FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
With regard to the willful destruction of a viable human infant, no, I don't. Why should I? Do you have sympathy for mothers spurred by tragedy to murder their birthed children in other contexts? Do you endorse "accompaniment" killings like Sati?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
I've memorized a lot more songs than poems, but I've memorized a few poems, and a lot more sections of poems. The ones I've memorized, I definitely found worthwhile, which is why I memorized them. Usually this is because they encapsulate some truth or insight in a way that seems most valuable to me.
Memorization usually was accomplished by repititive reading and writing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Jon Stewart/John Oliver/the other guy with glasses/the View/&etc.
The Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment appeared to exist.
Federal Circuit Courts informed them that they were mistaken, and that the Second Amendment very definately did not exist.
The Supreme Court accepted this correction, and allowed the Circuit Court decisions to stand rather than vindicate the Consitutional Rights of United States Citizens as required by its own prior decisions.
People like me abandoned all hope in the Supreme Court as a viable institution, removing the Jury Box from the "four boxes" model of liberty, and precommitted to discount all future adversarial arguments made on the basis of Constitutional Rights.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17d ago
This sort of low-effort spamming is not the sort of engagement that we are looking for here. You have already received two previous warnings, and have no QCs. I am banning you for one day. Please take the time to read and understand the rules linked in the sidebar; if you continue to engage in this manner, the bans will rapidly escalate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17d ago
To be clear, I'm describing the life I used to have; I'm not living that way any more.
I don't think I could claim that it's the worst that could happen. My porn addiction was far more manageable and less destructive than, say, what I've seen of the median meth addict. There were pleasures and pursuits beyond mindless self-indulgence. But it was not a good life, and it absolutely was not getting better with time. I observed myself slowly degrading, becoming less in very tangible and concrete ways, losing my humanity and degenerating into something verging on the insectile, as bitter regret and the need to escape that regret grew more and more to define my existence through habitual loops of pointless escapism and empty stimulus-response. Lying awake in the early hours of the morning, I would remember what it felt like to have someone I loved lying next to me, and know for an absolute certainty that I would never, ever have that feeling again, and the pain of that was considerable. At the time, I joked to my family that my purpose in life was to serve as a cautionary example, but the joke wore thin the worse it got. Toward the end, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about being dead. One of my main objectives in my current life is to do what I can to help my children and nieces and nephews avoid ending up in a similar place.
...All this is to say that, in my experience, the question of whether sex is or can be better than masturbation depends on the mentality of the assessor. In my own experience, I know for a fact that masturbation appearing preferable was a consequence of profound dysfunction. I am at least somewhat confident that my own experience generalizes at least to some degree, but this is pretty obviously a question that grounds out at one's values. At a minimum, I'd endorse what you wrote here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
I doubt I'm all that far off the heterosexual baseline, and I'd say it's a pretty reasonable description for the porn life as well. After a while it approaches wireheading. You want to feel [GOOD], and these actions allow you to turn on the [GOOD] feeling and sustain it for arbitrary amounts of time. Orgasm is nice and all, but it really isn't the point, the point is, as a book put it once, surcease. Your larger mind, your worries and anxieties, the tension and frustrations of the day, vague unknowns of the future and sharp hurts of the past, all of that flattens right out to smooth, gratified pseudo-flow-state, a delightful little mental loop through desire and satisfaction that's always there when you need it. And all it costs you is time, discipline, investment, human connection...
This is all well and good, but what stake do you put in your non-materialistic beliefs? How much does the Word of God guiding you trade off against anything an agnostic in your position would do?
The answer is "a considerable one"; I've completely changed most aspects of my life, in many cases entirely reversing my previous preferences or habits.
I don't want to be a Redditor about it, but I don't see the point of modern Christianity.
There is no point to "modern" Christianity. You are correct that many people claiming to be Christian are "cultural christians" for whom it is a fashion or a pose. On the other hand, there are also a lot of Christians like myself who are not partaking of "modern" Christianity but rather the old sort, and for whom it is an actual way of life. For us it appears to me that the benefits are as they always have been: considerable. It seems to me that the contrast grows increasingly stark as Modernity unspools itself into our collective society; the dating and relationship threads here on the Motte are as good an example as any.
Christians have gone from waging holy war against the heathens to missionary expeditions seeking conversions to "interfaith dialogue", from hanging homosexuals and other sinners to socially ostracizing them them to... IDK, frowning concernedly?
If we return to Deus Vult and the sword, will that satisfy you in some way? When Christians were serving in significant numbers in the recent middle east wars, and often saw those wars as a crusade, did that lend the faith more credibility?
We will continue on as we have before. Sometimes that will involve building, and sometimes that will involve fighting. We have done plenty of both, and will do plenty more of both in the future.
Maybe you're right in saying that, with the appropriate definitional games, one can peel materialism like a banana.
Not Materialism, the consensus materialist framework, the one that claims that there is no need to appeal to non-material explanations, and therefore any apparent evidence for non-materialist phenomena or explanations should be discarded without examination.
Briefly:
the consensus Materialist framework claims that Materialism adequately explains all observed phenomena, and that therefore there is no room for non-materialist explanations for observed phenomena.
We do not actually have a Materialist explanation for where the universe comes from; the chain of causality terminates roughly at the big bang. Okay, it's sort of a problem for "we can explain everything with Materialism" to then admit "other than the cause of the universe's existence", but that's a very long time ago and of questionable relevance to most practical questions. It's not entirely unreasonable to handwave that one.
Only, we do not actually have a Materialist explanation for the evident phenomenon of Free Will. We have a lot of evidence that either Free Will or something doing a completely seamless imitation of it exists: firstly, every one of us has an entire lifetime's experience of making an extremely large number of choices quite freely; secondly, every piece of functional social technology we have operates on the assumption that free will exists, thirdly, every attempt to develop social technology that operates off Determinist principles (and there have been many) has utterly failed: neither mind reading nor mind control appear to exist.
Materialists insist that all evidence of the existence of Free Will must be discarded, because it contradicts our Materialist axioms. But if evidence of Free Will contradicts materialist axioms, that necessarily means that it is evidence against materialism. And if one examines that evidence rather than simply discarding it axiomatically, it turns out that it is actually an enormous, heaping pile of evidence against materialism.
You are familiar with "The God of the Gaps", wherein theists made predictions about the material world based on their belief in God, and then had those predictions falsified by the march of Science, only to retreat back into smaller and smaller gaps where science had not yet penetrated, eventually retreating to claims that are completely unfalsifiable.
If you examine the history of Determinism, the exact same sequence recapitulates itself: Determinists make bold claims, and then those claims are tested to the tune of trillions of dollars and millions of man-years with the full backing of two civilizations, and the result was that their claims were completely falsified. The Determinists retreated to new, somewhat more humble claims in the gaps of the existing science, but science continues to advance and those claims are likewise falsified. This process has proceeded in this way to the present, and Determinists now make no testable predictions at all, but claim that Determinism must be accepted axiomatically, with no apparent awareness that they are adhering to Determinism of the Gaps and that this might be a problem.
"Materialist explanations are sufficient to explain all observed phenomena, except the ones we don't want to examine because otherwise they would be phenomena Materialism can't explain" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but is pretty much the state of the debate near as I can tell.
Materialism as an axiom still works as well as it ever did. It is not falsified so long as it limits its claims to being a very good solution to a very wide range of problems, not a fully general solution to all problems. But the latter is the consensus framing, and it is essentially a very large and lovingly-detailed sandcastle.
[LATE EDIT] - none of the above adds up to a claim that Christianity is correct, or even that Materialism is not an excellent axiom to reason from. Determinism very well could be correct, it's as reasonable an explanation for human consciousness as any. The point is that explanations that rely on things we can't observe or test are not Materialist explanations, and that while this fact should be so obvious as to go unsaid, a whole lot of people who call themselves Materialists do not appear to understand it.
Someone here once mentioned that Christianity was ridiculous. I asked them what they thought of the Simulation Hypothesis. They said that was different, because it was a materialistic explanation. and this is in fact how most descriptions of the Simulation Hypothesis are quite explicitly framed. There's this assumption that starting from a materialist frame, we think simulations are possible, and therefore nested simulations are possible, and therefore many layers of nested simulation are possible, and therefore we have a much greater probability of being somewhere in the simulation stack than at the baseline, but somehow that Materialist assumptions still obtain. But this is not how Materialism works. Once you are positing that there is an unobservable reality underneath the observable one, all bets are off. There is no basis for Strictly Materialist inference about the nature of baseline reality from observing the contents of a sim.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Why is this all pony literature?
To understand the answer to this question, we must look at the historical context. In the mid-2000s, Kurzweilian transhumanism began to draw increasing criticism from within, and a group of intellectuals began to coalesce around the troubling question of AI alignment...
"The real thing" is a more complex concept than many people appreciate, and a lot of it happens inside the skull and is heavily mediated by that skull's other contents. It is definitely possible to get to a place where "the fake thing" appears to be strictly superior; general gooner behavior is more or less a superhighway directly to this state. Further, this general pattern generalizes to most of the other pleasures of human existence.
The greatest source of joy in my life by far is my eldest child. Interacting with them, reading to them, the joy they radiate whenever they see me in the morning or when waking from a nap, cuddling with them and singing them to sleep at night are profoundly wonderful experiences that I would not trade for anything. But I remember quite well being quite determined to never have children, because they obviously interfered with all the "fun" I wanted to have playing video games and pursuing various hobbies. I do not think there are words present-Me could say to past-Me to convince them of their error; they thought the way they did because their mind was shaped by their circumstances and experiences, and only a change in circumstances and experiences could deliver a change of mind.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
I mean, the reason that deterrence works on Putin is that he’s at least semi-rational. He doesn’t want to have millions of dead Russians as a result. The concepts of Jihad and martyrdom of killing and dying in the name of Islam giving you a ticket to paradise— these negate the deterrent effect of “don’t try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die.”
I question whether one can in fact rise to control of a nation-state without becoming sufficiently cynical/realist that "don't try it, you and 3/4ths of your people will die" still works. We had a whole lot of evidence that the Japanese were insanely fanatical, but in the end they were, in fact, actually sane humans. Jihadism has demonstrated that it is willing to eat notable costs, but they still have to recruit their suicide bombers very carefully from a quite-limited pool.
It is not clear to me that Jihadism is actually more insane than Communism, and MAD worked on Communism.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Chiming in to possibly offer assistance:
People try to diagnose what's going on with the world around them.
Approach 1: "it's that guy's fault!"; "that guy" may be the king or a vizier or an enemy general or whatever. This is sometimes true on the object level, as bad actors do exist and do create notable problems, but it obviously doesn't generalize.
Approach 2: "It's those peoples' fault!"; "those people" might be a social class or an ethnic group, jews, whites, blacks, capitalists, billionaires, whatever. This could at least potentially be true, but much more often appears to be false. Human behavior is too complicated and interconnected for it to all be caused by one small group.
But if it's not individuals, and it's not groups, what is left?
Approach 3: "it emerges from the negative space between various individuals and various groups." The negative space, the net incentives created by the intractably complex interaction of more limited individual or group action, generate pseudo-intentional action, a set of phenomena which are not the result of consciousness, but which can be much better understood and predicted if modelled as though they were.
Two examples: Scott's description of "Molech" from meditations on Molech, and Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand of the Market". A weaker example might be strong convergence on the idea of "The Algorythm" in social media analysis.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
transformation, I think, but also vore, bimboification, the bondage variant where people get cocooned, corruption(?) slimepeople, diapers, mind control... the list of "topics" addressed is considerable, and the tone is sufficiently matter-of-fact that I genuinely didn't understand the angle he was chasing until quite late in the story.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
DataPacRat: S.I.
...from excerpts posted in the old place, I spent something like thirty consecutive hours reading this story in one sitting, only to realize somewhere around hour 28 or so that I was, in fact, reading a pornfic aimed at fetishes sufficiently obscure to me as to not recognize them for what they were. The realization and recontextualization of the reading experience was certainly novel.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
I was more interested in why someone would change their axioms based on seeing the politically-compromised Science-as-Institution
One observes that things scrupulously labeled "Materialistic, evidence-based belief" turn out to be generated and maintained entirely by social consensus effects, and once one has seen the pattern, one can recognize it elsewhere. "Things labeled materialistic, evidence-based belief are what they say on the tin" is an axiom, and once you have a lot of strong evidence that this axiom is wrong by observing the politicially-compromised Science-as-institution, it's pretty easy to discard it and everything that depends on it, including consensus-narrative-style "materialism". then you're free to notice things like Determinism-of-the-gaps and "Materialism precludes free will = evidence of free will is evidence against Materialism", and a whole bunch of very carefully crafted and highly-rigorous arguments abruptly reverse polarity.
...This is a subject I dearly love to discuss, but I am in fact trying to answer your question. Observing the political compromise of Science-as-institution directly led to me changing axioms, and adopting a set that seem much stronger to me against Materialism itself, because the large majority of Materialist elements seem to me to obviously depend heavily on similar political compromise for their weight.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Do you not understand that this is just like fourth wall breaking and pointless?
What is your understanding and assessment of the loaded phrase "just asking questions"?
I think what you are seeing here is a more general application of the ideas behind the phrase.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Huh? I've never seen anyone (on the right or elsewhere) go from "the institutions are politically compromised" to "there is nonphysical stuff."
It is trivial to demonstrate the existence of "non-physical stuff" from within a strictly materialist framework. With an understanding of the political compromise of institutions, and an awareness of the historical record of those institutions, it is fairly trivial to peel the consensus materialist framework like a banana.
What I wanted to point out was that the immediate and reflexive jump to "he must be one a' them bigot pro-lifer zealot Christian MAGAs!"
I'm pretty sure I'm the one you're referring to here. I also am a "bigot pro-lifer zealot Christian MAGA". I think this guy came from my side of the aisle because the initial evidence seems to have broken that way. The assassin's connections to the Democratic party appear to be tenuous at best, and reports are citing support for abortion as the through-line of his target list and a history of Conservative Christian involvement in his social media trail. That's genuinely how the evidence looks to me. I have not been attempting to make any comment on Protestants vs Catholics; I am noting that the way the press is talking about him is generally how they talk about people like me.
It would not be surprising in the least if it turned out that the press were lying, but I have no current evidence that they're lying other than that it's the press, and if they're lying, it's at least somewhat about facts they don't control and should be publicly verifiable, so I think that's less likely.
Having observed several iterations of this particular game over the years, I think anyone who argues for ignoring the question of motive is kidding themselves; if this guy is in fact a Red Triber, that fact will, to put it delicately, be relevant to the discourse for some time. If he is not a Red Triber, then I am compelled to point out that the question of his motivations will be actively suppressed. That is the pattern I observe from the last several go-rounds.
I am deeply concerned about escalating extremism. I believe it is better in principle to consistently engage on the motives of extremists such as this and previous assassins, rather than allow our press to play their usual games.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
I'd say Sherlock Holmes, but that leans heavily on asspull magic, in my view.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
That's certainly possible, but it's not the way I'd bet, given the current information.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
People in this thread are claiming that the shooter is a Blue, given that he appears to have been appointed to office by Tim Waltz and possibly by other Democratic politicians, with one of the victims being a democrat who recently voted with the Republicans on an important issue, resulting in much criticism from her own party. Also, he apparently had a stack of No Kings flyers in his vehicle. This seems quite premature to me.
I'm going to bet that the motivations for this assassination end up red-coded. Per CNN, the shooter is apparently a devout Christian, with him being caught on video "pointedly questioned American morals on sexual orientation". I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers. And not to put too fine a point on it, but he just shot two democrats.
Apparently the police have a manifesto, so we'll probably know the truth soon enough.
The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was not a "deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself".
The proximal cause of the 2020 riots was the widespread belief among Progressives that police kill large numbers of innocent Black men.
This belief was explicitly false, but became widespread among Progressives specifically because a large percentage of Journalists spent many years collaborating together to bias their reporting in a way calculated to create this impression, or in the parlance, "raise awareness". Widespread criticism of this practice was uniformly ignored.
And of course, the direct result of the riots was many thousands of additional Black people murdered by overwhelmingly Black criminals, as law enforcement broke down and the criminals ran rampant. This was the easily-predictable result of the riots, and it was in fact predicted in advance, by myself and many others. I observe that Blues, having been most vociferous in their support of the Black Lives Matter campaign when it was sparking riots based on a fictitious epidemic of Black murder, now studiously deploy the squid ink when the topic of the factual consequences of that campaign is raised. "Black Lives Matter" was a slogan to them, not anything resembling a principle.
calling immigrants "invaders"
The term seems appropriate.
and the DHS declaring intent to "liberate" LA from the socialists.
Despite what this poster and the average LA resident might think, Red Tribers are only de facto second-class citizens in Blue enclaves, not de jure. According to the actual laws in the actual law books, they are still entitled to the protections afforded by the law, and to having the laws enforced on those who break them.
Okay. The state commands people to not murder on pain of prison. Problem solved?
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