FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Looks to me like Trump imagined that because the US is large, it has magical powers to compel others to do what it says.
Trump appears to be compelling others to do what he says. Israel's airports have just resumed full operations. Iran is telling the Saudis that they're ready to resolve their differences with the US.
I’m getting a strong feeling that this is the same exact thing as happened with Russia and Ukraine. Wasn’t he supposed to end that war? What happened there?
Trump does not actually have magical powers. He has considerable power, but exercise of that power comes at unknown but significant costs. So far, ending the Ukraine war is beyond him. We'll see how it goes in the future, though.
But what they ultimately wanted to achieve, more than anything else they ever wanted before, was preventing Trump from getting elected, twice, and they failed at that.
They failed, twice, to exercise control at the point where exercise of control is the absolute weakest and most difficult to execute: control over highly protected and highly legible choices made by dozens of millions of Americans in secret, all at the same time. And of their numerous attempts to forestall these choices, many failed by very thin margins or in very temporary ways.
There’s this contradiction at the heart of anti-establishment movements – according to their own central myth, they are doomed rebels against the all-powerful, entrenched evil forces of the establishment, the cathedral, the megaphone, the elites, and so on.
Anti-establishment movements do not have a central myth that they are doomed. Their central myth is that entrenched evil forces are a clear and present danger that must be fought with maximum effort, right now. "Winning" means removing that threat and preventing it from re-emerging, and electoral victory is not the end of that effort, but rather the beginning. You have to actually wield power to un-entrench the elites from their positions and entrench yourselves or your allies therein, or you'll be right back where you started when the electoral winds inevitably shift.
"Don't be ruled by people who hate you" is the proper foundation of political thought.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.
Some rulers do that. Other rulers claim they're doing that and then rely on manipulation of procedural outcomes instead. And likewise, some critics are pointing to actual abuses, and some are simply mad because they got caught breaking black-letter law.
I believe I and others here are pointing to actual abuses. Between formal complexity, subjective interpretation, selective enforcement and corruption, Rule of Law is not a sustainable assumption in the United States. We cannot passively trust the legal system to fulfill its promises to us; pressure must be constantly applied, and some of that pressure must be illegible and outside the formal bounds of the law.
Trump is acting as though he expects the ceasefire to be respected. Notably, he's acting like he expects both sides to respect it, and is willing to criticize Israel for shooting back. It seems pretty clear that Trump is, in fact, imposing a ceasefire on people who have a strong preference to continue shooting; if this is the case, then both sides are going to want to goad the other side into accepting blame and consequences for breaking the ceasefire, so that they can continue shooting with their opponent in a worse position. If that's the situation, then getting the ceasefire to stick means convincing both sides that they will not succeed in this and that brinksmanship games are an unacceptable risk, which is what Trump and his administration appear to be doing.
I maintain that Trump at least appears to be doing the right thing: pursuing obvious American interests as efficiently as possible, while actively avoiding entanglement in the problem. Trump declaring a ceasefire and blasting both Iran and Israel for limited violations makes it significantly more likely that the fighting will stop, and indeed both Israel, Iran, and the media are acting as though the ceasefire is a real thing that there are consequences for violating. But also, it seems to me that Trump's general approach vastly reduces the chances of America getting dragged into the war, because our stance now is that there is no war to get dragged into, and contradiction of that narrative by Iran or Israel is being framed as wrongdoing.
This seems like a pretty significant change from the status quo, and I am happy to see it.
[EDIT] - ...And skepticism and resistance to the contrary, it does in fact appear to be working. Per CNN headlines:
Iran is ready to resolve issues with the United States, [Iranian] president says on call with Saudi crown prince
Israel lifts country’s restrictions, and airports will resume full operations
And of course:
Rep. Al Green introduces articles of impeachment against Trump over Iran strikes
...some things never change.
I wrote up a post late last week about Trump ordering airstrikes against Iran's major nuclear facilities. Consider this a follow-up:
CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE! It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE (in approximately 6 hours from now, when Israel and Iran have wound down and completed their in progress, final missions!), for 12 hours, at which point the War will be considered, ENDED! Officially, Iran will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 12th Hour, Israel will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 24th Hour, an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR will be saluted by the World. During each CEASEFIRE, the other side will remain PEACEFUL and RESPECTFUL. On the assumption that everything works as it should, which it will, I would like to congratulate both Countries, Israel and Iran, on having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end, what should be called, “THE 12 DAY WAR.” This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will! God bless Israel, God bless Iran, God bless the Middle East, God bless the United States of America, and GOD BLESS THE WORLD!
DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
On the one hand, this seems literally incredible. On the other hand, Vance is on TV right now answering questions about the process, so they're committed to the bit, and it would be a rather strange thing to lie about. On reflection, it's possible that both belligerents have taken enough punishment that they're ready to call it a draw.
If this is not real, it's going to be about as humiliating as imaginable for the administration. If it is real, on the other hand, it's going to throw a lot of the discussion over the last few weeks, and particularly since the airstrikes, into fairly sharp relief. I'm particularly interested to discuss Nick Fuentes's remarkable predictive accuracy with regards to this new development.
There's been some discussion lately about whether it is better, on breaking events, to hold one's tongue and wait for further developments, or start talking immediately. Many have argued that it's better to wait. I disagree: When one of these things happens, and we want to talk about it, and we experience the nervousness that we might be making fools of ourselves if what we say is proven wrong by revelations tomorrow morning, in that moment we have an opportunity to be far closer to honesty, with others and with ourselves, than at any other time throughout the year. Uncertainty is the prerequisite for charity, and these moments of uncertainty force us to realize that we ourselves can, in fact, be wrong. People should be more open to talking about breaking news, not because it allows for hotter takes, but because it gives one skin in the game and favors rational analysis over sophistry. It is good for us all to call the coin before it has landed.
In that spirit: I think this is real. I think Iran and Israel have in fact agreed to a ceasefire and to an end to the war, and I think there's a high probability they'll stick to it. I think the strikes actually worked, and Iran's nuclear program has in fact been pretty thoroughly wrecked, with their timetable set back by, say, more than five years.
If this is what it appears to be, it's a hell of a thing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Trump has bombed Iran's nuclear sites, using B2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound massive ordinance penetrators. All aircraft have successfully cleared Iranian airspace, and Trump is claiming that all three nuclear sites were wiped out. No word that I've seen of a counter-attack from Iran, as yet.
AOC has concluded that a president ordering an airstrike without congressional approval is grounds for impeachment. Fetterman thinks it was the right move. Both are, I suppose, on brand.
My feelings are mixed. I absolutely do not want us signing up for another two decades of invading and inviting the middle east, and of all the places I'd pick with a gun to my head, Iran would be dead last. I do not think our military is prepared for a serious conflict at the moment, because I think there's a pretty good likelihood that a lot of our equipment became suddenly obsolete two or three years ago, and also because I'm beginning to strongly suspect that World War 3 has already started and we've all just just been a bit slow catching on. That said, I am really not a fan of Iran, and while I could be persuaded to gamble on Iran actually acquiring nukes, it's still a hell of a gamble, and the Israelis wiping Iran's air defense grid made this about the cheapest alternative imaginable. I have zero confidence that diplomacy was ever going to work; it's pretty clear to me that Iran wanted nukes, and that in the best case this would result in considerable proliferation and upheaval. Now, assuming the strikes worked, that issue appears to be off the table for the short and medium terms. That... seems like a good thing? Maybe?
I'm hoping what appears to me to be fairly intense pressure to avoid an actual invasion keeps American boots of Iranian soil. As with zorching an Iranian general in Iraq during Trump's first term, this seems like a fairly reasonable gamble, but if we get another forever war out of this, that would be unmitigated disaster.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
Do you believe that Tim Waltz actually directed this man to kill state politicians to clear up seats for him to run for the Senate?
I am going to say that this is almost certainly a lie. I've been watching the story develop as well, and have been updating against my previous prediction that this guy was a Red ideologue, and in favor of him being a straightforward wacko. I'm not sure how this shifts the calculus; if he were a Red ideologue, claiming Tim Waltz put him up to it makes this an after-the-fact false flag, but it's also compatible with serious delusion.
I would estimate a roughly 0% chance that he is a democrat operative, or that any amount of "training" he received from "elements of the US military" is anything at all resembling the median image evoked by that phrase. If I visit a shooting range with a buddy in the guard, I'm "receiving training from elements of the US military". That doesn't make me John Rambo.
Reporting on his previous activities shows a clear pattern of delusional/manic energy animating his various schemes.
However, in the preceding years, Boelter seemed like a hard worker striving to make his ideas real, and sometimes, struggling to make ends meet. His fervent personality frothed with big, civic-minded ideas on how to "make the world a better place," Kalech said. In the professional relationship they had, Boelter was clearly "idealistic."
"I think he sincerely believed in the projects that we worked on, that he was acting for the greater good," Kalech told ABC News. "I certainly never got the impression he saw himself as a savior. He just thought of himself as a smart guy who figured out the solution to problems, and it's not so difficult – so let's just do it. Like a call to action kind of person." Most of those grand-scale projects never came to fruition, and the last time Kalech said he had contact with Boelter was May 2022. But in planning documents and PowerPoint presentations shared with ABC News, which Kalech said Boelter wrote for the web design, Boelter detailed lengthy proposals that expressed frustration with what he saw as unjust suffering that needed to be stopped. Some of those projects were also sweeping, to the point of quixotic -- even for the deepest-pocketed entrepreneur.
Boelter first reached out to Kalech's firm for a book he had written, "Revoformation," which Kalech took to be a mashup between "revolution" and "reformation." It's also the name of the ministry Boelter had once tried to get off the ground, according to the organization's tax forms. "It seemed to me like maybe he volunteered more than what was good for him. In other words, he gave too much away instead of worrying about earning money, because he didn't always have money," Kalech said. "It was never clear to me if the ministry really existed. Are there congregants? Is there a constituency? I don't know. Or was it like something in his head that he was trying to make? That was never clear to me."
I'd imagine I'm not the only one here for whom this description feels uncomfortably familiar. I've known a few people like this.
Kalech recalled that Boelter chose his firm for the work because they are Jerusalem-based, and he wanted to support Israel. Boelter's interest in religion's impact on society is reflected in a "Revoformation" PowerPoint that Kalech said Boelter gave him, dated September 2017. "I am very concerned that the leadership in the U.S. is slowly turning against Israel because we are losing our Judaic / Christian foundations that was [sic] once very strong," the presentation said. "I believe that if the Christians are united and the people who are leading this Revoformation are a blessing to Israel that it will be good for both Israel and the U.S."
Over the years, Boelter would reach out with what appeared to be exponentially ambitious endeavors, Kalech said: "What he wanted to take on, I think, might have been bigger." Boelter wanted to end American hunger, according to another project's PowerPoint. And while the idea would require massive changes to current laws and food regulation, it appeared Boelter dismissed that as surmountable if only elected officials could get on board. "American Hunger isn't a food availability problem," the presentation said. "American Hunger is a tool that has been used to manipulate and control a vast number of American's [sic], with the highest percentage being people of color. This tool can and should be broken now, and failure to do so will be seen as intentional criminal negligence by future generations. We should be embarrassed as a nation that we let this happen and have not correctly [sic] this injustice 100 years ago," one slide said. One slide described how his own lived experience informed his idea, referring to him in the third person: "several times in his life Vance Boelter was the first person on the scene of very bad head on car accidents," and that he was able to help "without fear of doing something wrong" because he was "protected" by Good Samaritan law – which could and should be applied to food waste, the slide said.
This part right here seems illustrative. This guy is not tethered. It does not sound like he understands mundane power, nor what is relevant to that power. He's feeding back the banalities he observes via cable news as the final output of the political process, and he thinks the eight-second soundbite in between anchor waffling is what the actual top-level inputs look like. He's unbearably, excruciatingly naïve
To keep an eye on which lawmakers supported the necessary legislation, "there needs to be a tracking mechanism," the presentation said, where citizens could "see listed every singe [sic] elected official and where they stand on the Law (Food Providers Good Samaritan Law)." "Those few that come out and try to convince people that it is better to destroy food than to give it away free to people, will be quickly seen for who they are. Food Slavers that have profited off the hunger of people for years," the 18-slide, nearly 2,000-word presentation said.
There's the lists of Bad People, and the focus on politicians. Also, complete disconnect from basic reality. The windmill he's tilting at doesn't exist. To a first approximation, hunger does not exist in America. There are food banks literally everywhere. Most grocery store and many restaurants supply them with large quantities of nutritious food.
"At least in his mind and on paper, he was solving problems," Kalech told ABC News. "He would think about things and then have a euphoric moment and write out a manifesto of, How am I going to solve this? And then bring those thoughts to paper and bring that paper to an action plan and try to implement it." The last project Kalech said Boelter wanted to engage him for was a multifaceted collection of corporations to help start-up and expanding businesses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, all under the umbrella "Red Lion Group." The 14-page, over 6,000-word planning document for the project outlined ideas for what Red Lion Group would offer: ranging widely from "security services" to agricultural and weapons manufacturing sectors, medical supplies, investment services, martial arts, oil and gas and waste management. Red Lion would also serve in media spaces: with "CONGOWOOD" Film Productions "to be what Hollywood is to American movies and what Bollywood is to Indian movies."
...The above doesn't sound like a Red Tribe partisan flaming out into violent extremism, and it doesn't sound like a Democratic machine assassin. It sounds like an earnest moderate normie with deteriorating mental health catching a bad case of the currently-endemic madness. The last two personal interactions I had were with Blues, both mentioned their desire for bad-people-murder unprompted. I do not doubt for a second that I could get equivalent expressions from my Red acquaintances. I'm pretty sure large portions of the population are simply marinating in this soup 24/7; fill an echo chamber with "kill the bad guys" enough, and someone's going to take you seriously.
It bears mentioning that the above is from the Press, and one should never trust them. But from the evidence available, it looks like I was wrong and this guy was just a normie psycho with nothing approaching a coherent tribal agenda.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
I agree. Now explain how it is more rational to believe instead that "the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
You would consider you new preferences and habits to be unambiguously superior to before, yes? If so, where is the aforementioned trade-off?
A physically-fit person exercises and eats vegetables and meat rather than ice cream by the tubful. They think that fitness is better than the pleasures of a sedentary life and a nutritionally-poor but flavor-rich diet. They sacrifice the joys of the one to gain the joys of the other, no? I sacrifice things I want, and even some things I want very, very badly, for a chance at things that are better. I sacrifice these things because I believe they are contrary to the will of God, no matter how much they please me, and no matter how much I want them. I could even argue that they are actually permitted, through this loophole or that shaky argument, but that would be rationalization and self-deception. So I have to let them go.
It would, yes. If the word of Christ really is the Way and the Truth and the Light, Christians ought to be far less complacent in their efforts to spread the gospel than they currently are. Should you not rout the disbelievers, those who lead souls astray with false idols and apathetic impiety? Should you not hate the heretics, those who twist revelation into abomination? Your predecessors certainly did, so what changed?
No Christian who has ever lived has succeeded in emulating Christ, in living without sin and in doing perfectly as Christ would do. All Christians stumble and fail, because they are human. Given that we know that all Christians fail to execute Christianity perfectly, it stands to reason that different Christians in different times fail in different ways. Some Christians fail by lacking mercy; others fail by lacking courage, some by lacking love, some by lacking faith. It behooves us to determine which failures we each are prone to and to make a special effort to guard ourselves against the failures we are weak to.
Suffice to say, my personal weaknesses do not include a deficit of hatred. The hard part for me is "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you," and "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us," so that is the part I must fortify. Further, Christianity cannot be spread by the sword. That doesn't mean the sword is useless, or that we are required to be pacifists; it means that we must recognize that the ends we can achieve through the tools of this mortal world are strictly limited. Evil, sin, impiety and false idols have always existed and will always exist so long as this present world remains; you cannot kill your way to a Heaven on earth, nor achieve a Heaven on earth by any other means. If we fight, we fight for the mortal aims of upholding justice, defending the innocent, and breaking the power of ascendant evil, and we do so with the understanding that our means must be as limited as our ends. If that compromises our victory or our survival, so be it; Christians have been martyred before and will be martyred again, and our God has promised to wipe every tear from our eyes.
Probably many who called themselves Christians in the past went too far, and were lacking in mercy. Certainly many who call themselves Christians now seem to have gone too far and abandoned everything but mercy, and are lacking in courage, zeal and righteousness. None have us have ever been perfect; many of us have been good enough for the challenges facing them.
I think the Christianity you practice is actually quite different to the old sort, at least in practical implementation. For one, the demons of the earth who possessed the insane, swapped babies with changelings, communed with witches, and who many good Christians thought actually, literally existed have seemingly vanished.
I am skeptical that changelings ever existed, and that witches ever actually communed with the devil. The Old Testament itself condemns empty superstitions:
He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak. He let it grow among the trees of the forest, or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow. It is used as fuel for burning; some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread. But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it. Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms himself and says, “Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.” From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, “Save me! You are my god!” They know nothing, they understand nothing; their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see, and their minds closed so they cannot understand. No one stops to think, no one has the knowledge or understanding to say, “Half of it I used for fuel; I even baked bread over its coals, I roasted meat and I ate. Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left? Shall I bow down to a block of wood?” Such a person feeds on ashes; a deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”
...And that was thousands of years before science and the cell-phone camera. Nor is atheism a novel development; there have been atheists as far back as we have writing. Nothing about the basic questions has ever really changed. "Many Christians" believing in changelings or witches makes no difference to me; I do aim to follow "Many Christians", but rather Christ.
The relevant part of your argument seems to be that previous Christians were very much not Materialists, but then I am very much not a Materialist either. Even though the the demons are silent and the miracles have ceased, I take the reality of their respective sources as an axiom, and shape my life accordingly.
But I have a hunch that the sort of casual superstition that past Christians practiced may have been vital (or at least a factor) in avoiding the exact sort of secularization that modernity hath wrought, at least among the common folk. Us gentry might be able to satisfy ourselves with philosophies of the Good, but many don't see the point of belief when there's nothing concrete in it for them.
And this is the crux, one might say. I am not advocating a philosophy of the Good. Sin is very real in the most concrete sense, and its lethal effects can be directly observed. If you let it have its way in your life, it can and will erode your substance until little that is human remains. It was not hard to observe the process in my own life, and it is trivial to observe it doing so in the lives of others.
Nor does it seem to me that the superstitions have ever gone away. At every point through the few centuries of the modern era, superstition has remained as strong and ubiquitous a force as it ever was; only the details have changed, not the mechanism. Science is now dominant, so our superstitions tend to be built out of technobabble, rather than legends and folktales; in both cases, they are built from the available pool of loose information. Humans don't seem to change; we are as we ever have been. There is nothing "concrete" in current beliefs; there is practical knowledge kept honest by constant feedback from reality, with precision both sufficient for and equal to the tools available to implement it, and then there is superstition expanding to fill what space remains. That's the way it's always been, and my bet is that it is the way it will always be, no matter how long we last.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Explain to me how belief that God blesses those who support the state of Israel is more irrational than believing that the iron laws of history produce classless socialism through a process of dialectics.
He mentions the primary source and gives keywords in the description: the MKUltra subproject guidebook. I'd agree that I'd like him to show more of his work in where he's drawing his elaborations from.
4 - The best gameplay in the series. Characters were uniquely distinct from each other, with a mix of magic types and unique abilities that gave them deep flavor without being gimmicky, much in the way 1's class system and upgrades had worked. This worked with the linear story to regularly remix your party and keep things fresh from a gameplay perspective; a character dying or leaving the party meant the flavor of the fights changed significantly, and these mechanical changes underlined the story beats. Exploration was significant, because you could find hidden fights and treasures that noticeably spiked the power of your party, especially in the endgame. The characters were awesome, and the story hit hard. Coming from FF1 and from the Dragon Warrior games, it was a complete revelation.
6 - The best story in the series. Kefka had far more depth and menace as a villain, and many of the character set-pieces and story beats were delightful. Amazing mood, amazing music. In terms of gameplay, though, I felt like it was a step down. You had much more control over which characters you used through the game, and every character could learn every spell through the esper system; this was a huge upgrade in terms of player freedom, but a huge downgrade in terms of focused gameplay, because it made the characters feel much more generic and made the gameplay much more open-ended and flabby. They tried to compensate by giving every character a unique skill, but there were so many of them and they all competed with universal magic/Espers, and the end result often just felt gimmicky and pointless; combined with the much longer intended playtime, the gameplay felt much more monotonous by the end.
...The other games I played were downhill from those two. 7 and 8 felt like elaborations on the theme of 6, but each felt flabbier than the last. I never played 9. 10 felt like they were trying to pull things back in the direction of 4, but by that point the bloat seemed terminal. I gave up somewhere in the second disc, and haven't played an FF since.
The series as a whole seems like a monument to the truth of "less is more". FF was the series where I realized "100 hours of gameplay" wasn't necessarily a good thing, like a bit of butter spread over too much toast.
...I've often wondered how much of the above might just be the "nothing will ever be as good as that thing you liked when you were 14" effect, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Or the sneeze gun, the mega sneeze gun, the sneeze gun detector, efforts to develop gasoline cancer...
I recommend Flesh Simulator's MK ULTRA subproject rundown
your dire, ever-postponed predictions
My prediction has been for some time now that the culture war will continue to escalate until we either find a way to leave each other alone, or until violence and chaos become self-sustaining. I do not think this prediction has been postponed, and I think the developments of the last four years have born that prediction out quite well. Our current society is still best described as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble, and that search is observably advancing over time. If you disagree, give me the metrics by which you judge social cohesion, peace and prosperity to be increasing, and we can discuss it.
your proposed solutions
Which of my proposed solutions do you object to, specifically?
The woke have largely backed down from their most extreme positions during the summer of george, on BLM riots, covid restrictions, metoo nonsense, DEI, etc.
In what sense?
Race riots and zero-sum racial politics did not start with BLM. They ruined numerous major cities across the US in the 60s and 70s. They devastated the black community of LA in the 90s, blighting it for decades after due to the lingering economic and social effects. And after that mess, Clinton was supposed to have laid the issue to rest with his sista soulja moment, and then Obama was supposed to have paved the grave over for good with his two terms. And yet here we are, No Justice, No Peace, same as it ever was. Antifa-style gangs are still rioting in Blue strongholds, and their criminal violence is still being ignored, excused and actively enabled by major Blue institutions. Blues generally have moved to openly endorsing the murder of rival politicians, and we're seeing the normalization of straightforward political assassination. We're right back to the Days of Rage, because nothing actually changed.
Blues are on the back foot because we Reds dealt them a crippling and humiliating electoral defeat, and we're currently capitalizing on our victory by attacking their infrastructure directly. There's still several dozen million of them, and while the institutions they control are clearly in decline, they still wield considerable power and influence. There's going to be another election in a year, and then another presidential election two years after that, and there's no reason to believe that Progressivism will not come roaring back the moment they regain significant political power. All we have done they will attempt to undo, and they will aim to maximize the damage to our institutions in turn while the power is theirs. We're going after their institutions because we fundamentally do not believe the people running those institutions have changed their minds, and we are not confused about their approach to the wielding of political power.
BLM riots, covid restrictions, metoo/affirmative consent, DEI and so on are expressions of the contradictions within the Blue worldview. Those contradictions will keep right on expressing themselves whenever and wherever Blues secure power, and usually in these same forms or in forms very similar to them.
You did say you were going to coerce me, or else the woke (earlier you) would coerce me.
"Previous Me" was a standard-issue tits and beer liberal who believed strongly that coercion was unnecessary; I, like most of the other tits-and-beer liberals, was driven out of the Left when our erstwhile allies decided that free speech and tolerance were for pussies, actually, and that Liberals Got The Bullet Too. I now recognize that some level of coercion is necessary, because I've personally seen how the vacuum collapses, and how the supposed Liberal safeguards against such a collapse failed.
If you believe that people like me are just as bad as the Progressives, or perhaps worse, then go live with the Progressives and see how that goes. Either way, you need to accept that naive liberalism is not sustainable, and will inevitably decay.
Vacuous predictions. That broken record keeps spinning.
Read a relationships thread here some time. Read similar conversations elsewhere. Observe the collapses in sex, relationships, marriages and fertility. Observe general attitudes to such modern marvels as the Dating App. Observe how men and women talk about each other, as a class. Observe the history of the #MeToo movement, and its deployment of unsustainable coercion and attempts to escalate to the police and jail to settle what it perceived to be failures of the previous sexual order, an order built and defined entirely by the Progressive sexual revolution. Observe the grooming gangs in the UK, the total failure of governments at all levels to do anything but pointedly ignore the problem, and contrast that with their heavy-handed efforts against anyone who refused to allow the subject to be quietly buried. Observe the number of Americans willing to endorse political murder of their opponents, the generally bleak outlook, the proliferation of black pills, the evident rise of extremism on all sides.
It is entirely possible that the above is not your problem. It seems unlikely to me that it will continue to not be your problem indefinitely.
Your life so far has been that of a zealot, flip-flopping from one extreme group to the next, fanning the flames of CW and even civil war wherever he went.
I do not mind personal criticisms. I do mind inaccuracy.
I've spent long portions of my life as a moderate by-the-book "none of this matters, let's just chill out and go to work and save and invest in the stock market and let the experts sort it all out." When I became an extremist, I have been the sort that points out that widespread endorsement of unrestrained, lawless mob violence in support of tyrannical and unaccountable government authority will end badly, that incentives are decisive, and that sooner or later reckless hatred will recoil to the ruin of those who wield it. And now I confine myself to attempting to warn people of the foolishness they are evidently stumbling toward.
always trying to force on others the one thing, or its opposite.
It's an evocative image, but the charge is baseless. I do not want to rule you. I do want to live in an orderly, structured environment, and I understand that this requires a non-trivial degree of coercion. There are many whose idea of an ordered, structured environment conflict with my own; we should each do our best to leave each other's communities alone, up to and including moving away from each other. To the extent that it is possible, I want to live in peace and plenty. To the extent that living in peace and plenty is not possible, I am pretty sure it is not the fault of people like me.
I guess I’ve just had better experiences than you. I’ve never been depressed about casual sex or masturbation. Or anything, really.
Quite possibly this is true. Perhaps it will continue to be true for the rest of your life. What I observe from society at large, however, is deep discontent bordering on open rage at the sexual environment our society has delivered. Having attempted to have the bloom only, the bloom withers and is gone, and people generally are much worse off for it, and perceive themselves to be much worse off.
Meanwhile, I have a spouse, and children, and strong ties to a family of considerable size. Do you have these things? If you do not, how do you think that fact shapes the world over the next two or three decades?
Another difference between you and me is that I do not want to stop others from choosing your path, or the other, while your side is fundamentally willing to coerce.
Then you and your preferences are irrelevant to the question of what the future will be. Coercion is an indispensable building-block for large-scale, high-complexity social order. To the extent that you disagree, it seems likely to me that you are either blind to the coercion you endorse and participate in, or else you are in a temporary pocket of calm created by the push and pull of competing ideological constructs. The tide goes in and out, and there's doubtless a moment there in the middle where it seems that the water is being neither pushed nor pulled, but it will not last. You will be found either by the coercion of Progressive ideology, or the coercion of people like me, or the coercion of some other construct, because atomic individualism creates a vast power vacuum, and sooner or later that vacuum will be filled.
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller life
(Which started by loving our neighbor, and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children, and the men lost reason and faith
and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said, "The Wages of Sin is Death."
The problem with accepting that I'm anti-sex and sticking to the ascetic line is all the sex I've been having with my wife. I would imagine most other Trads would tend to have a similar problem, given the available stats and evidence.
If you do not understand the concept of "soulless pleasure seeking", I'm not sure what to tell you. I have lived as a "sex-positive" Progressive, and I have lived as a Trad. In my personal experience, the trad life is much, much better. Progressivism aims for the blossom without the roots or stem, but without the roots or stem the blossom withers and is gone.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
see the comment here. This may be little more than a disagreement over semantics.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Some soldiers are going to have more sympathy for the people they're being told to bomb and shell than they would for Durka Durkas. This will cause reliability issues, of the sort where they don't want to fight, may sympathize with the enemy, and may even defect. Some soldiers are going to have less sympathy, because Y'all Qaeda/Soros-Funded Pedo Antifa killed their kids. This will also cause reliability issues, of the sort where they commit uncontrolled atrocities, which in turn remove the ability to control the intensity of the war. Both sorts of reliability issues make it very hard to return to a state of peace.
I do not think it really matters if a Tyrant tries to go full first-strike Vernichtungskrieg or if they play it like Platonic Lincoln and scrupulously attempt to maintain rule of law. People look at those two scenarios, and they imagine that there's a clear difference in the scale and character of the initial inputs, so obviously there should be a difference in the outputs, but the mistake they're making is in the assumption that the inputs are driving the process. If you have a forest dried out by six months of drought, it makes approximately zero difference if you start a fire with a cigarette butt or a flamethrower; two hours later, you will not be able to tell the difference between the resulting fires, because the exponential growth of energy-release will utterly eclipse any variance in the initiating inputs.
However it starts, whichever winner comes out the other side might possibly still call itself "the United States of America", maybe, but the likely scenario is a dirt-poor, fanatically-paranoid military dictatorship populated by heavily-armed, criminally-inclined murderers with severe PTSD, huddled in the dark, dreaming of electricity and clean water. And sure, "there are levels of survival we are willing to accept", but people should at least be clear-sighted about what they're walking into. It will not be clean. It will not be quick. It will in fact be the worst thing that ever happened to you and everyone you know and love, by far, and it will neither reverse itself nor end for the forseeable future.
I will note that you are, in fact, still talking about a lot more than small arms here; mortars are far, far more effective than small arms, and are not something the Blue Tribe is currently trying to take away from private citizens
I'm defining small arms as weapons you can build in your home and pack on your back. Mortars are absurdly easy to manufacture out of ubiquitous materials, and I think even the people nodding along with that sentence are still overestimating what "easy to manufacture" and "ubiquitous materials" requires; you do not even need metal. And again, our armed forces were united against the Taliban to a degree that is unlikely in a civil war here. It still wasn't enough.
I will note that since mechanisation, you kinda need militia to have tanks and MANPADs in order to provide a credible deterrent to tyranny.
What's your understanding of how the GWOT went? That's what it looks like when the American military goes up against a determined adversary armed primarily with small-arms and scrounged explosives.
Now, you might argue that America's heart wasn't really in it. Is their heart going to be more in it when it's their own homeland they're burning and shelling? Also, in the GWOT, America's military operated in a foreign land, while their entire support structure, industrial base, and their soldiers' friends and family were perfectly safe on the other side of an ocean. Try to picture how this goes when it's not just a soldier's fellow squaddies getting mortared in their barracks, but their kids' preschool.
This claim that government overthrow requires nation-state resources appears to be unkillable, and it will never cease to baffle me. There is approximately a zero percent chance that America as a going concern could survive a significant portion of its population concluding that they were being ruled by actual tyrants. Things would go so bad so fast it would make your head spin.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
If you’re a regular straight person, everything is basically designed for you.
I'm one of the many, many guys who grew up with the bedrock knowledge that I should never display romantic interest in a member of the opposite sex, for fear of creeping them out.
I can entirely believe that on balance, your analysis here is more or less accurate. I'm pretty sure Trans people do in fact have it significantly harder than straight men, and certainly much harder than straight women. But straight men have it pretty hard, and a lot of them have achieved common knowledge that approximately no one is interested in helping or even sympathizing with them in any way. The bitterness this produces is severe, and mixes poorly with claims that "everything is designed for them".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
It seems fairly clear to me that the psych construct underlying the median abortion is closure. The psychic goal of abortion appears to be to avoid not only being a mother, but also having been a mother.
Seems like it's closer to the bullet people bite when they pass out cokes spiked with antifreeze to the homeless.
It seems to me that you have failed to understand the current state of discourse in Conservative Christian circles, and have instead proceeded with basing your reasoning off cached data from a quarter-century ago.
The fundamental difference that you appear to have missed is that Christians lost these arguments decisively around the turn of the century, and their opponents got their way. As a result, Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society. The powers of compulsion no longer rest within our hands, and so we can focus on persuasion instead. And the worse Progressivism makes things, the more persuasive our arguments get.
But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens. Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.
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