FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
A Canadian lady apparently tried Ricin.
For this incident, my current understanding is that the only evidence that he intended an assassination attempt is a loaded weapon in his trunk, while he denies any such intention, and appears to be an enthusiastic Trump supporter. My bet is that he was not actually an assassin.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
your measurement definitely beats my eyeballing. and yeah, I'd be mystified at how either one could end up in that position in a kid's head, on purpose. Like, you need the bullet to have lost 80-90% of its velocity before it's going to stop like that, so we're probably talking high-angle fire at long ranges.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
they use 7.62 NATO for snipers and machine guns, IIRC, and .50 for HMGs. that bullet looks like a .50.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
You're assuming that's a 7.62x51 projectile. It looks like a .50 BMG to me, given the relative scale to the head, unless that's a newborn.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Organization and management is also labor.
There is a reason SpaceX has developed and deployed this capability, and none of the national space organizations and none of the private space organizations succeeded or even tried.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
According to Musk, they're explicitly prevented from hiring migrants due to Federal ITAR rules, which means they're being sued by the Feds for obeying a Federal law.
This would be more effective the more this perpetrator could serve as an effigy of the outgroup. Life in prison for a single easily mockable overweight Democratic Party apparatchik transwoman would have gone a long way to restore faith in institutions in many Deplorables, and if that person did in fact perform election fraud it would not even be unjust under the standard American understanding of justice.
I think we're past that, unfortunately. Toss out a scapegoat, and that will be seen as "here's the one they couldn't cover up, just imagine what else they're hiding".
Trump is an instructive example here, I think. I would argue that he has been investigated pretty thoroughly, and now he's even been prosecuted, tried and convicted. I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that, by any reasonable standard, he doesn't have any skeletons left in the closet, and what we see is what we get. By contrast, the sense I get from Blue Tribe is not "the process has succeeded, we have discovered his crimes and punished him for them", but rather "we've barely scratched the surface, he's obviously guilty of a thousand times worse offences, and the fact that he isn't in jail is an indictment of the system." Further, it seems to me that the impeachments and prosecutions and conviction (and, one might argue, the assassination attempts) have only fed the appetite for a dramatic conclusion. People want to see the mammoth brought down under the spears of the tribe, and every spear thrown only increases that desire.
I think Democrats are wrong to take this stance with Trump, but I do not think they are obviously wrong. A similar argument was made for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and it held no water with me for what seem to me to be solid, entirely factual reasons. If we look at non-partisan examples, crime lords for instance, we see that despite intense investigation and prosecution, often they are only formally held to account for a small fraction of their misdeeds.
More generally, the problem is that there isn't a "we". Reds and Blues do not perceive sufficient shared values and interests to make power-sharing practical. Elections are a vast, opaque system, and the Federal Government they maintain makes them seem miniscule and transparent as glass by comparison. It turns out that our system requires more social trust than you need for credit cards to work, and we don't have enough any more so the system is breaking down.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
It really seems like you're focusing on the worst possible examples.
That's pretty much the definition of what a "superspreader" is, isn't it? And the reason that term is now common knowledge is that, at least hypothetically, superspreaders can cause immense amounts of harm by spreading infectious diseases.
This feels like blaming all conservatives for the tiny minority involved in school shootings.
Well, let's roll out the comparison and see where it leads us. Roughly half of gay men in America died to the aids epidemic. What percentage of that number do you think died because they scrupulously avoided risky activities, and just got really, really unlucky?
Meanwhile for COVID or school shooting deaths, I don't think either correlate with Conservative behavior at all, though it is absolutely routine to see such claims made. Having seen such claims made, I'm backtracking the logic to a situation where there does, in fact, appear to be a correlation.
Do you feel that other groups should be held to a similar standard, even one's that you're a part of?
This standard has been applied to groups I'm a part of, and using false data to boot.
Does that really sound like a group that's trying to spread AIDS and opposed to restrictions on homosexual activity?
Did their efforts work? Not before the disease killed roughly half the male homosexuals in America and went on to be a global pandemic. My understanding of the history is that activists arguing for restrictions were outnumbered by those arguing for no restrictions until it was much, much too late, and even the restrictions they belatedly put in place were not enough to halt the spread.
Are you comfortable saying the same things about these groups as you are about homosexuals?
The actual record of how the disease spread and who it killed tells the story. AIDS is spread overwhelmingly by risky behavior. If Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately contracting the disease, that tells me they're disproportionately engaging in risky behavior. What's the alternative explanation?
I don't get it - you seem opposed to lockdowns for spreading an airborne pandemic that threatens everyone near you, but you also seem to be advocating for lockdowns against a pandemic which only threatens sexual partners?
In the first place, it seems pretty clear to me that the lockdowns and the vaccines failed at their defined objectives. COVID was too infectious to be controlled, the vaccines were not terribly effective and had side effects, and top-down government mandates caused much harm for little to no benefit.
Despite this, those objecting or resisting absurdly massive and unbelievably draconian interventions into every facet of our lives were treated like antisocial scum, and in many cases had the resources of the state turned against us to punish resistance in any form. This was cheered by the Blue population broadly, based on widespread lies told by academic and government agencies, and the result was demonization of people like myself.
I am pointing out that the gay community was the actual epicenter of a much worse disease than COVID, and the individual action of the members of that community evidently played a pivotal role in the disease becoming endemic, resulting in dozens of millions of deaths. The disease was straightforwardly more serious than COVID. The actions taken to spread the disease were straightforwardly more objectionable, and the end result seems significantly worse. Yet the standard narrative I observe is that American Gays were the victims, and Lockdown/Vaccine Mandate opponents were the straightforward victims.
It seems to me that this narrative is built on a stack of lies, and so I am kicking at them to see what happens.
If you think the "coordinated meanness" deployed against lockdown/mandate opponents was appropriate, what was the appropriate level of "coordinated meanness" for gay men when AIDS got rolling?
For that matter, weren't there plenty of people selfishly spreading COVID? People who went to major events and caught flights, despite knowing they were feeling sick? Isn't that selfish behavior that we should want to punish?
If we're going to punish selfish behavior, I'd like to imagine we'd punish it based on fair and impartial standards, and not play tribal favorites.
...What's your guess at the average number of sexual partners per month for a Gay man in California or New York in the era immediately predating AIDS?
That was pretty much exactly what I was looking for.
the question was prompted by seeing an advert for a self-published book, with cover-art in a very eye-catching watercolor style which immediately triggered my "that's AI" sense, and it made me curious about the state of the market these days. I've had several experiences of what I suppose you could describe as AI paranoia, the creeping suspicion that the bots are getting past my personal filter. I figure the best way to tell where the tide is would be to see where peoples' boats currently are.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Would you consider conservatives dangerous, due to their behavior in spreading the Covid plague?
I don't think Conservative behavior had any significantly disproportional impact on spreading the Covid plague. But then, I observe that there were a lot of people who disagreed very strongly with my assessment, who called people like my own family members "plague rats", who advocated firing them from their jobs or even putting them in camps, or any of a wide variety of social or legal sanctions in between.
Meanwhile, I observe that Homosexual (and hard drug user) behavior appears to have had a very significant impact on spreading AIDS as widely as possible in the early years of the outbreak. The contrast between the treatment of those opposed to lockdowns or vaccine mandates for COVID, and those who for selfish reasons actively spread an extremely lethal plague as widely as possible is my whole point here.
Have you considered that part of why AIDS was so dangerous, was because we didn't really have the concept of "AIDS" back then?
My understanding is that from fairly early on, they understood that there was an infectious, lethal pathogen, and they understood that it was being spread primarily by homosexual practices and drug use. Further, my understanding is that some gay men intentionally spread it as much as possible, and more gay men staunchly opposed any restrictions on homosexual activity. Eventually this opposition was at least partially overcome, but by then AIDS was endemic.
Does that description seem inaccurate to you?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Why do you think such a "community" exists?
Because I observe it existing at this very moment. There is a significant number of black people who believe that they are being harmed by my tribe in particular, and that we will continue harming them until they and their allies have all the power and we have none. This is encouraged by Blue Tribe, who amplify such claims to distract from the consequences of the power that they have exercised for decades. "Black Sepratists" are beside the point; the system is not aimed at them, it's aimed at people demanding dominance over our current society. The point is to seperate "control over themselves" from "control over me", to highlight and isolate those for whom the later is in fact the actual point. Further, it highlights the degree to which this has already happened; how Blue enclaves already are not constrained to any great degree by Red preferences or institutional markers.
I am pretty sure that if you established a new political zone with with no practical limits on policy and a significant guaranteed cash flow to anyone willing to form a government, a fair number of people would be lining up to give it a shot. If Oprah wasn't interested, BLM would, and if not them, some black-fronted libertarians. Depending on who was running it and how, I might be willing to move there.
The point of the thought experiment is to try to imagine what it would actually look like to take their concerns seriously and give them as much of what they say they want as possible, while insulating the rest of us from any harmful effects that might result. Given that they are observably pushing schemes such as absolute racial dictatorships, "reparations" to the tune of dozens of trillions of dollars, and the complete overthrow of our justice system, I see no harm in exploring less-insane portions of the possibility space.
So why anybody would? Why they don't just stay right where they are and keep demanding reparations from the US? What is going to stop them?
Nothing, of course. but rhetorically, the point would be proving that they do, in fact, prefer to stay where they are and demand reparations, when this would satisfy their stated goals much better for much cheaper.
If any of the populated area is turned into the racist paradise, the people living there would be forced to either live there or lose their homes, jobs, social environments etc.
Offer them compensation for moving if they wish to move, and likewise for people who wish to move in. Expensive, sure, but a fraction of the cost of some of Kendi's proposals.
What do you mean by "them"?
The blacks who freely choose to move there and establish local government.
The US just declares on 1.1.XXXX the US laws stop working in Atlanta?
Yes. Why should they be forced to live under white supremacist institutions, when it would be so easy to simply not do that? What harm is caused to the rest of us if Atlanta gets to make its own laws as it sees fit?
It seems like you are not grasping the principle here. I have no terminal interest in controlling the lives of my outgroup or my fargroup. If black people or Blue Tribers don't like being ruled by me, it is straightforwardly in my interest to facilitate an amicable separation whereby they do their thing in their area and I do my thing in my area and we simply leave each other alone. I may think their thing is awful, but if they're not willing to work with me and they're not willing to change, it is much better for permit them to do their awful thing somewhere far from me, rather than trying to force them to do things my way. I do not want to be ruled by people who hate me, but neither do I wish to rule people who hate me.
It is useful to frame the conversation this way, because some people really do seem to want to rule their outgroup, apparently as a terminal goal. Others believe that simply leaving each other alone is impossible, which amounts to the same thing. When discussing and organizing politics, it seems quite important to me to have a firm understanding on which people are genuinely just trying to be left alone, and which mean to rule.
You know how well it works on Mexican border, where the counterparty is the actual functioning government that kinda wants to help us with that?
In that case, I submit that since we already have a thousand-mile border with a giant uncontrollable narco-state, adding another, much smaller narco-state won't actually make the problem all that much worse.
If any of the populated area is turned into the racist paradise, the people living there would be forced to either live there or lose their homes, jobs, social environments etc. Why would they agree to that?
For the same reason they agreed to letting BLM and antifa burn their cities, I'd imagine: stupid virtue signaling, purity spirals, and a maniacal commitment to Progressive ideology. The prize would be too big for the Black Community to coordinate refusal, and acceptance would be too-well rewarded for the rest of the Progressive movement to withstand the incentive gradient.
Say, why Oprah would want to live in this racist paradise enclave, if she's already a billionaire in America?
She probably wouldn't. But I bet once it got rolling, she'd be interested in trying to steer it toward good outcomes. Ditto for Obama.
If there would be any desire on the part of the black Americans to live in something like that, black separatism wouldn't be a political nonstarter.
It's a political non-starter because it is so obviously all downside. The point is to formulate the minimum viable upside to make it attractive not to people like you, but specifically to the sort of person who genuinely believes that our society is shot through with racism and white supremacy. Hence the financial incentives created by giving the zone a guaranteed cashflow and guaranteed political autonomy.
Moreover, why limit ourselves to American blacks? There are millions of people who already enjoy this deal - living in a places where US does not control it, and doing whatever they want there, mostly.
Those places don't enjoy the advantages of being a literal part of America, which this state would. They also don't enjoy guaranteed, no-strings-attached cashflow from the US federal government, which this place also would. Their citizens couldn't return to the US at will, which this state's citizens could.
It's easy to propose some sort of mean-spirited deportation scheme under some level of veiling. The point of this is to actually explore the degree to which their preferences could actually be satisfied without unacceptable costs to the rest of us, and to explore what costs are actually "unacceptable".
Why do you think black Americans - who already enjoy full citizenship right, full access to welfare services, significant representation in all power structures and undying admiration of at least one powerful political movement - would want a worse deal than Haitian blacks want?
Americans of any color who chose to move to this state would still enjoy full citizenship rights in the colorblind US, to which they could return at any time, and full access to welfare services (guaranteed when outside the zone under colorblind law, and inside it depending on the laws they collectively write). Black Americans who chose to do so would have significantly greater representation in local power structures, and to the degree that they have no control over national power, they also are granted complete immunity from it within their border. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Blues would stop admiring them. There is no hook or secret gotcha here for the occupants.
and if people understood what it actually means - e.g. losing all access to all the welfare state goodies, US citizen benefits, etc.
My offer is specifically designed to avoid costing them these things, unless they themselves chose to reject them, which I absolutely do not expect them to do.
I see no evidence and no logical reason why they would, and this makes this whole scheme doomed and useless.
If Blue Tribe offered me a deal like this, a city or a small state with existing infrastructure, a significant guaranteed cashflow, and complete freedom from their political and social interference, where the government could only be held by, say, Gun Culture types or Christians, and where we could live under whatever laws we prefer, I would move there in a heartbeat. And again, this is another point of the exercise: to generate a sincere, good-faith offer to your opposites that you yourself would take if the positions were reversed, to explore the degree to which compromise is possible even in principle.
If they think US is built mostly by their ancestors (let's no argue how true it is but assume that's what they think) but they aren't getting their fair share of it, how giving them a soon-to-be-shithole area and absolving ourselves of any responsibility of what happens there would sound like a good deal?
I see no reason why they would believe that it would be a soon-to-be-shithole. I expect it to turn into a shithole because I believe that shitholes are what their ideology reliably produce, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. And I'm not "absolving myself" of responsibility; I'm offering them the chance to take responsibility, because the ability of Blacks and Blues to shirk responsability for their own actions and decisions is a huge part of the problem we're stuck with. I would be happy to take a deal like this offered to my tribe, even if the people offering it did so with the full expectation that my ideology would result in an immediate shithole, because I think they're wrong.
On the other hand, I'd be fascinated to hear why those offered this deal in good faith would reject it, because it would seem to me that rejecting it would be a tacit admission that they know on some level that my tribe is right, that their ideology would in fact create a shithole, and that they are in fact dependent on my tribe to cover for their excesses and abuses.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
and even reports that reached NPR of shootings of unarmed civilians-
I'm pretty sure InRangeTV did a dive on one of those incidents.
True, and that's why the only solution is to abandon the framework where the measure of equality is the equality of statistical outcomes between races (or any other large population-wide categories, for that matter).
Humans form tribal feelings for other people who seem like them. Humans are predisposed to perceive those who share their race as "like them". This can be overridden, but the effect is real and overriding it is not easy, especially when the environment seems threatening. Blacks have an environment that seems threatening, and there is no plausible way to get them to stop forming tribal attachments to others of their race. And this is doubly so when one of the tribes outputs a constant firehose of propaganda about how all their misfortunes are the fault of the other tribe, who hate them explicitly because of their race.
I don't care how many people who have the same eye color as me and the same nose length as me are rich and how many are poor.
I care when people say that whites should be discriminated against or disadvantaged, because I'm white. I care when people hurt or kill white people explicitly for their skin color, because, again, I'm white. I mostly don't care how rich other whites are, because I'm doing pretty okay. If whites were an underclass, and I had reason to believe that the upper classes were keeping us down on purpose, I would definitely care about that.
I care about whether I could be prevented from being richer or made poorer by unjust means.
And they manifestly were being made poorer by unjust means, and they've been told for decades that they still are being made poorer by unjust means. Our whole society is built on propagating that idea. Why would they not believe it?
To be an "underclass" you should first be a "class", and "classes" are entirely arbitrary.
It could be argued that "Jew" is an arbitrary class. But if the Nazis have settled on a definition that includes you, and are actively trying to exterminate you, recognizing the arbitrary nature of "class" doesn't resolve the problem.
In the same way, Blacks are, as the saying goes, "less likely", and not by a small margin. It is not in their individual or collective interest to reject group identity as arbitrary, because then most of them would still be in the same miserable position, only now they'd be alone, with their community ties severed. For most of them, that would very likely put them in a strictly worse position, and this fact is sufficiently obvious that they simply aren't going to do it.
Who are "they"?
The actual, current black community, or whoever they choose or designate from among that community. If it's actually a problem, let Oprah and Obama pick a panel to get the ball rolling. It doesn't really matter who they are, so long as they're unambiguously recognized as black by other blacks. The point is that it not be me or you, because if it's us, we'll be blamed for any bad outcomes that result. Many Blacks see themselves as a separate group, and the point is to give that group absolute power to do things its own way while insulating anyone who doesn't want to participate from the consequences.
What does it mean "control completely" - does it secede from the US?
Effectively, yes. The people inside run it however they want with zero interference from the rest of the country, but with the current level of funding that the occupants would otherwise receive under our current system, and possibly significantly more. They can keep our laws or write their own, interpret our laws however they want or discard them entirely. Let them do things exactly as they think they should be done. If they want to ban private property or institute full communism or legalize murder of white people or make everyone attend their local Baptist church on Sundays, that's fine: everyone there is there because they want to be, and if they don't like it they can leave at any time.
What happens to people that want to keep living in the US and keep being US citizens and keep having US laws? I don't see why for example a black professor at local university would suddenly want to subject himself to a regime that may not be able to sustain any universities at all. Doesn't he have any rights?
...You have fundamentally misunderstood the proposal. No one of any race has to go there, at all, ever. Participation is entirely voluntary. It's a place where the only legitimate legal authority is expressly reserved for its black occupants, carte blanche, but where no one at all is actually required to go, and funded out of the outlays we'd already be providing to the percentage of the population who chooses to live there voluntarily, plus however much extra is required to sufficiently sweeten the pot. The people who believe that US society is founded on white supremacy and structural racism would now have an alternative that has had any plausible influence of white supremacy removed, while sacrificing as few of the advantages of American citizenship as possible. Meanwhile, everyone else can move on with their lives according to colorblind rules. If someone in the rest of the country complains about racism, you now point out to them that if they have a problem, there's an alternative easily available to them, and if they keep complaining, you mock them mercilessly until they shut up.
Areas can't write laws. People write laws. Who will be choosing these people?
It would not be my place to say, nor yours either. The point would not be to create what you or I think of as good governance. The point would be to create, as explicitly as possible, governance by Blacks on their own terms and in their own way, as an explicit alternative to the system governing the rest of the country.
What if there would be 10 groups of people writing ten competing sets of laws - which group is the real one that gets the full control?
That would be for them to sort out. The whole point is that they're in charge of this area, with no plausible legacy of white supremacy and racism to hinder them. Intervening in any way other than the unambiguously positive, ie providing a steady supply of cash, would be completely counterproductive.
Will it blockade the area if there would be threat of violence spreading out?
Their authority is absolute inside the border and null outside it. People who want to leave can at any time, but are subject to standard colorblind US law as soon as they cross the border. That probably should handle any actual problems short of weapons of mass destruction.
What about if they decide to build a giant meth factory and ship it to the US?
We check goods at the border and confiscate contraband. We don't do anything to those inside manufacturing the meth, we just don't let them export it to the rest of the country. Ditto for whatever other hypothetical; treat it like a foreign country, but with more leniency than usual. If they decide to make low-cost drugs and export them to the rest of America... that might not actually be a bad thing.
They already have this status, why we need the racist paradise to achieve what we already have?
The point is that many of them don't believe that colorblind society is actually operating in good faith, so you need to give them a demonstration of good faith, and that demonstration of good faith needs to actually resolve the concerns in a reliable way without opening the rest of us up to exploitation. Reparations are an example of an exploitable demonstration of good faith. This would cost less and be highly resistant to exploitation, and offer a good chance to actually resolve the majority of the distrust.
...The rest of your questions seem to be predicated on people being forced to live in such a zone, rather than being offered a free choice to live there or not as they see fit, so I'll end it here.
Go their own way where?
I disagree fundamentally with some of @Hoffmeister25's axioms, but in the formulation of the problem he's more or less straightforwardly correct. Blacks will never accept being an underclass any more than whites would, and there is no reason to believe that any solutions inside the Overton window can actually extricate them from their underclass status.
As for solutions, here's a modest proposal I wrote awhile back. As a list of things that are never going to happen, I think there's much to commend it.
I have previously proposed Reverse-Segregation: give blacks an area that they control completely, where every public official and government position must be held 100% by black people, by law. Grant this area leave to write its own laws as it sees fit, irrespective of the American constitution, and grant it leave to enforce and adjudicate those laws as it sees fit, completely outside the jurisdiction of the rest of American jurisprudence. Fund it with a per-capita percentage of all outlays legitimately payable to black Americans equivalent to the percentage of black Americans who actually live within it. People, white or black, can move there if they want, and leave if they want; no one can be kept there against their will, and no law-abiding citizen be prevented from going there by the rest of America if they choose to go. Then declare that outside this zone, racism has been solved. Blacks get the exact same legal status as everyone else. No AA, no hate crime laws, no special privileges, we implement pure colorblind enforcement of the letter of the law. Race-based discrimination is equally illegal no matter which race it's applied to. If certain words are evidence of bias, they're evidence regardless of who speaks them. Claims of bias will no longer be entertained unless they come with ironclad evidence. And if anyone doesn't like this, there's a place they can move. Welfare can even continue outside the zone as well, we just use cellphone data to track who's inside and who's outside and apportion the money appropriately. Anyone not-black who wants to can move inside the zone, they just can't hold office or vote for anyone who isn't black, presuming the zone decides to keep voting. Maybe even throw in something about the zone expanding if its population rises too high.
I think Hoff would not be wildly enthused with a plan like that, but I wonder if he'd take it. I wouldn't be wildly enthused for it either, and my expectation is that the zone would either turn into a corrupt shithole or what many now would consider a draconian police state in fairly short order. The idea of enforcing "racism is over" outside the zone is likewise laughably unrealistic; blues will never, ever let that weapon be pried from betwixt their fingers.
In any case, I think he's right that the colorblind 90s aren't coming back. Some problems don't have acceptable solutions. We can in fact keep right on burning social cohesion trying to bail water with sieves until things actually fall apart in a serious enough way to leave us with more pressing concerns.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Show me a person of influence who made this case when the George Floyd video dropped.
I do not believe anything the Russians could ever say or do could hold even a flickering candle to the gigaton flare generated by the actual words and deeds of genuine Americans.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
The problem with Southern whites wanting to venerate a lie about Robert E. Lee
The statement was "myth", not "lie". Can you specify "a lie about Robert E. Lee" that Southern whites in general want to venerate?
I have been repeatedly told that the history of the Civil War that I grew up on was the "Dunning School", a deceptive attempt to hide the crimes of the South. I've never actually figured out which crimes were hidden from me. I was taught from the start that from the perspective of the South, the Civil War was fought explicitly in defense of Slavery as an institution, but most of the people bringing up the Dunning School claim that denying this was one of the central points of the program. So on the one hand I'm told I've been lied to, and on the other hand the claimed nature of the lie is either unspecified or, in my experience, itself straightforwardly false. I was taught that Robert E Lee was an honorable man who fought ablely for a bad cause, lost, and accepted the verdict of battle with dignity. Which part of that was false?
Which prominent figures on the Union side do you consider worthy of veneration? John Brown? Sherman? Grant? Lincoln? I'm quite fond of all of them, as it happens. Are you?
Now, I know the response to do this is something like, "well, MLK Jr. cheated on his wife" or whatever.
It's routine for me to encounter left-leaning people who venerate Lenin or Trotsky or some other august personage among the Bolsheviks, or who venerate people generations later who engaged in lawless violence in support of their cause. I encounter more who think these people were just rascally knuckleheads, and have precisely zero knowledge of the horrors they unleashed and championed. I think those people are straightforwardly worse than the modal Robert E Lee admirer, because the people and institutions they venerate were straightforwardly worse than the slaving South. And this, on the understanding that the South richly deserved to have a significant portion of its men ground into worm-food because of the evils they perpetrated. From where I sit, the left doesn't have the slightest claim to moral insight, much less moral superiority. A significant portion of politically-active leftists are isomorphic to actual-literal-and-not-figurative neo-nazis.
Lee wasn't even a good general.
My understanding is that his contemporaries disagree with your assessment. Certainly I have never heard of any of the prominent generals fighting against him claiming that he was bad at his job.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
That said, our country's most prolific rapist actually did rape hundreds of young men with the drug, so it has been used for that.
Yeah, it's a bit weird to read comments about how drink spiking is vanishingly rare, right after listening to the press conference about the P Diddler accusations. I'm pretty sure both are true, and it's pretty crazy to wonder what percentage of the chemically-induced rapes in the last 25 years were literally just Sean Combs and his associates. I mean, the number couldn't possibly be that high, but with something like three thousand accusers and what appears to be significant evidence of guilt, it really activates the almonds.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.
Speaking of Sweeney in particular, I encountered enthusiasm for her breasts by listening to the Critical Drinker's "Open Bar" stream while working. The open bar has some actual conservatives, but it seems to me that the core group is pretty clearly tits-and-beer liberals who have been left behind by the rapid advance of Social Justice ideology.
Is what you're seeing a shift in core conservatives, or is it a shift in the center as SJ evolution pushes an increasingly-broad spectrum of people into oppositional alliance?
Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.
I think this is pretty accurate, and I think I see it in a lot of other ways too. A lot of the old conflicts between Christian denominations have gone away, now that the central example of a doctrinal dispute has shifted from "what hierarchy do we answer to" to "does sin exist". Many such cases, as they say. Polarization is very, very real.
That quake hit about 3M people living in ridiculously poor and dense conditions. It’s a terrible comparison for the electrified, paved, American-standard-of-living Southeast.
This is an excellent point.
Is your general sense that the cleanup and rescue efforts are proceeding more or less as well as we could ask for? I've heard complaints, but I haven't seen strong evidence either way, nor had the time to track down the details to a level where I could be confident that I understand the actual situation.
On the one hand, partisanship obviously dominates from both ends; the people running things have every incentive to present everything as fine, and the people opposing them have every incentive to present everything as a total disaster. This is complicated by heavy bias in the media, so the default narrative is definately going to favor the people running things in the current situation; the flipside is that any complaints are going to come from the opposition ghetto, which observably has poor quality control.
On the other hand, this is a time-sensitive issue; the three days between your comment and this reply could have been quite significant. If there is actually a problem, it would have been imperative to identify and correct it as quickly as possible.
On the gripping hand, I have no expectation that this can actually be done in a timely manner in the present environment. I mainly want to discuss it now as a marker, and check back in a month or two as the facts present themselves. The problem there, as I snarkily alluded to, is that it seems to me that after-the-fact, sober assessments of what really happened don't actually penetrate, even here. They become old news and people move on, even if the weight of evidence falls hard on one side or the other. There are exceptions; Ymeshkout did what seemed to me to be a very good job hammering election fraud claims, for example, but exceptions don't seem like they're enough.
This is a serious post and deserves a serious response, which I don't have time to write tonight. But one thing I will say right now is that I put the disclaimer "Assuming the secondary sources about The Civil War are roughly correct" in for a reason.
Fair enough.
Grah.
The proper way to have a serious discussion is to get to know a person really well, and then have an intimate meeting of the minds. That isn't really practical in a forum like this one, so to a greater or lesser extent, I find myself building a model of the person I'm talking to, and then arguing against that model. I can update the model as the conversation progresses, but it's a lossy process at the best of times, and it's prone to bleed-through when having a very similar part of a conversation with multiple people.
I've argued this particular issue a number of times with a number of people, and it's entirely possible that I'm rounding you to positions you don't have. If that's the case, you have my apologies. If you want to continue this later, I'll be interested in reading your thoughts.
If you ever get the chance, you should watch "Civil War". It is one of my favorite documentaries, and I think it is an excellent example of actual "civil religion", in the sense the rationalists use the term.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
Sure, maybe. Sometimes those things happen.
Sometimes they happen often enough that they foment irresistibly-large social movements demanding draconian top-down enforcement to prevent their failure states.
Neither chewing bubblegum nor consuming fentanyl guarantee doom. But there's a pretty large mountain of evidence that Free Love is closer to the Fent end than the bubblegum end, and thus, it seems to me, something people should generally steer away from. It's not close enough to the fent end that I'd advocate passing laws and enforcing them with the police, but it's close enough that I'm not really interested in expending significant effort to stop others from doing that, even when they're being quite dishonest about the nature of the problem. It's certianly bad enough to make an explicit point of the chain of causality between the Free Love narrative of "harmless fun" and the very real and apparently quite significant amounts of harm it has been causing for the last several decades. As the evidence continues to accumulate, hopefully people will learn to make better choices voluntarily, and those who do not can serve as cautionary examples.
They'd be no better than utilitarians at that point.
This is a fully-general argument against prudence in any form.
concur that time will tell, and if there's any solid evidence of intent, I'm open to hearing it.
My understanding is that the fake ID and fake plates is standard sovereign citizen behavior. they make their own license plates and IDs routinely (or use novelty reproductions) because it's part of the sovereign citizen memplex; they believe they're the "real" united states government, so they issue themselves "official" ID. I've heard he claims not to be a sovereign citizen, but I'm not sure if that's just a permutation of the meme, where he'd claim to actually be a "free citizen traveling" or whatever not-actually-a-distinction.
Multiple weapons isn't that weird. When I travel with guns, I usually travel with more than one.
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