmountably difficult to believe Trace or anyone supporting him would accept access to public spaces and the exercise of their constitutional rights being treated as consent to a "skateboard fight" that the police simply stand aside for.
I also do not believe that Trace is a liar, nor do I believe that he's too stupid to understand the obvious implications of his argument. I notice I am confused.
My conclusion is that Shiri's Scissor is in fact real.
You guys, who haven’t heard a really bad Scissor statement yet and don’t know what it’s like – it’s easy for you to say “don’t let it manipulate you” or “we need a hard and fast policy of not letting ourselves fight over Scissor statements”. But how do you know you’re not in the wrong? How do you know there’s not an issue out there where, if you knew it, you would agree it would be better to just nuke the world and let us start over again from the sewer mutants, rather than let the sort of people who would support it continue to pollute the world with their presence? How do you know that you’re not like the schoolkid who superciliously says “Nothing is bad enough to deserve a swear word” when the worst that’s ever happened to her is dropping her lollipop in the dirt. If that schoolkid gets kidnapped and tortured, does she change her mind? If she can’t describe the torture to her schoolmates, but just says “a really bad thing happened to me”, and they still insist nothing could be bad enough to justify using swear words, who do you side with? Then why are you still thinking I’m “damaged” when I tell you I’ve seen the Scissor statement, and charity and compassion and unity can fuck off and die? Some last remnant of outside-view morality keeps me from writing the whole list here and letting you all exterminate yourselves. Some remnant of how I would have thought about these things a month ago holds me back.
That passage is a reasonably accurate description of my subjective experience of that period generally and my argument with Trace in particular.
At the end of the day, the part that confuses me the most is how he can believe that his preferred strategy is actually going to work. I, personally, will never trust or cooperate with him ever again. I will never stop holding his position against him so long as he holds it, and I will use it as an example of why other people should not trust or cooperate with him or anyone like him ever again. More generally, he has joined Ozzy and Zunger as prime examples of why mistake theory dooms us in the long-term: even with the best intentions, even under the best possible conditions, values incoherence is simply unsurvivable.
There are many frustrating parts here, but one of the notable ones is that people seem to read the above as an expression of personal animosity; as in, I dislike Trace as a person, and so I am framing that dislike as opposition to his policy positions. In fact, it is the exact opposite; as with Kulak, I quite enjoy debating with him and respect his intellect a great deal. But also like Kulak, he advances policies incompatible with peaceful coexistence.
The difference, of course, is that Trace's proscriptions were actually implemented.
I think you are strawmanning because I don't understand him to be against self-defense from people faced with a lynch-mob.
The argument I got in with him, that he has since pointed to as one of the bigger impetuses for creating the Schism, was specifically over whether it was appropriate for a law-abiding individual to use a gun to defend themselves from mob violence. I really do not want to misrepresent him, but his position very clearly seemed to be that it is better for the mob to be able to attack an unarmed person, than for an armed person to defend themselves from the mob with lethal force. He claimed (correctly) that since mob violence tends to be less lethal than gunfire, letting the mob brutalize helpless victims would result in fewer overall deaths. He claimed that the obvious best solution was for the authorities to crack down on the mobs in the first place, but when pressed with the then-current situation of the authorities ceding the streets to the mob, he stuck, as it were, to his guns.
I've seen a lot of morally-repugnant arguments here in my time. I'm quite sure I've seen many worse arguments than his. That one, though, is probably the widest spread between repugnance of argument and regard I had previously held for the arguer, ever. I've always respected Trace a great deal: I've spent enough time conversing with him over the years to know that he's a thoughtful, considerate, intelligent person. The lesson I drew from that conversation was that those qualities are insufficient for functional cooperation; it is, in the end, values which ultimately matter.
Here's the thread in question, read it for yourself. I'd be interested in your assessment of the arguments presented.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
The sin I was referring to is the sin of regarding a human being as having merely instrumental, rather than terminal, value.
I am not clear on what it would mean for humans to have terminal value. I am very comfortable saying that other humans are not merely a means to my preferred ends, which is what I would assume you mean by "merely instrumental", but they are also pretty clearly not an end in and of themselves, which is what I would assume you mean by "terminal".
I would say that our common humanity imposes upon us both significant rights and significant obligations. I am not sure you and I are anywhere near agreement of what those rights and obligations actually are. Certainly they do not override all other concerns.
That doesn't change the fact that they are still human beings.
The treatment other human beings deserve from me ranges from tender affection to swift, merciless death. That is a pretty wide range, and you don't seem to recognize a fair portion of it.
The former does not follow from the latter; what is natural is not necessarily just, and it is entirely possible for a decision to have consequences which are not deserved.
And sometimes they are somewhat deserved. And sometimes they are entirely deserved.
For many centuries, suffering from cholera was the direct consequence of the decision to live in a city; then we built sewer systems.
I'm a big fan, but I notice that you picked something where the harm was entirely separated from the choice made; there was no germ theory of disease, people knew that cities were plague-ridden but they had no idea what the cause was or how to stop it, nor which actions helped or made it worse beyond "don't go to cities".
Now swap cholera for methamphetamines, and explain to me what the equivalent of the Sewer is supposed to be. My understanding is that there isn't actually a sewer equivalent; a lot of people who get addicted to narcotics cannot be "cured" of their narcotics addiction in any sort of reliable way; if you have data to the contrary I'd love to see it. And so it goes with many, many other similar choices. You are speaking as though you have a solution to these problems, as though effort expended on these problems translates into improved outcomes. At this late date, my assessment is that such claims involve willful deception, of the self and often of others.
There is certainly a conversation to be had about the effectiveness of our attempts to help people; however, I was addressing the arguments against even trying.
"Trying" is not an exciting new strategy you thought up in a stroke of genius five minutes ago. We have been "trying" on some issues for half a century, others for multiple centuries, others for millennia. Any claim that we should continue trying needs to engage with the extant results of previous efforts, or it should be discarded out of hand as fundamental irresponsibility.
As a society grows materially wealthier, the standard of living it is obligated to provide to the least of its members also increases.
No, I don't believe it does. Human wants expand without limit. Human needs are unchanged over millennia. You can disagree if you like, but neither I nor others are obligated to subscribe to your bespoke morality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
And what do you think the result of such an action would be?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.
Yes, exactly.
People make choices. Sometimes people make choices that are straightforwardly destructive to themselves and others. Sometimes these choices can't be un-made. When such choices are made, the people who made them sometimes need to be written off in any one of a number of ways. Sometimes this involves shaming or shunning. Sometimes it means imprisonment, exile or execution. We can wrangle over which choices require which responses, but the simple fact is that not all people are good, and not all people can be saved from themselves or their demons.
Not everyone who is suffering deserves better. Some people's suffering is the direct consequence of their own bad decisions.
There is a difference between telling all 100 "We need 10% of your wealth"
This presumes that the poor are actually going to be fed, and that it actually costs 10% of their wealth to do it. What I observe is that vastly more than 10% is taken, and that a large percentage of it is either pocketed by the takers or wasted on absurdities. I also observe that the poor around me are not starving, not by a very wide margin, and that many of the ends this system is supposed to support are never achieved.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I disagree.
A functional, formalized, rule-based society requires writing some people off. Every society that has ever existed or will ever exist does this. The only question is who those people will be.
Keeping your society functional requires minimizing the number of people being written off, and writing them off for good reasons. This requires less-than-absolute property rights, but less-than-absolute property rights doesn't actually obviate the need for the write-offs. Losing sight of this tends to devolve down to "property-rights-in-theory", at best, and then everyone is worse off.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I have been robbed of three vowels, and all the possibility they contained. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Fwiw, I am anti-stomping, and I do believe Trace is too.
I believe you are anti-stomping. What's your assessment of the following hypothetical argument?
"Sure, that black man had a right to vote. But now he's been attacked, he's in jail for defending himself, and there's a lynch mob gathering outside burning him in effigy. Wouldn't he have been better off staying home? Or if he had to go, leave his gun behind and just accept the beating?"
Taking this argument in complete isolation, I ask you: if I committed myself to this argument, would you say that I'm anti-stomping? What if I argued further that the proper solution for such a black man in the 1930s South would be to rely on his local police for protection? Would that be a good-faith anti-stomping position to take?
A major part of Trace's argument was that beatings are a lot less lethal than gunfire, so it's better for a mob to stomp on a person than for that person to defend themselves with gunfire. It is hard for me to agree that such a position can be fairly described as "anti-stomping". The reason I don't want to share a country with him is because he convinced me, through rigorous disputation, that should a mob come for my family he'll side with the mob.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
It is certianly not war yet, and the probability of war is currently trending downward in my estimation. Discussion is still quite valuable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I temper my sense of decency to ask, but... RAHOWA?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I think I have a pretty good understanding of both the spread of likely outcomes and the prudent path forward, and have made my peace with them. Also, sincere Christianity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Homogeneity is relative, and does not preclude warfare; see the Civil War for a pertinent example.
"Freedom of Religion" seems like a good idea between Christians, with some Jews and vanishingly few Muslims and American Indians thrown in. It does not seem like a good idea if half the population are Aztec Blood Cultists. And indeed, we see the principle decay along these very lines, because the values that endorsed the principle are not in fact universally applicable. People are not in fact willing to tolerate anything other humans are willing to call a "religion". Those who coined the phrase did so in reference to their own, highly homogenous context, on the assumption that their present conditions would obtain in the future. They were wrong, and so the internal contradictions come to the fore until the principle has entirely self-destructed.
I certainly could feel it in my bones.
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