FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
more an argument over definitions, in my view. Red Tribe's prospects look better to me under MAGA than they have at any point since W's first term. The MAGA movement is pretty clearly a national contender; and this despite what one might euphemistically refer to as "procedural headwinds". It's true that we're aligning into a direct fight with the entire formal establishment, but that sort of fight is exactly how this nation was founded, and I like our odds. Certainly the present situation seems preferable to one where we endlessly sacrifice value to support that establishment and receive nothing in return.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
W wasn't even a neocon. Although the Bushes like 'compassionate conservatism', they were really just the wild Northeastern Establishment reaching it's dead hand forward into the 21st century.
I voted for W, and one of the biggest reasons I voted for him was his firm stance against nation-building. 9/11 was shocking enough to change my mind for a year or two, but before his first term was out I had achieved escape velocity from the Conservative movement of my birth almost entirely because of the war and the whiplash-inducing abandonment of principles that went with it. Torture was fine. Fiscal responsibility was out the window, with the meme at the time being us dumping pallets of hundred dollar bills out the back of airplanes in Afghanistan. Two ruinous foreign wars leading to what were obviously going to be indefinite and doomed exercises in nation-building, based on deliberate lies to the public. Massive violations of civil liberties, "free speech zones", ubiquitous government surveillance. I had opposed Clinton and the Democrats explicitly because I didn't want any of that!
The neocons were a core part of Movement Conservatism, from the beginning. They had no special connection to foreign policy and the weight of anti-war sentiment coming down on them was more a creation of left wing anti-war media than something central to the neocons themselves.
I suppose I was fooled then, because what I remember is The Project for a New American Century and W's administration being notably staffed by neocon true believers in numerous prominent positions, and that they set policy in numerous ways from those positions. I remember those policies defining the era, and I remember the results.
the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion
The social conservatives have gotten Roe overturned, and are now one of the core nuclei for serious Red Tribe organization in the culture war. W's attempts to support the social conservatives as an integrated part of American society failed categorically. The current strategy seems like a better deal to me, given the present realities. We no longer have any illusions that public morality can be maintained, but that is probably for the best. Better for us to accept our role as the outsiders, to recognize that this nation and its social order are incompatible with our understanding of universal truth.
and the business conservatives/fiscal hawks have been shown the door both in rhetoric and actual practice.
As they should have been, because they have zero credibility with any part of the public any more. Offshoring manufacturing in favor of the "service economy" was supposed to provide broad prosperity. It did not. "Learn to code" is a cruel joke now, but I remember when that was the actual, inironic policy prescription. Fiscal responsibility is a joke after W and the Obama presidency; there will never be a balanced budget, and pretending otherwise is foolish; even if we could maintain it under Republican leadership, which we couldn't, there is no benefit to tightening Red Tribe belts to pay down Blue Tribe's credit card. We let the business conservatives lead, and they consistently led us to failure and to outright disaster. Then when we'd beggared ourselves supporting their defunct ideological prescriptions, they promptly dumped us and defected wholesale to the Blues.
You are describing outcomes, but you are not accounting for the process by which those outcomes arrived.
While the Social base of the MAGA movement allowed for this revival of Paleoconservatism, the base of the New Right in the suburbs is moving Left too rapidly for the New Right to ever revive, so Movement Conservatism is essentially dead. Evangelicals will continue their deal with the devil and Business Conservatives will dither over what to do: go to the Democrats and just pray their socialist wing can be kept under control or try to influence MAGA to be more friendly to them.
The social base of America is dead. The social cohesion you see right now, where cities are haunted by the specter of nation-wide race riots and federal politicians are dodging assassins' bullets, this is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again. In less than a week we're going to vote in a national election, and no matter what the result may be, social cohesion is going to decrease significantly, yet again. Nor is it going to recover in the next ten years any more than it did in the last ten. The Culture war consumes all other concerns, and it continues to escalate. Red Tribe has a pressing need to mobilize to a war footing versus the Blues, and MAGA is the best option available for achieving that. There is no reason to compromise that mobilization to prop up a social order not only dead but visibly rotting off the bone.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
The Neocons killed the conservative movement by expending its credibility in support of ruinous Forever Wars. If the Republican candidate had been anyone but Trump in 2016, I was planning to vote Hillary.
I'm a trump voter. I grew up being taught that the abolitionists were the heroes of that particular story. I grew up cheering for the Union when reading about the history of that conflict, while also granting honor to the defeated southerners. I was born in the north, if that matters. I grew up thinking Lincoln was one of the best presidents the country ever had, a view I still hold even after learning of the greater complexities of his administration. I have a fair degree of borderer ancestry, but the Irish fought in large numbers on both sides.
In what way am I descended, ideologically or genealogically, from the Confederacy?
No, John Wilkes Booth would not be a Kamala Harris voter today.
Where do you believe he would have come down on the subject of eugenics?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Could you elaborate?
Are you familiar with the idea that "conservatives are liberals driving the speed limit"? This is just an instance of that. Trump's general policies are fairly similar to 1990s-Clinton policies. He makes no pretension of fiscal responsibility, which used to be a core Conservative concern and now has been completely abandoned. He has no interest in legislating morality. He is not a good example of moral character, he does not stand for public morality, and he has no interest on enforcing public morality through law or the bully pulpit. He's "tough on crime", though Clinton did a better job on actually following through. They've both been publicly accused of rape/sexual assault/sexual harassment, though it seems to me that the accusations against Clinton were far more substantial. He passes ineffectual gun control measures, though Clinton's were more lasting. They even both survived an impeachment.
If you want to see the tribes come together, Trump is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again. This is the closest point of approach. When he fails, Red Tribe will inevitably turn to less conciliatory options.
it's a video of a prolonged and hideous torture murder committed by agents of a drug cartel, with the song "funkytown" playing in the background.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
The GOP is the socially moderate party for social conservatives, which offers them protection for their way of life. The dems are the socially progressive party for people who want to make social conservatism illegal, which offers them realistically just harassment of social conservatives but it could be state discrimination occasionally, and of course both parties have other interest groups in their coalitions.
This seems like a system one would be well-advised to extricate oneself from with all possible haste.
African Americans, Latinos and Asians are all shifting right, and increasingly voting Republican.
Republicans are now running a 1990s-Bill-Clinton analogue for president. To remain even nominally competitive, the Republican party has had to abandon numerous priorities as simply untenable, to the point that the party itself has completely fractured from its base of supporters. It's certainly true that "old patterns break up and are replaced by new ones", and that there will be a viable "Republican Party" for the foreseeable future. They'll be running on democratic policies when they aren't outright endorsing democrats.
It seems to me that this is not, in fact, acceptable, and that it does, in fact, provide a pretty good argument for why the existing social structure should be done away with.
The thread you linked has people describing an inflection point where Red Tribe gets enough of a breach in the establishment firewall to actually have a go at producing good things outside the stranglehold of the present consensus. It's obviously quite optimistic; I think it's a reasonably open question whether optimism is inherently ridiculous at this late date.
The more probable outcome is that no matter who is declared the winner, trust declines precipitously, possibly to the point that credit cards stop working. I observe that there are multiple forms of doom converging rapidly on our present position, most of which even people here show no awareness of. Rockets and unrestrained Can-Do might thread the needle. It seems unlikely to me that your general prescriptions can. Or maybe I'm wrong; how does the future go in your view?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Here's Cenk Uyger's take, which seems pretty positive for someone who pretty clearly isn't suffering from pro-Trump derangement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
But by the same token, Portland is already blue, so why bother?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
it's a reference to skibidi toilet, an absurdist source filmmaker meme animation popular with the youth.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
then take it from me: they have increased the amount of gameplay/content/complexity by ~300% at least. it's pretty close to a full sequel at this point.
have you been keeping up with the friday factorio facts stuff they've been posting? Space age is adding an absolutely absurd amount of new mechanics, shifting mechanics around, rebalancing existing stuff, adding new enemies... it's nuts. There's a planet where you generate power by tapping lightning strikes from a never-ending storm, and run the manufacturing gameplay backwards by digging up alien ruins and sifting the wreckage for random refined products that can be further broken down for raw materials. There's a planet with giant lava worms that steamroll your defenses if you tresspass on their territory. There's a jungle/swamp planet where you need to grow and harvest produce, and get what you need from it before it rots on the belt. You can build space platforms and fly them between planets. You can build fusion reactors. Plus a million improvements to existing mechanics: reworked recipes, reworked research, elevated train tracks, beacons and modules redesigned, and on, and on, and on... I've got near two thousand hours in factorio, and the amount they've changed with this patch is staggering. It's pretty close to a whole new game.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
I can see his post, but it's greyed out which usually means he deleted it. @Belisarius, if you didn't mean to delete it or otherwise wanted it to be up, let me know.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
...not really the point, but also, nope, having massive numbers of unwilling immigrants whose intended support network was in Texas bussed in at once is inconvenient, especially for them, but they're still going to make us richer and safer in the medium term
In what way are the bussed migrants "unwilling"? I thought it was pretty clear that Texas is bussing volunteers.
What was the "intended support network" in Texas, and why is it better than that of self-declared "sanctuary cities" like New York? My understanding is that absurdly massive numbers of illegal immigrants have been flooding into small Texas towns with poor infrastructure for quite some time now.
Does that mean anything to you? When you look at... anything - a person, a work, a system, a phenomenon - are you struck by the impression that there is so much that remains unread? Do you want to believe that there is so much that remains unread?
I have been, certainly. I do not think I am often "struck" by this now, as it has moved past initial revelation into basic knowledge. The list of unknowns is infinite. As the author says, "Our brains have one scale, and adjust our experiences to fit." "Human subcultures are nested fractally; there is no bottom.". Everything is like this. But I wonder if you would agree that I am capturing the essence of "so much remaining unread."
Do I want to believe that there is so much that remains unread? There seems to be an implicit optimism in this question that I do not think I can muster. I would like to believe that there is deep value contained in Trout Mask Replica or The Large Glass or The Birth of the World, to the extent that I have made some minimal effort to sift them or to try to get leads from others. I can recognize some level of significant value in Klee's Angelus Novus because I greatly value some of those his work inspired, and I can work backward to see how his work influenced theirs, and I can imagine that there is more in that piece that I lack the context to recognize.
But on the other hand, the unknowns remain infinite, and life is fleeting. I do not think that there is enough there there in any of those pieces, for me, to be worth the time digging for it would take. And so my time and effort goes to what seem to me to be more fruitful artistic pursuits.
Suppose that there were no God; even if you think this is absolutely inconceivable, try to grant it as a hypothetical.
There being no God is entirely conceivable to me. I used to be an atheist; not being an atheist now is a choice I make freely each day. The other side of that choice does not seem mysterious or inexplicable to me.
What would become of the "A" view then? Would it still make sense, in any context, or no? If there were no God, would reality shrink to the point that we actually could master it all in a rational, calculated way?
I would say no. God's existence or non-existence doesn't seem to me to have any significant impact on the correctness of the "A" view.
Are there certain attitudes - wonder, awe - which, when applied to mortals and their deeds, can easily be construed as a category error at best and blasphemy at worst?
I think so, but wouldn't mind some elaboration.
There's that quote above: "our brains have one scale, and adjust our experiences to fit." I think that's a pretty insightful description of how the human mind works: we can focus down on some emotion or some aspect until it fills our entire perception. We can work it into our past and our hopes for the future, wind ourself around it till we grow to its shape, obsess over it, bend every other aspect of our life back to it, until it seems to be all that matters, elemental, primordial, a terminal value, the hub of our universe. And we can, I think, do this with anything. The subjective perception of value has no necessary correlation to actual value. Feelings of goodness have no necessary correlation to goodness. And some forms of twisting our minds in this way appear to me to be deeply misguided or actively evil.
I spent a considerable portion of my life chasing Eros, and I went far enough for long enough down that rabbit hole to get philosophical about it, to begin trying to search for transcendence in it, to consider shaping significant portions of my life around it. In retrospect, that seems to have been, as you say, at best a category error, and at worst blasphemy.
Wrath is far sweeter. "The blood sings" is an evocative phrase, but the experience itself is a pleasure beyond easy description. The world narrows, simplifies, clarifies. The hands shake, the teeth grind, the mouth twists into a rictus of sheer pleasure and ravenous anticipation. And that is only the hot, momentary rush; nurtured, over time, a cold fury builds secret and implacable within the mind and the heart, like an avalanche of iron poised to sweep down on the adversary. Down in the chthonic depths of the inmost self, the primordial drives of cooperation, competition, and predation come alive. And high above in the heavens of the rational mind, the sunlike certainty shines clear that one's wrath is Just, that They Deserve It All And More, that this is how it should be, that this is how it must be. Then there comes the flowering of Pride; I am better than them, I will be their downfall, I will lay the snare, I will triumph... There is grandeur there, and ample room for awe and wonder. The pull is strong, easily strong enough to shape a life, to define one's entire existence. Brief though that existence might be, would it be so terrible to be a meteor, to burn so bright as to illuminate the world, even for an instant?
And yet: "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Merciful, smothering calm. Stillness. A sense of hollowness, brittle, like an empty shell. Sanity returns, and with it shame. Here too, "Blasphemy" seems an appropriate term.
Basically, I would like to determine the extent to which the light of the Almighty makes everything else seem dull in comparison.
I formed most of my opinions about art back when I was an atheist, and returning to Christianity has not materially changed them. Atheist or Christian, I have always been skeptical of emotion; I do not "trust my feelings", and I do not think that others should either. They have swept me up before, and I have experienced what seemed to me a full measure of their extremities, but they eventually pass, and life resumes.
It is a contingent, empirical truth that there are a number of facts about reality which remain unknown, and therefore, on a rational cost-benefit analysis, we should refrain from hasty action. But in principle, if we could learn enough true facts, we may not need to be as prudent.
The latter. If scientists can actually demonstrate mind reading and mind control, what would be the point in arguing that they can't do so? Reality is reality. "A" is a caution against a specific lie that we have previously and are currently telling ourselves; it has no bearing on counterfactual scenarios, and can be entirely invalidated by subsequent events should scientists actually succeed in their Abolition of Man.
We do not now control nature in the sense that I perceive "B" advocates to be claiming. But it seems to me that art is much closer to "B" than it is to "A". Its scope seems clearly limited. We have not "solved" it, nor reduced it to pure engineering, but neither does it run rampant, dismaying our intentions and trampling our works. There are artistic misfortunes, but there has never been an artistic disaster, nor, I think, will there be.
I've been speaking about art as a totality - all of it, across time and space, not just one kind or type. And furthermore I disagree that commercial art is "frivolous".
I'm given to understand that one of the generally accepted defining characteristics of art is that it is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, optional, chosen rather than compelled, a luxury rather than a necessity. Further, it seems obvious to me that commercial art, made as a job to earn money, is generally considered to hold the least artistic merit, relative to works made out of sheer passion. Would you disagree?
End of Evangelion for example is an exemplary film, plainly a creative triumph of the first order, despite it being a thoroughly "commercial" work and having a mass theatrical release.
If a person lives and dies without seeing it, do you think their life was necessarily made lesser thereby? I don't particularly disagree that End of Evangelion is a "creative triumph". For that matter, I think the Madoka fanfic Fargo is a creative triumph. And I think the same of Hellboy, BLAME, and the H&K MP5K submachinegun. I think my disagreement is more about the significance of "creative triumphs" in general. I maintain that these are games we play together. Games are a good and proper part of life, and it is well that we should enjoy them. But they are not of terminal or even of very great value. Many things should outweigh them in a healthy worldview, because their scope is in fact too limited to support a central role in our existence.
If I tell you that I highly value Duchamp's The Large Glass, more than the large majority of representational works that would traditionally be considered "technically correct", would you believe that I'm being sincere? Or is this just pretension and laziness? I encourage you to be honest; I won't take it as a violation of charity if you say that I'm lying, or deluded.
I'd say I'm cautiously skeptical. I observe that people claim great value in many things. I'm confident that some of these things hold little to no value, and I'm confident that some of those claiming otherwise are either lying or deluded. For this piece in particular, I'll say that I see little to no value, am fairly confident that the value you draw would be sufficiently esoteric as to be inaccessible to me even if I were to actively pursue the context. having not yet pursued the context, I think it less likely but still possible that it holds no real value at all, and you are deluded.
It seems obvious to me that:
- humans can generate endless rabbit holes out of anything or even nothing, for a variety of reasons.
- These rabbit holes appear to me to vary widely in perceived value, and that my perception of value appears to correlates with the perception of others, and the features that indicate the presence or absence of value likewise correlate. In other words, value doesn't seem wholly, solipsisticly subjective.
- Some of them seem straightforwardly explicable even from the outside, meaning that their depth appears to be illusory.
- Some of them seem to be straightforwardly harmful to those caught in them, even if those caught in them disagree.
Given the above, discrimination is necessary, is it not? Life is fleeting. We pays our money and we takes our chances. And given the above, arguing for or against the value of a thing is useful; whoever is wrong could benefit greatly from correction.
All this is to say, I entirely recognize that value might exist even if I cannot see it. I am at this moment actively hunting for more value down a variety of rabbit holes, some of which might be completely bizarre and inexplicable to you, so it is easy for me to imagine that you likewise are mining gold down a hole that seems bizarre and inexplicable to me.
But do you recognize that value is sometimes, perhaps even often claimed falsely? And further, that sometimes those claiming to perceive the value are themselves misled? You asked if I wonder whether there might be more. I ask if you wonder if there might be less?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
"He can't keep getting away with it."
It seems to me that we Trump supporters also feel this way, simply with a different referent. Hence, Trump.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
But nonetheless, if the phrase "artist's temperament" is going to mean anything at all, then it must be something determinate, to the exclusion of what it is not; and I don't really see how it applies to you.
I love the act of creation, of weaving new things out of my imagination and building them up into something approximating reality, drawing connections between them, rolling them up into a big katamari-ball of associations and idea-connections and emotional inductions. This act brings me great joy and delight, and has all my life since I achieved self-awareness.
I love sharing these creations with others, and seeing joy and delight spark in their eyes, hearing their laughter and excitement, seeing them experience the induced triumph or sorrow or conviction as what I've made sweeps them up and carries them along, even if only for a moment or two. I love the communion with others innate to this act, the joyful seduction of drawing them out of the material and mundane into the immaterial and fantastical.
I am vain enough to desire that it is my creations that should strike a fire in their minds, that some part of me should take root in those around me, to see some part of myself reproduced in the mind of others. I want to make a mark on those around me.
But in much the same way, I love partaking in the creations of others, being swept away or inspired in turn, and I love taking pieces of what they have made and kitbashing them together into something "new" of my own. I love finding the Buddha-nature in something, finding which parts of it hook and pull, which motivate, where the payload lies and through which channels the current flows, and I love how this knowledge, once gained, strengthens and invigorates my own creations. It's a push and pull, give and take, cooperation and competition, like all of the best things in life. This, to me, is the essence of the "artist's temperament", the center around which any dividing line should be drawn.
Do you disagree? And if so, how would you define the center of the "artist's temperament"? The distinction that stands out from what you've written appears to be the idea of the mysterious, the numinous, the "losing of one's head", the encounter of something incomprehensibly vast or primordial. You are correct that I see art from a "B" perspective, or close enough for purposes of discussion. What I don't get is where you're getting the makings of an "A" perspective from with regards to art, other than sheer assertion. I can imagine that there's some sense I lack, some frequency I'm deaf and blind to, but I can also imagine an invisible dragon in my garage. How to proceed?
More on this soon, hopefully.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
I had J.C. Denton read me the Unabomber manifesto. 10/10, would critique industrial civilization again.
I take the "A" view on AI art, and you take the "B" view.
In that discussion, "A" is something approximating "we are huddled around a small kernel of knowledge, surrounded by vast, dark unknowns, hoping to grow that kernel a little larger", and "B" is something approximating "We reside in a well-lit framework of knowledge that encompasses the small, fragmentary set of unknowns that remain to be eliminated", where these are referencing what we comprehend about the real world and our place in it.
But even before AI, art is our creation, is it not? Where within art are the vast unknowns that could loom over us?
We make images for our own pleasure. We find that some images please us more than others. We discover rules and techniques that optimize the pleasure generated by the images; these rules and techniques clearly derive from our own psychology and history and nature, but they seem both discoverable and explicable, and can and have been reduced to engineering. What part of this does not fit within the "B" perspective? What realities of art does it neglect, which could form an argument for "A"?
With regards to philosophy and epistemology, I would argue that "A" is better, because it better fits observable reality and the historical record, while "B" appears to me to consistently generate notable disasters; a straightforward argument from prudence. But commercial and popular art of the sort we are discussing here is inherently frivolous, so where would an argument from prudence even be grounded?
Again, I am an artist by trade and by temperament. I do not claim to have perfect insight into the nature of Art, but neither do I accept bald assertions of deeper mysteries wholly unknown and invisible to me. I have spent the better part of a lifetime observing how the sausage gets made; I can accept that there may be things of value that I do not understand or am not wired to appreciate, but I also can observe that much of what people claim to value as "art" is in fact pretention covering for laziness or naked greed. I have known too many artists to believe that the pursuit of or mere association with art confers any special virtues beyond those innate to discipline and skill, or indeed any significant insight into philosophy or truth. Beauty and Truth are not synonyms, at least for any common definition of those terms.
All that being said, what am I missing? What is the "A" view, with regards to art?
But freedom has a limit; it is, after all, only one ideal among many, one concept among many, no matter how charming of a concept it may be. I can't actually bring myself to get upset if someone gets canceled over AI art. That's how high the stakes are for me - my other "principles" turn to dust in the face of this reality.
Why, though? What is it about AI art that prompts such outrage?
I'm an artist. The AI is pretty clearly doing what I do. Any argument I see for objecting to AI art applies equally well to artists generally. To the extent that AI art infringes on copyright, we all infringe in exactly the same way when we learn to draw by copying other peoples' work. AI is very likely going to put me out of a job. But why should this be objectionable? My job is a job. The AI won't take away my ability to draw or paint or model. To the extent that it reduces the value of my drawing and painting and modelling to zero in an economic sense, why is this a bad thing, when it wasn't a bad thing to invent lace machines or lathes or jackhammers or whatever other labor-saving machines we might care to name? It won't stop me from making the art I actually care to make, and while the idea of having to change careers is quite scary, I certainly won't be in this boat alone, and I imagine that we have a reasonable collective chance of muddling through.
This makes me a hypocrite; but so what? If I contradict myself, then very well, I contradict myself. Some instincts are too powerful to be ignored.
...But then, why would you expect others to respect your own appeals to freedom, when you've concluded that no one actually cares about Freedom as such as a terminal value? You roll out the Shall Nots for something as trivial as AI generated art, but don't want people to roll them out for sexual ethics or homogeneity of values?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
My understanding is that there are a couple considerations. First, the studs used for catching are much lighter than legs used for landing. Lighter weight for the landing components means more payload.
The other part is that the engines produce blast shockwaves which reflect off the landing surface and back into the engines, causing stress and potentially damage. Catching the rocket well off the ground prevents this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
In the case of Hlynka, his rule-breaking posts were generally highly visible, and usually when he broke the rules he did it with gusto. He simply was not willing to abide the rules, so eventually he ran out of second chances and was banned. I don't think him having a "fan-club" of reporters mattered much one way or the other.
To your understanding, how did the emails investigation get closed, and why did he have to re-open it?
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