FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
See the response here:
I am not willing to accept significant disparities in law enforcement breaking along the lines of partisan ideology. You have pointed to a BLM rioter who got a serious sentence for a serious case of arson. I would even be willing to overlook the many, many BLM rioters who did not commit serious arson, and agree that any J6er who committed arson should receive a similar sentence and a similar lack of pardon; only, there aren't any, are there? I would even be willing to agree that the person who planted pipe bombs in the capitol building should receive a harsh sentence and no pardon; only, the FBI seems to be oddly incapable of finding them, claiming that all the video evidence has oddly disappeared from FBI custody. I would be willing to write off any J6ers who shot people, or shot at people, or even who brandished firearms to threaten people, but it doesn't seem that there are any of those either.
I am not willing accept an equivalence between scuffling with the police and burning down a police station or shooting people or staging an armed takeover of a portion of a city. I have no idea why I should, but I'd be happy to hear arguments to the contrary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
What if there are no shared values, or not enough shared values to found a workable peace?
You could say "we all want to live", but I can point to suicide bombers to demonstrate that actually, no, "we" don't. The search for shared values can in fact fail. More often, the search for shared values can succeed, but return such minimal values-overlap that conflict is preferred on both sides anyway. The problem with Liberalism is that it assumes this can't actually happen, so when it does there's no plan B.
No, my point is that many BLM rioters that committed violent acts are still in prison right now.
This is true, for certain values of "many". I'm sure I could find at least a dozen examples of BLM rioters still in prison, and a dozen is certainly fits the general definition of "many".
Do you believe that most BLM rioters that committed violent acts are in prison right now? I would say that is certainly not the case, but perhaps you disagree.
What would be your estimate of the percentage of BLM rioters who committed violent acts and were then imprisoned? I would say less than .0001%; does that estimate seem in the right ballpark to you?
What would be your estimate of the percentage of BLM rioters who committed serious violence, like shootings, stabbings, severe beatings or arson, and were then imprisoned? I would estimate less than 1%. What would your estimate be?
Of those who committed serious violence and were then imprisoned, what percentage received notably lenient sentences given their crimes? My estimate is that most of them did, because that is how the large majority of the cases I followed at the time and in the aftermath went; what's your view?
Another way to frame it is that, roughly speaking, the overwhelming majority of BLM rioters who committed violence were not arrested, of those arrested a large majority were not prosecuted, of those prosecuted a majority were not not imprisoned, and of those imprisoned a majority received unusually lenient sentences. By contrast, it seems to me that J6ers got much harsher treatment at pretty much every step of this process. Do you disagree? If so, on what basis?
I am not willing to accept significant disparities in law enforcement breaking along the lines of partisan ideology. You have pointed to a BLM rioter who got a serious sentence for a serious case of arson. I would even be willing to overlook the many, many BLM rioters who were not punished for serious arson, and agree that any J6er who committed arson should receive a similar sentence and a similar lack of pardon; only, there aren't any, are there? I would even be willing to agree that the person who planted pipe bombs in the capitol building should receive a harsh sentence and no pardon; only, the FBI seems to be oddly incapable of finding them, claiming that all the video evidence has apparently disappeared from FBI custody. I would be willing to write off any J6ers who shot people, or shot at people, or even who brandished firearms to threaten people, but it doesn't seem that there are any of those either.
I am not willing accept an equivalence between scuffling with the police and burning down a police station or shooting people or staging an armed takeover of a portion of a city. I have no idea why I should, but I'd be happy to hear arguments to the contrary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
As far as I can tell this is essentially the entire reason the concept continues to even hang on at all despite the almost total lack of any meaningful use case outside of some niche video game crap.
FPV drone control.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Are you familiar with the essay Tolerance is not a moral precept? If not, I would highly recommend it.
But if the marketplace of ideas is truly an antiquated concept, it's only a matter of time until its corpse starts to obviously reek.
I would argue that this reek is what you are observing around you at this moment.
I don't think that going mad with political war every 4 years and winning half the time is sustainable.
No, it is not. The present arrangement cannot last. The highest-probability positive outcome is a collapse of centralized power leading to durable federalism. A soft separation, if you will, where Red States and Blue States get to do things their own way in their own areas without being able to impose their preferences on the other. In many ways, this is pretty clearly how things have been drifting for some time, with sanctuary states and state "legalization" of marijuana; Red Tribe is starting to dip their toes into similar efforts in nullifying federal firearms laws, and is likely to continue doing so with increasing success. As polarization increases and the tensions ratchet up, actually enforcing the law becomes increasingly impractical, and cooperating with the other side's enforcements becomes increasingly unacceptable. The path of least resistance is to just let people go their own way.
The highest-probability negative outcome, as you hint, is civil war.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Here's a thread on the subject from last week, with a bunch of people offering their own answers to that question.
What’s the likelihood that this just ALL flops back in 4 years?
You are describing a switch being flipped left, then right, then left. This is typically the way people talk about these things, because it is an orderly model of the sort assembled by orderly people living orderly lives. Or to put it another way, this view is constructed by people who have gone beyond taking orderliness for granted, and have moved to assuming that orderliness is axiomatic.
Our political system is not a switch, but rather a post in the ground. It is not "flopping" one way and then the other. It is being wrenched, back and then forth, and each motion travels further as the earth's hold on the post loosens. This "flip" is burning norms and systems that had stood for centuries. Those norms don't come back on the next wrench, or indeed at all. They are gone for good, and the next wrench will do more damage still, as the escalation spiral continues. Soon or sooner, the post comes out of the ground completely, and then we'll see what we see.
Alternatively, the culture war peters out. Maybe the Blues will give up! Certainly the Reds don't seem inclined to do so. The most likely positive outcome is that Federal authority decreases precipitously and permanently, and we have a go at actually leaving each other alone.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
There you go, ruining a perfectly good theoretical construct with your vulgar facts.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Broke into the capitol building in order to overturn an election?
It had been previously established that it was entirely acceptable for mobs to declare themselves sovereign from local, state and federal law enforcement, and to enforce this claim by burning police stations and courthouses, denying access to the actual police, arming themselves with rifles and shooting people in the street. When I and others like me stood appalled at the leniency applied by the government to such behavior, we were told that this lawless, organized and widespread violence was "mostly peaceful", that acting against these mobs would only "inflame tensions", and then that it was fine because they didn't actually achieve anything, ignoring of course the mass victimization of their fellow citizens and the mass intimidation of those who disagreed with them.
It seems to me that the same arguments apply here. The January 6th protest was in fact significantly more mostly peaceful than many of the leftist riots that preceded it. The protesters did not arm themselves with guns, did not shoot people in the street, and did not set the capitol building on fire. They scuffled with police, conducted an unscheduled tour of the capitol building, had an unarmed woman among their number fatally shot by security, and then left. To the extent that they intended to "overturn an election", it seems to me that numerous leftist protests involved similarly dire goals, and took far greater action toward achieving them to boot, and were given far more lenient treatment even when their crimes included serious violence with guns and arson.
Mobs have "mostly peacefully" disrupted government functions before, and it was not treated as insurrection. I see no reason why this should be treated any more harshly than previous mob disruptions, particularly given the violence allowed during the Floyd riots.
For national respect and social cohesion that’s so much worse than burning down a police station.
I disagree. My perspective on the riots is that Blue Tribe legalized political violence committed by their partisans against people like me within a significant portion of the country, and made it stick for the better part of a year. That is a profoundly corrosive action against any conception of "national respect" or "social cohesion". I now know for a fact that reasonable, thoughtful Blues are in fact willing to look the other way while my civil and human rights are violated and while lawless violence is committed against me or my family, because I watched them do exactly that, and I watched them argue at length that it was good, actually. That's the meaning behind "burning down police stations." January Sixth was not even close to that bad.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Gulf of Mexico is named from the implicit perspective of America. Gulf of America would be named from the implicit perspective of Mexico. Therefore, "Gulf of America" is actually highlighting a non-Amero-centric viewpoint.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
It's argued elsewhere in this thread that BLM rioters who attacked cops were given ~1 year sentences. Assuming that's accurate, why should J6ers who committed similar crimes but who have already been in prison four times as long, and at least arguably in significantly worse conditions, remain in jail even one day more?
Nor does it seem that punishing BLM rioters is still possible, given that they have in many cases served their sentences and have been released. Presumably your view is that this is regrettable, but we should stand for the principle in any case?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
The BLM rioters were, by and large, let off. But there was some amount of discretion shown and the worst were prosecuted. Can't say Trump returned the same.
"the worst" in one set are significantly worse than "the worst" in another set. BLM rioters murdered people with guns and burned down police stations. What is the worst crime that a J6th rioter committed?
Conversation below seems to indicate that the prisoners accused of committing violence have not in fact been pardoned. Rather, their sentences have been commuted, which means that they're still being treated significantly more harshly than the norm for left-wing rioters who attacked police.
Things like general statistics, trends that can be gained from a large volume/scale of evidence, while being able to sort for other factors that are justice adjacent.
This seems to me to be a good-faith question, but do you think this sort of thing is possible to do, in some general sense?
From 2014 through 2020, Blue Tribe collectively made a large-scale push for reform of our criminal justice and policing systems. How should we assess that movement and its consequences?
This graph is probably my favorite single piece of data from the last decade or two. It seems obvious to me that "how many unarmed black men are shot by the Police per year" is a question of direct and very significant relevance to our recent politics, and that this question is a reasonable proxy for tribal views on law enforcement policy. It's also obvious to me, from looking at the statistics, that the correct answer is "about ten".
This graph is probably my second-favorite piece of of data. It shows a recent dramatic increase in violent crime, with a clear inflection point coinciding with Ferguson and the founding of the BLM movement and another massive inflection point coinciding with the Floyd riots (and with COVID and the attendant lockdowns, to be fair, but that doesn't really change the calculus much given the tribal salience of lockdown policy).
What I get from these two graphs is that Blue Tribe was catastrophically misinformed about at least one of the most salient details of the policing/criminal justice question, and that their efforts at revolutionary change of the criminal justice system resulted in a massive and incredibly destructive crime wave. I'll readily admit that other conclusions might be drawn, but it seems to me that to the extent that data drives discussion in any meaningful sense, this thesis ought to be, at a minimum, a major part of that discussion. I do not think it's possible to name a more significant intervention in the criminal justice system in living memory, and that intervention neatly coincided with the worst increase in violent crime rates ever recorded.
Instead, what I observe is that this thesis is entirely absent from most intertribal discussions on the topic, and attempts to introduce it are generally fruitless. And maybe this is reasonable; maybe the evidence really isn't strong enough. But if this evidence isn't strong enough, where's the stronger evidence that's supposed to be driving the discussion? These graphs are my favorites because they are unusually clear and unusually strong, and because they demonstrate a result I could and did predict in advance based on historical precedent. What does better evidence look like, and what precisely makes it "better"?
The question generalizes. For example, take the debate over racism generally: if we accept the Blue Tribe idea that racism causes bad outcomes for black people, then in a nation of 50 states and 300 million people and across, say, the last three decades, we ought to be able to detect a "racism gradient" in the outcomes of local Black populations. That is to say, heavily Progressive areas with strongly progressive policies ought to deliver superior outcomes for Blacks to strongly conservative policies in heavily conservative areas. The existence of such a gradient is an axiom in much Progressive discourse. Yet, near as I can tell, such a gradient does not exist to any significant extent, and this fact has no measurable impact on the national conversation.
Or take gun control. Between the 80s and now, we've seen massive changes in firearms policy nationwide, with plenty of local divergence for purposes of comparison. Over that time the average rifle changed from a bolt-action deer rifle to a high-capacity semi-auto AR15, and the average pistol went from a .38 revolver to a high-capacity 9mm semi-auto. Over that time, concealed carry went from vanishingly rare to legal in a majority of states with millions carrying daily. And over that time, violent crime dropped precipitously and then bottomed out at a level much, much lower than in the hieghts of the 70s and 80s, despite uniform progressive predictions that failure to implement stringent gun control would result in a massive increase in violent crime. Again, this split between predictions and observed results has no appreciable impact on the national conversation.
Nor are other fields better. I've more or less given up on the field of economics, given my experience with the predictions of the field. Ditto for environmentalism and Climate Change, ditto for educational policy, and so on and on. COVID was a recent example where, if data could drive a debate, the debate should have been driven by data. My assessment is that it was not.
I'm entirely open to being wrong, for what it's worth. Where do you see conversations being driven by data? What's the model we should be following?
Did you read the ACX article On Prison and Crime?
Presumably [this article?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you
- I have not; I stopped reading Scott some years ago. I'll give this one a try though.
There's only nothing left to talk about if both sides believe values are merely subjective and that, therefore, no values can be more correct than any other in any absolute sense.
I observe a set of people who share my values, and a set of people who do not share my values.
When dealing with the set of people who share my values, appeal to those values we share is a viable method of conflict resolution; we agree on ends, and are only arguing about means.
When dealing with the set of people who do not share my values, I can't appeal to my values because they don't share them, and so such an appeal would be meaningless, and I usually have no interest in appealing to their values, because I don't share them and they don't generally support the argument I'm making.
Once I recognize that a set of people doesn't share my values, what is there to do? Even if I believe my values are objectively correct, I have no way of forcing this set of people to agree. Any further discussion depends on a retreat to subjectivity to even be possible. If I'm not willing to consider that my values might be wrong, why should I expect them to do so?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
thanks, approved the rest of the filtered posts too while I was at it.
As an aside, I hate how hypocrisy is now the cardinal and only sin in certain discourse.
Arguments over hypocrisy are the last stop before total values incoherence. Previously, we would have argued over the implementation of shared values, but those values are no longer shared in any meaningful sense. Having accepted that there is no meaningful overlap of shared values, we appeal to the meta of consistency. If consistency fails, there's not really anything left to talk about.
I don't know that I have seen a well laid argument. I have seen many piecemeal or specific cases that people bring up, but I have seen that from both sides, where evidence is cherry picked.
What would non-cherry-picked evidence look like? What separates cherry-picking from representative sampling?
Would it be cherry-picking to look at the Rittenhouse case? I don't think so, because it seems to me that the Rittenhouse case was typical of how the Justice System handled Red defendents. Ideally, we could discuss whether or not his treatment by the Justice System was legitimate or acceptable; my position is that it was neither. If you agreed with me on that assessment, we could then ask whether there are examples of pro-BLM actors engaging in similar behavior, and then looking at how they were handled by the Justice System. If we found that their treatment was typically much gentler than that applied to Rittenhouse, that would support my thesis. If we found that their treatment was generally similar, that would undermine my thesis.
Above, I laid out an attempt to do that, using "prominent cases of BLM-riot-related shootings" as the category. I noted that the pro-BLM shooters had clearly worse facts and clearly better outcomes in general. Which Red Tribe protestors got caught red-handed committing federal destructive device felonies, and had their prosecutors recommend a sentence well below the floor of the applicable sentence? This generalizes; how many Progressives have been prosecuted under the Logan act? Did the FBI illegally spy on the Obama or Clinton or Biden or Harris campaigns? Confronted with a very large mass of data, what approach is better than starting with the outliers and working from there?
My argument would be that for the last several years, Red Tribe defendants have received unusually harsh treatment, and Blue Tribe defendants have received unusually lenient treatment. An obvious counter-argument would be to present cases of Blue Tribe defendants receiving unusually harsh treatment, given the available facts. Do you have any at all?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Maybe move it back to a week before the election? In an abstract sense, I'd agree that maximizing the effect of pardons on a subsequent election would be one of the most straightforward ways to trim back the unilateral power of the Presidential pardon.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
"No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!"
This thread seems relevant, as does my post responding to it.
The reason you didn't see many high-profile convictions is because the BLM protestors were at least smart enough to commit their crimes at night and make some attempt at concealing their identities.
That is certainly part of it. But then, there's this:
Rittenhouse was subjected to a malicious murder prosecution in the face of multiple-angle video evidence showing his attempts to retreat from his attackers. His attackers were not charged in any way, despite solid evidence that they had broken the law.
The McCloskeys were charged with felonies for defending their home from a criminal mob, but managed to mostly defend themselves from the worst consequences.
Gardner was hounded to suicide with the able assistance of his local and state governments.
Bacca pleads guilty and will go to prison.
Daniel Perry has been sentenced to 25 years, but might get a pardon.
On the other side:
The CHAZ gunmen were allowed to slip away unmolested after one murder and an unknown number of attempted murders, with the implicit cooperation of local government.
Reinoehl committed cold-blooded murder, on camera, which was then publicly celebrated by his allies, again on camera. He died shortly after in a shootout with federal law enforcement, which the press spent some time spinning conspiracy theories about.
Dolloff shot a man to death for, at most, punching and pepper-spraying him, and witnesses were uncertain even of that much. The authorities declined to prosecute him, instead punishing his employers while he walked free.
Masks work. Anonymity works. Not just for the basic reasons of making a positive ID harder, but because it makes every effort to cover for you by your allies downstream in the press, the activist scene and in government easier as well. It widens every subsequent zone of plausible deniability, lends credibility to every argument about why there's just nothing to be done about your exercise of coordinated political violence.
Institutional support is crucial for control of the streets, and thus the public. What these people did can't be done without a cooperative press and local government, and especially a firm handle on the police. Again, plausible deniability is key.
Manipulation of procedural outcomes is the name of the game, surfing that line between clearly communicating that you are above the law, and exposing yourself to real backlash and severe consequences. Making it clear that your side will tend to walk even when you murder, while the other side will be prosecuted even for defending themselves from you is an integral part of the strategy. Remember, even if it takes a while, even if the hit-rate is not 100%, your opponents are risk-averse and have a whole lot to lose, so it doesn't take much to shift the calculus. You or your allies need to control interpretation and implementation of the procedures. All else flows from that point.
Here's what it comes down to: Reds believe that our justice system is politically compromised, and it seems to me that they believe that because there is a very large stack of evidence that it is, in fact, politically compromised. You can disagree if you like, but their belief has grown sufficiently strong to allow them to coordinate the winning of elections and the exercise of bedrock power based on that belief. At some point, you and people like you are probably going to need to start taking those arguments seriously, simply out of simple pragmatism if nothing else.
Or to put it more succinctly, "no justice, no peace." Or what did you think that slogan meant?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
Is it your assessment that Musk did in fact give a nazi salute?
The post you are responding to is a line of argument @Chrisprattalpharaptr has been advancing, consistently, for some years now: the culture war is not and should not be an existential conflict, and keeping this in mind is to everyone's benefit. Further, his comment seems mostly aimed at progressive catastrophizing. It seems to me that he is modelling a willingness to accept a loss, shrug, and move on with one's life.
I disagree with CPAR on a great many things. I even somewhat disagree with this particular idea that the Culture War can be shrugged off, though the argument seems a reasonable one to me. I can say that of the people making snippy comments about their outgroup, he certainly would not make my personal top twenty.
Is this level of hostility really warranted?
yup.
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