FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Given how hard the US right is now pulling for "1. feed Ukraine to Putin 2. ???? 3. PROFIT!"
The implication being that the pro-Ukraine side, by contrast, has a plan?
How'd Syria go?
Libya?
Afghanistan?
Iraq?
Iraq the first time?
Iran?
Afghanistan the first time?
...Like, what's your actual conception of how this is all going to roll out? Putin is couped by the competent, democratic statesmen who form his opposition and then Russia reforms into a functional capitalist democracy, thereby nullifying the threat of their considerable nuclear arsenal? Is that the road you're looking for?
If you want to defend the interventionist consensus, defend the results it has delivered over the last thirty years through the multiple fucking iterations it has played out, very publicly, at vast economic and social and human cost. Show how all the previous disasters were really just faulty perception, or working the kinks out, or something other than simply a blind-spot in your geopolitical perception the size of the fucking moon. I'll cop to not expecting the Russian army to be a shambolic trash-disaster, and sure, right now we are fairly thoroughly mauling that army for pennies on the dollar, given that Ukranian and Russian lives are considered to have no value in the equation. But what's the endgame, here?
What are you willing to call success, such that we can move on, job well done, no more entanglements and expenditures needed?
What are you willing to call failure, such that you agree that it's time to cut our losses?
Because I have heard this fucking song and dance before, where "these next six months are critical" for ten or fifteen or twenty years at a stretch, and my heuristic is that anyone selling that bullshit is either a braindead incompetent or a literal vampire who requires decapitation and a stake through the heart. I refuse to play this game where we pretend that all those previous disasters and betrayals and massacres and atrocities didn't actually happen or were just crazy random happenstance, where we pretend that American foreign policy and leadership should be presumed to be competent and efficient and generally on the ball. I can't pretend that hard, and I have zero respect for those who can.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
You just told me that violations of the background check and false statement laws run rampant and virtually unchecked.
The ATF is barred by law from retaining records of legal firearms purchases. That is, if you attempt to buy a gun, submit the instant check form, are cleared, and complete the purchase, they are not allowed to keep a record of the gun you purchased. Laws have been written, passed, and enacted specifically to prevent them from doing this, because gun owners know for a fact that compiling a firearms registry is one of the dearest desires of the gun banners and the ATF both, and so they fought hard to ensure that doing so was flatly illegal.
We have very, very good evidence that the ATF has simply ignored these legal restrictions, and has in fact built such a database. Because laws Blues don't like don't matter.
Nothing prevents the ATF from retaining records of illegal attempts to purchase a firearm. When a felon or a straw-purchaser submits an instant check form, they have just signed a form confessing to a felony. The ATF exists to investigate and prosecute such crimes, which are about as open-and-shut as you can ask for. They have consistently declined to do so in all but a vanishing number of such cases, year after year, for decades.
The authorities absolutely refuse to enforce the laws we actually have on actual criminals. They refuse to prosecute straw purchases. They often decline to prosecute actual use of guns in actual crime. They absolutely have time to hammer the shit out of law-abiding gun owners, gun sellers, and gun manufacturers. It's the same anarcho-tyranny we see in numerous other aspects of modern life.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
no, he's just going to provide another object lesson on the mile-high stack that the points are made up, the rules don't matter, and any appeal to norms or procedure should be assumed to be bad-faith on sight. How many completely novel legal theories have been applied to Trump and his associates and supporters now? Is it because he's really that novel, or is it because we're well past the point where the paper system mattered?
The time to stop this was five or six years ago, and it's far too late now, so let's keep going and see what happens.
Wingnut, Trumpkin, Domestic Terrorist, y'allQaeda, bigot, racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, white supremacist, fascist, klansman, abuser, rapist, anti-semite, fuckboy, pissbaby, incel, bible-thumper, inbred, hick, redneck, gun nut, ghoul, vampire, bloodsucker... The list is considerable.
Naively, one might imagine that "slur" means something along the lines of "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to". After a few minutes of thought, though, I don't think that's actually how it works.
Various terms for races that I'm sure we're all regretably familiar with frame ethnicity in a negative light. People are in fact those races, but these terms are slurs because they assume "...and that's a bad thing". One might argue that claiming people are bad for being a race is obviously objectionable, but of course Gammon, Mayo, Whitey, cracker etc are generally acceptable in what passes for polite company online, and terms like oreo or banana show up as well. "White male" often comes with a "fucking" attached. This is just sorta the way things are, no one here is under the impression that it can be changed.
What about terms relating to actions or choices? Maybe it's a slur if it's aimed at immutable identity, versus one's actual choices? Well, no, I don't think so. "bitch", "slut", "whore" are all slurs, and generally unacceptable to use in polite company, at least toward a woman, despite describing someone who engages in specific behaviors. On the other hand, "racist", "sexist", "bigot", "homophobe", are all entirely acceptable, while also describing someone who engages in specific behaviors, even when those terms are quite a stretch. If one refers to a woman who publicly sells their body as a "whore", that is unacceptable. But it is entirely permissible to refer to someone as a "racist" for any and every reason, or even no perceptable reason at all. And of course, one of these words comes freighted with serious consequences for those so labeled, and it isn't the one that refers to farming equipment in the vernacular.
It seems to me that most of the words we generally think of as slurs are things Reds frame as bad while blues think are neutral or good, whereas most of the names Blues call Reds are terms Blues think of as bad, with Reds' opinions not really being relevant to the judgement. I can't think of any exceptions that would disprove this model.
It's not even that certain words are okay and other words are not, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's that certain words are okay based on who they're applied to, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's not hard to find cases of even the hard-R being dropped by blues toward percieved Reds, even African-American ones, without the slur alarm getting triggered. [Upon reflection, @Amadan is correct and this claim is unsupportable.]
Given the above, of course Blue spaces don't have a slur problem. When Blues use words to demean, shame, or humiliate, it's not a slur as judged by definitions our society actually appears to use in practice. The same goes for "threat", "harassment", and the rest of the no-no word terms.
[EDIT] - To be clear, this is a factual claim. Counter-examples are welcome, and I'd be happy to hear even anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
First time?
Everyone in the Culture War has this experience sooner or later. It sucks, but eventually the realization settles that this is how it is and it's not going to change, so you make your peace with it and move on with life.
For me, it helped to realize that most people who talk about politics and culture aren't actually engaging in analysis, but rather an informal group-bonding game built around call-and-response meme-trading. This doesn't make them stupid or irrational, any more than posting dogespeak memes means they don't understand proper grammar. They aren't trading John-Oliver-tier (or steven crowder tier) talking points because they're interested in pursuing objective truth, they're doing it because it generates a feeling of togetherness. Sure, it's alienating to you, because the pings they're generating are pings your brain rejects, but that's not really their fault. People are different, is all.
I don't think this is surprising. A lot of Ukraine's ability to resist was predicated on US assistance, which has become increasingly rare due to resistance from House Republican leadership.
Maybe don't promise things you can't deliver? I never supported Ukraine, I have no interest in supporting Ukraine, and I'm not interested in voting for people who support Ukraine. If more people thought like me, it's entirely possible that this war would not have happened. Given that this war has happened, I'm not going to change my mind because "you broke it, you bought it". I didn't buy shit, and I think anyone who's still on-board with writing blank checks to the American foreign policy apparatus is too stupid to be allowed to vote. If the last twenty-four years of disasters wasn't enough to drive the lesson home, they're simply incapable of learning.
This is so bizarre to me. Ukrainian women are... people? They are not the property of Ukrainian men.
This would be a better argument if those Ukrainian men weren't faced with forced conscription into indefinite service in a meatgrinder war of attrition. They are also people, no? But naturally, when it's the men, it's honor and duty, and when it's the women, it's human rights and individualism. Women have, after all, always been the greatest victims of war.
I do not think "maintaining the territorial integrity of Ukraine" is an "abstract geopolitical goal of NATO."
Then I submit that you are not very good at assessing what is and is not an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
It's nice to see things tied up at last, but it seems to me the general pattern was well-established more or less at the time and we've just watched it play out. Every high-profile incident where people tried to defend themselves from rioters resulted in significant effort being made by the state to punish them as harshly as possible. These prosecutions clearly had nothing at all to do with the facts at hand, and everything to do with the demands of the mob.
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.
...There's more, but I have better things to do this morning.
Some takeaways:
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.
For Reds specifically:
Don't live among Blues. Armed self-defense, in the lawful sense, assumes an impartial legal structure. That is not a supportable assumption anywhere Blues control. It doesn't matter what the laws say; they will interpret, ignore and adjudicate as necessary to secure their desired outcomes. If you cross them, they will find a way to fuck you. Not every time, but often enough that it's not worth the risk.
Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Excellent post. All it's missing is a callback to Beware Trivial Inconviniences. This is just the same idea from the user-end, right?
I think this point generalizes quite a bit more than people appreciate. An example from elsewhere in the Culture War might be the proliferation of suppressors in the Gun Culture. Acquiring a suppressor requires an onerous and intimidating amount of paperwork and red tape, so for a long time most people just didn't bother. But then people in the gun culture got together and built themselves something analogous to a GUI on top of the bureaucratic command prompt, a system to guide people through the process and, perhaps more importantly, reassure them that the process actually could work for them. Suppressor ownership exploded.
I'm skeptical generally of rules-based systems because it seems clear to me that rules cannot constrain human will. On the other hand, if the rules work, why not use them?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
imagining is one thing. Expressing it to others, speaking to third parties in the voice of a second as though it were their own, is what I'm objecting to. Particularly for a fictitious third party meant to stand in for a large group of people.
"Legitimately" according to who? I am sure that no matter how Trump is prevented from taking office, it will be entirely legitimate according to the New York Times and Blue Tribe generally. There will definately be wild accusations of election fraud. I'm going to wager that many of those accusations will be provably false, and none of them will be provably true. @ymeskhout will definately continue his series of impeccably accurate posts documenting these arguments and their lack of validity, as he should.
But it seems to me that the election is already illegitimate, and it will simply grow more illegitimate as this batch of escalations accumulate and ripen in the public consciousness. The gamesmanship has swamped any legitimacy the process might have had, and that trend will accelerate over time as the escalation spiral evolves.
What fraction of an electoral college vote is this novel legal theory worth, in practical terms? What fraction was it worth for the Press to systematically lie about the Hunter Biden Laptop story? What percentage was it worth for the FBI to assist in coordinating that lie? For the FBI to illegally spy on a presidential candidate? For Blue Tribe and the Democratic party to actively encourage and provide cover for large-scale, organized political violence? And so on, and on, ad nauseum.
Nor is there a remedy for these breaches, and the only available response is to find an escalation of your own. There is no agreement between the sides on what the rules actually are, no unified scale to measure escalations objectively. There will never be an agreement that what the other side did was justified by one's own side going too far; it's Russell Conjugations all the way down. Even if there were, the other side would simply agree and then add another escalation for good measure. When Red Tribe starts bombing things and murdering judges, no Blue is going to point to Ayers and Davis and say "well shucks, you got us there". It's going to be different, because it's always different when the outgroup does it. And likewise for Red Tribe, of course.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
This is quite schizo.
China is definately not sending agents as illegal immigrants to join the military and conquer the US via military coup. That plan is pants-on-head retarded.
I was initially going to say that if they aren't sending agents in as illegal immigrants for general sabotage/espionage work, they aren't trying, but honestly why send them over the border when they can simply immigrate legally through Academia or employment with various major corporations? The illegal route might be a better fit for the more hands-on side of things, I suppose, but the idea of getting enough illegals across the border and into the army to compromise the actual army is a complete non-starter.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
I don't like Planned Parenthood even a little. Anyone on the right celebrating this should understand that just as it did not start here, it absolutely will not stop here. The other side is going to look for a way to escalate until they find one, and then they're going to use it, likely without mercy. Why wouldn't they? There's no common understanding of rules being pursued here. The entire point of a legal system is to settle disputes. This is not a legal fight, but a war by other means, and those means remain fluid, as they have been since 2014. Reds accepted legal outcomes as binding because they were making a mistake. Realizing that acceptance of legal outcomes was a mistake, a weakness, does not stop people from abusing the courts, but rather incentivizes greater abuses while those courts retain some shred of validity; get what you can and the devil take the hindmost.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
It is where all the subway lines are, it is where all the people are, it is easy to access and has everything you need within a tiny tiny walk.
It is that way in those cities because the authorities make it that way. We used to have dense urban cores that were safe, prosperous, and full of healthy communities. The authorities (loosely defined) destroyed them, often on purpose, and have made lasting commitments to prevent their regeneration. The story of how and why they did this is long, and despite being matters of public record, not widely known, but that explains the difference. We destroyed our communities, and committed ourselves to ruinous policies that preclude anything like them from arising again. Suburbia is not anyone's first plan, it's merely the workable option somewhat out of reach of the authorities' malign influence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
A lot of the discussions we have here hinge on public policy. The default assumption is that our institutions run in at least a quasi-rational fashion: that methods are tested, the results recorded, and lessons drawn to improve the systems involved. Obviously no system is perfect, and there will always be flaws, but the system will, even if haltlingly, progress toward greater efficiency. Almost every discussion of public policy, even here, takes this view as an axiom.
No part of the above assumption is accurate enough to base a meaningful discussion on. Our systems do not test theories, record results, or draw lessons. Malpractice leading to screaming disaster might perhaps be locally corrected, but the knowledge so painfully gained does not propagate, and it is routine to see the same ideas implemented a year or two later the next state over. No one, not the workers, not the management, not the politicians, not the academics or journalists and certianly not the voters, is actually both willing and capable to implement any sort of rational approach to any serious public policy question. Our systems drift in circles, guided not by hand and mind, but by the closed-loop human centipede of flattering falsehoods. And this is, amusingly enough, the optimistic state; were the fog of policy dementia to lift, people might demand solutions from a system congenitally incapable of providing them.
Moving this to a top-level comment, since the point seems generally applicable.
Previously, a conversation about "Cultural Marxism" vs "Marxism".
Not similar at all. Aim of Marxism is indeed radical social change, while aim of wokeism is preserving society as it is, only with more rainbow flags and transgender toilets.
There's a point of view from which the point of Scientology is to allow someone to rid themselves of the Thetans that cling to them, becoming "clear" and unlocking the supernatural powers that are every human's true birthright. There's another sense in which the point of Scientology is to scam people into placing everything they have and are at the mercy of a vast, highly scalable scam so systemized that it outlived its creator and arguably now runs itself. Both of these could be, potentially, valuable ways to understand and discuss Scientology, but it's important to understand the distinction between them.
When talking about groups and how they relate to each other, I think it's not terribly useful to argue over whether two groups are, in their immutable essence, related or not related to each other. I think it's much more useful to lay out one's own understanding of the salient connection or separation between the groupings under discussion. It seems evident to me that you believe Marxism and Wokeism share no relation, because Wokeism has discarded too much of Marxism's theory and practice. I can readily concede that this is a coherent view to hold, if one thinks that the specific elements of theory and practice are the core of Marxism, rather than the periphery.
On the other hand, it is not obvious to me that wokism is any less aimed at producing radical social change than Marxism is. Certainly it seems to me that it has succeeded in changing society quite radically in the short time it's existed as the current, coherent, legible ideology. Certainly the Woke themselves would not agree with your description, so why should we presume it on your say-so?
When Marxists get their way, billionaires are expropriated. When wokeists get their way, billionaires are richer and more secure than ever before.
When Wokeists get their way, Billionaires and the corporations they control throw their unquestioning support behind Wokeism, providing a great deal of social, political, and economic power behind, for example, large-scale lawless political violence. The fact that CHAZ enjoyed de facto corporate sponsorship did not make its actions any less radical. The capitalists can, in fact, sell Revolutionaries the rope to hang them with, and can even help them tie the nooses. Nor is cooperation between Billionaires and radical leftists a novel development; rich people have attempted to cooperate and support radical socialist utopianism many times before. Some of them actually moved to the USSR.
When Marxists got their way in one situation, which itself contradicted Marx in numerous ways, some billionaires got expropriated. That does not prove that one attempt to implement some elements of Marxism while discarding others is fundamentally different from another attempt that implements and discards a different selection of elements. What we actually have, as with Scientology above, is an open question of which elements of Marxism are core, and which are periphery. You and I can have differing opinions on the answer to that question.
In my view, Marx's theories are of roughly equivalent value to Scientology's theories about Thetans. Labor theory of value, scientific materialism, class analysis and so on are more or less fiction, and are not load-bearing to Marxism as an effective ideology. Ideologies, I think, are best considered not by their stated aims, but by what they actually produce. Marxism is quite bad at producing Materialist Utopia, but it's fantastic at generating and prosecuting class warfare, thereby accumulating power to Marxists themselves. It's a system for building an army unconstrained by the humanizing effects of tradition and civilization, and putting oneself at the head of it. It does this by telling people a lie about their lives, that the misfortunes and tragedies that beset all humans are not simply the nature of human existence, but are instead are intentional harms inflicted by bad people on good people, and that if the good people band together and remove the bad people from power and possibly from existence, all their problems can and will be resolved.
Marx's theories about the identity and characteristics of the good people and bad people, how to remove them, what to do once they're removed and so on do not, in my view, actually matter. Marx was not a scientist in any meaningful sense of the term. His factual claims about what his ideology was supposed to achieve have either been falsified or proven themselves unfalsifiable. What makes Marxism relevant is not its blueprint for building a better world, but rather its blueprint for burning down the existing one, and it is from this perspective that its similarities to Wokeism emerge. Wokeism adapts Marxism's core lie to a wildly different cultural context, where its original claims would be laughably irrelevant. The proletariat never actually mattered, which is why Marxist revolutions were executed in countries with no proletariat to speak of. Categorizing society into oppressors and oppressed and relentlessly framing all social issues according to these categories, on the other hand, is actually how both the Marxist and Wokeist systems work.
Perhaps the model I describe above is wrong, and some doctrinaire Marxist model is correct; that's at least potentially a productive conversation to have. What's necessary, though, is an understanding that the groupings are something we're generating as a tool, not a brute fact of the universe. I draw connections between Marxism and Wokeism and progressivism not because people did one and then the other, but because I believe there's actually important parts of the ideology that the later has drawn and continues to draw from the former.
Actually existing Indians well understood differences between European colonialists and played them for their advantage as they could.
Sure. So what's the relevant differences between Marxists and Wokeists that I'm missing here, and how should people like me play them to our advantage?
I do not get why boomer conservatives insist on pushing "Marxist" straightjacket on everything, why they insist calling "Marxist" people who know nothing about Marx and never claimed to be Marxist.
I observe that the Wokeists do in fact claim to be Marxists quite frequently, claim to know quite a bit about Marx, and often frame their critiques in terms of Marx's ideas. So right off the bat, we have a factual disagreement.
I observe that, doctrinal disputes aside, Marxism remains eminently relevant to the whole of Progressivism. As long as they keep quoting and teaching him, and as long as they keep building their ideology around the scaffolding he provided, I think it's reasonable to take them at their word that he's relevant to them, and hence to those who oppose them.
If you disagree with my understanding of the facts, we could go look at some actual evidence, of which I'm confident that there's no shortage. If you concede the above, I'm not sure how your critique makes sense.
If you asked woke activists about Marx, 90% would answer "What is Marx?" and 10% would say "Fuck this white racist colonizer".
This has not been my experience. Can you provide some examples?
Is it their childhood programming that taught them that Marxism is the worst thing in the world, and all bad things must be Marxist?
I certainly don't think what I've written above can be summarized in such a way. Have I provided you with a fresh perspective?
They don't, communism appealed very much to the working class.
It appealed very much to intellectuals, academics, journalists, and other elites, and I'd argue appealed to such people much more consistently than it did to the lower classes.
You may not see this because communism was basically illegal in the US, but where it did exist the parties were staffed by working class people and that's where they received votes.
Communism was not basically illegal in the US. It was suppressed to a limited and ineffectual extent for brief periods that manifestly failed to eradicate it from elite strongpoints, academia among them. I've no doubt that formal structures for organizing working-class people were predominantly staffed by working class people; I would be surprised if it were otherwise. On the other hand, Communist penetration of multiple Western governments didn't happen at the behest of steelworkers and teamsters. Stalin was an academic before turning to revolution full-time. So was Lenin. So was Marx.
What would that be?
Heirarchy, tradition, law, economics, justice, ethics, morals, etc. Ideas along the lines of "Social justice" or the cultivation of a "revolutionary conscience" recur with monotonous regularity, because the fundamental logic of Progressive Materialist revolution demand such innovations.
All strong ideologies "attack the family" to some degree:
Your examples seem fairly bimodal to me, in a way that is quite telling. I observe a significant difference between honoring God above one's father and mother, and honoring the state or one's auditor above one's father and mother. Neither Christianity nor Judaism seem to encourage this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Increasingly, it appears that the establishment also dislikes second parties.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Every time we made a piece of art that didn't have POC/gender balance in it, our boss told us it wasn't diverse enough and we had to remake it to be more diverse. This complaint never was made for anything involving villains. It took a dozen iterations before we started internally discussing where to put the diversity in a given image during the planning stage, and we still frequently are told that the images aren't diverse enough and we need to add more. Any time we do an early mockup with stock images that aren't themselves diverse, we're reminded that the finished version has to be diverse. I'm indy; the boss tells us directly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Would it be fair to say that your core assumption here is that the Civil War was a standard-deviation or three out from the optimal solution-space?
You describe Brown's results in negative terms: he sidelined other forms of resistance, exacerbated existing tensions, didn't resolve anything, divided rather than unified. Only, it seems to me that what he actually did was polarize the situation: he made it abundantly clear that the existing conditions could not last, and that something had to be done one way or the other. That unified each side within itself, even if it grew less united across the aisle.
Five years from his execution, Slavery in America was done. Not winding down, not slowly declining, not coming to a middle, not hotly contested, but ended decisively and permanently for so long as the society he operated within might survive. The cost was high, but it could be and in fact was paid. It seems hard to imagine that he himself would not see this as a near-optimal outcome, and many of his contemporaries seemed to see it likewise.
“But when John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared. There was an end to the argument. The time for compromises was gone, and to the armed hosts of freedom, standing above the chasm of a broken Union, was committed the decision of the sword. The South at once staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing in that, she drew the sword of rebellion, and thus made her own, and not John Brown’s, the lost cause.”
- Fredrick Douglas
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
If I tell someone shooting heroin that it's killing them and they need to stop, they can decide that actually I just hate them, and if they insist on doing so I certainly can't stop them. At a scale of the entire society, they're going to find no shortage of people who actually do hate heroin-shooters to conflate me with. That doesn't make their logic any less garbage.
Your insistence that Christians trying to warn non-believers away from Hell amounts to hatred and hostility seems nonsensical. Christians positing the existence of Hell neither breaks your leg nor picks your pocket, any more than your claiming our God and Heaven does not exist. To the extent that Christianity has been used to implement oppressive authoritarian norms in the past, so has literally every other ideology that has ever existed; where Christianity stands out is the number of states where it has played a significant role in allowing actual liberty, something secular humanism has a considerably worse record on.
You're free to despise Christians if that's your thing. Not liking people is legal. You're likewise free to coordinate meanness against them for believing things you disapprove of, since no system of law or custom will ever prevent such behavior. Just be clear-headed about the likely consequences of forcing several dozen million people to choose between peaceful coexistence or their faith.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.
It's good skills practice for everyone involved, and unlike many "life-saving" expenditures, if these people are saved they have a very high likelihood of going on to live productive lives that are a net-benefit to those around them.
I've increasingly become convinced that the underlying principles of the motte aren't working, or aren't true.
...From something I wrote several years ago and never got finished enough to post:
Charity is the benefit of the doubt. All charity comes down to some approximation of the following proposition: "I think you might be a bad person, but it's possible that I'm mistaken. I'll hedge my bets, and not treat you like a bad person if there's another option until I'm extremely certain."
Hedging is the technique of sacrificing scarce resources to offset risk, and the sacrifice generally involves a number of irreducible inefficiencies. The greater the risk, whether in probability or severity, the more sense it makes to offset that risk with a hedge. As risk declines in probability and severity, the inefficiencies involved in hedging eventually make it a net loss. With Charity, we're hedging against the risk of embracing conflict when productive cooperation was possible if we just worked at it a bit harder. The more uncertainty we have about whether some act is being taken in bad faith or not, and the lower the apparent severity of being wrong, the easier it is to treat them with charity, to extend them the benefit of the doubt.
All of this is just groundwork to hammer out a simple point: Charity is not free. It costs scarce resources, and its cost fluctuates according to your supply of doubt. The more certain you are, the less benefit of the doubt you can supply, and the more expensive charity grows. The less certain you are of bad intentions and serious consequences, the cheaper charity is.
Uncertainty exists in the absence of information and evidence. As evidence and information accumulate, uncertainty diminishes, and charity grows increasingly expensive. It costs you in terms of stress, attention, time, frustration. And of course at the tails, poorly-chosen charity can cost you your career, your friends, your sanity and if you're extremely unlucky your life.
Back in the early 2000s, when I was all hopped up on Blue Tribe 9/11 conspiracies, there was a idea kicking around my circles called "Peak Oil". The idea was that oil takes millions of years to make via geological processes, our society depended on it to function, we had used up most of it, and the price of oil was only going to rise from here on till it grew too expensive and society ground to a halt.
Of course, that never happened. Some brilliant engineer invented fracking, and political winds shifted, and here we are still driving cars and pumping cheap gas. Still, the logic seems sound, doesn't it?
Charity takes a long time to form, possibly on the order of generations. Our society depends on it to function. We have used up most of it, and there does not appear to be a way to manufacture more on short notice. Further, technology is making this problem a lot worse, not better, and it is difficult to imagine the social equivalent of fracking. Charity is expensive, and when people cannot afford it any more, society will grind to a halt.
Back in 2015, arguing with people who disagreed with you was a wonderful thing. The ideas they were pushing might seem strange, bizarre or maybe even harmful, but they were also very new and their outcomes and consequences were very much in doubt. There were still a great many uncertainties, hypotheticals, open questions about how things would play out. These uncertainties made charity relatively cheap, and discussion flourished.
It isn't 2015 any more. We've had seven years of incidents, arguments, and happenings to test our predictions and models. We've had seven years of data to examine. We've gotten to see long-term outcomes for a variety of issues. As events stack up, conversation becomes less and less useful. There was a point to arguing about whether Eich's firing was a good idea or not, whether it was a trend or not. By Damore, wherever you fell on the issue, you probably weren't going to change your mind. By Jeong, there was little left to discuss, and the positions people take largely serve only to disprove what few charitable models remain, or to run up the confirmations for sport[...]
[...]In this environment, given a reasonably stable userbase, Charity drops asymptotically to zero. It's never gone completely, but there's not enough to do what we need, and there's a little less every day, and what there is is a little more expensive, requires a little more effort, and the next day a little more care, and more, and yet more. People start rationing their charity. They start hoarding. The community stutters, chokes and seizes. No one wants this to happen! They want the conversations to keep going! They get angry at people for not being charitable enough, and demand more effort. They get angry at people for growing more certain, less open. But what else is evidence for, if not to lead to conclusions? What is the point of conversation, if not to move from less knowledge to more knowledge? Why ask questions if you don't want answers?
Still, it isn't as it was when we knew less and laughed more, and we miss what we once had. And so we try to adjust things, we try to put in more effort, we change rules and adapt approaches. And the evidence continues to accumulate, three thousand comments and maybe two or three hundred headlines and articles and studies a week, steadily, monotonously burning the charity away, belching out whatever soot is generated by burning the milk of human kindness. No one wants it to be that way. No one wants the thing we love to be its own annihilation. But it is that way, and it will be no other.
I don't think people are going to discover a way to frack charity. On the other hand, maybe it helps some to realize that the problem isn't just other people being awful, that the problem really is, lord help me, systemic, an emergent property of the world we're stuck living in rather than a choice people are making.
Sadly, the above is probably just more of the sort of depressive worldview that you're objecting to. Faith was the only exit from this dead-end that I could find; so long as the Rationalist tendency to empirical calculation is followed, fatalism seems inevitable. To escape the trap, it is necessary to defy the odds, to embrace axioms rather than evidence.
The argument that you should show empathy even to an enemy is noble, and I wish I had the generosity of spirit to really do it in this situation.
I'm not sure "empathy" is the right word, but if you do not recognize that you owe something to your enemies, some level of consideration, some measure of restraint, you are missing something humans cannot, in the long run, do without. I get that it's hard, but good things generally are. Being hard doesn't make them less necessary.
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Learning to see everyone around you as an avatar of their tribe is a big part of this process. It's not even untrue. It's probably even strongly predictive! That doesn't make it any less destructive in the long term.
I'm not in any position to judge your mind. On a bad day, I sweat tribal hatred, can taste it in my spit. It's still bad for us and for everyone around us.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Modern progressivism molted off its libertarian-friendly aspects, demonstrating that almost all Libertarian victories over the preceding decades were fake. Libertarian advances required common knowledge that the norms they'd been establishing were durable, reliable, stable. Watching bedrock Libertarian institutions like the ACLU abruptly and undeniably abandon those norms the second it became practical to do so gut-shot the movement. Not only did thirty or forty years of gains evaporate overnight, but the hard-built common knowledge that made those gains possible was destroyed, and replaced with common knowledge that all the arguments those gains were made on were in fact lies.
Skokie worked because it appeared to be a durable principle. Opposition to McCarthyism worked because it appeared to be based on durable principles. We now know that both were merely who, whom, so neither will ever happen again in the foreseeable future. Principled Libertarianism has no constituency. It's a train people ride to their desired destination, and then get off.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Thats the default though. 60 years ago kids were being indoctrinated into an ideological system with the backing of the state, whether their parents liked it or not.
60 years ago, our society was much more homogeneous than it is now. The social systems in contention now weren't set up to create that homogeneity, they were set up because the homogeneity allowed the public at large to see value in systems and structures that achieved common, (that is to say homogeneous) goals.
Now we are heterogenous, and the systems and structures become a weapon to fight over, in the endlessly spiraling series of escalations. You're describing it as though that fight was the norm previously, only it really, really wasn't. There would be no public school system if the population that established it had suffered the level of values-conflict we currently endure. Likely there would have been no nation either.
I don't need to ask why. I've sat through a couple impromptu diversity lectures over the years. Both the indy space and Triple-A are completely dominated by progressive voices. The entire gaming press ecosystem is rabidly progressive. Influencers are more balanced, but everyone the boss knows and everyone the boss respects, cares about, and wants to impress are all on one side. You want to show your game at PAX, you want buzz, you want people cheering you on and giving you good press, well, there's a set of beliefs and behaviors that get you that, and there's another set of beliefs and behaviors that definately will not.
I could give more examples, but I'll leave it there for OPSEC purposes.
More options
Context Copy link