FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
I don't actually follow LoTT all that closely, so the above is my general understanding, and I stand by for correction. That being said, I don't see it.
LoTT is, in fact, a mom in a basement, is she not? She aggregates publicly available information, and the overwhelming majority of the information she aggregates is both obviously real and speaks entirely for itself. Trace demonstrated that you can, with a moderate amount of effort, feed her false information that she will repeat, because she doesn't actually check all that carefully. The problem with that critique is that it doesn't seem to generalize; when he made the post, I considered a response of simply pulling random items from her feed for the next couple weeks, and checking one by one whether they were legit, on the expectation that they would be. If I were to do that, what outcome would you bet on? Compare that to Social Text, or Progressive Academia generally. Okay, we know the Sokal Squared articles were bogus; are you actually confident that the rest of their content was significantly more reliable?
What is the actual critique here? LoTT is a shitposter, and receives low trust. On the other hand, her output is optimized to be extremely effective despite that low trust. The overwhelming majority of her content is posting public receipts, and her vulnerability to hoaxing doesn't significantly undermine the reliability of those receipts, because you can generally click through and see the actual record for yourself. She is valued by Reds because she provides a fire-hose of solid evidence that is highly inconvenient for the Progressive narrative. She shows up here because stuff she has actually found has led to significant cultural disputes a number of times. I don't trust her for analysis or for picking my stocks. I trust her that her link to a facebook comment goes to facebook, especially since it's trivial to check myself. Is that foolishness on my part? If so, where does my foolishness actually cash out? What foolish predictions or positions actually result? How does this foolishness compare to people who, say, genuinely believe that Trump was a Russian plant, or that the Hunter laptop was fake news?
I don't have to believe that she is a Very Important And Very Noble Journalist to think that the information she aggregates is timely and relevant in many cases. My basic critique of Trace's hoax isn't that he hoaxed her, which to my mind is entirely fair game; it's that he seems to think that the hoax discredits the rest of her information in some way. That because he fooled her, I should now discount an archive link to comments on facebook or a CNN clip on CNN's own servers because she's the one that handed it to me. At least, that's how the Trace's criticism comes across, and this seems similar.
@Chrisprattalpharaptor posits that it's absurd to claim that LoTT has less social influence that Social Text, and presumably the Academic consensus it represents. I think there's a reasonably clear line from that academic consensus to the operating interpretations of Federal law and HR policy. Would you disagree?
LoTT, on the other hand, operates by exploiting coordination failures within Blue Tribe. Blues in one place deny a thing exists, Blues in another place are publicly doing that thing, LoTT provides reciepts. The Blues who denied the thing was happening are shamed, and turn against the Blues who embarrassed them, or else are forced to pivot publicly. Reds benefit either way, but why should this be objectionable? You can say that she's nutpicking, but that has to be balanced against ubiquitous Blue denials that the nuts exist at all, and then there's the further problem of isolated demands for rigor.
- I think LoTT is reliable enough that information she provides should be taken seriously.
- I think LoTT is in fact much less powerful than the Academic consensus, to the degree that the comparison above is laughable.
- I think LoTT generally provides a valuable service to the media ecosystem.
Which of these statements seem indefensible to you? If there's a motte and bailey here, where is it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
This post breaks a whole bunch of rules. You've had a couple warnings and temp-bans last year, but it's been a while and you got an AAQC recently. On the other hand, you pretty clearly know that this sort of foaming-at-the-mouth rant doesn't fly here. You are waging the culture war, not discussing it.
Take a couple days off, cool down, and come back with something other than tribal rage to contribute.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
if we're dealing with mythos, this scene might be a worthwhile corrective.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I can only comment that, in my own personal experience and in observation of numerous others, it is both very easy and very attractive to launder one's own hatred into faux-altruism. I know that I wish to do this, and so I know I cannot trust such convenient constructions. Especially when the forgiveness is nebulous, and the "righteous anger" is focused and specific.
how do you do it?
Poorly.
In my experience, the starting point is to confront the fact that when he says these things, he's talking to you, specifically, about your hatred, specifically. If your response is "yeah, this is a lesson that other people really need, they should listen to him", you have already missed the point.
The next step is to recognize the specific parts of your thinking that are hateful. Sin starts as a choice and becomes a habit, a reflex, an instinct. Resisting it means pushing the other way, to gain awareness of the sin as sin, usually in retrospect to start with, but with the goal of gaining awareness of the sin in the moment, and ultimately at the moment of choice. From "I've hated", to "I am hating", to "I am about to hate".
Once you have awareness of the choice, you have to choose righteousness. The best way I've found to approach that is to precommit and practice, to make your decision as much as possible in advance and in a position of strength, rather than trying to choose well in a moment of weakness. For me, hymns help a great deal; it is difficult to maintain hatred while singing It is well with my soul. The hymns do a good job of giving me a model to validate my thoughts against, an example of what a Christian's thoughts should be. In difficult moments, they can pour cold water on the embers in your mind. The ultimate goal is to make obedience habitual, instinctive, to make the right choice until it ceases, as much as possible, to be a choice, but simply part of what you are.
You have to remember and to internalize that you are not better than those you hate, that your hate is not righteous or justified in any way. You, like them, are a sinner. You, like them, were once under condemnation, and your debts are forgiven in exactly the way you are willing to forgive the debts of others. This is not optional, and Jesus is explicit that forgiveness is the standard by which your immortal soul will be judged.
You have to remember that no human is in control, and that there are no ends in this world to judge means by. This life is transient, all humans die, justice is fleeting at best, and suffering is and always will be the common lot of all humans on this Earth. There is no progress, there is no arc of history, there is no glorious victory to be won in any meaningful sense in this life. It does not seem to me that this view demands pacifism, but it does demand a cold, hard realism on what is actually achievable from conflict, an understanding that conflict has far less upside than the world may recognize, and that we should be far more wary of it than the world would think. If your side wins, that fact alone means nothing in the grand scheme of things. If your side loses, that fact alone likewise means nothing. If God's design hinges on some outcome, you have no idea what that outcome is or why it is necessary, and certainly no reason to believe that it coincides neatly with your worldly preferences for ease or glory or the defeat of your enemies. Maybe it serves his purpose for you and all you know and love to die in pain and horror and darkness. It was so for the Japanese Christians, and for many others, and he has promised to wipe the tears from every eye.
The ingrained instincts of the world and of one's own nature fight and scream against every part of this process. It is not easy, and you will regularly fail, but the point is to repent and keep trying. There will be no shortage of opportunities.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
There has been no shortage of actual blood either.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Not only is it already normalized, it's mandated by the Federal Bureaucracy, enforced routinely, and has been for decades.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
You have accurately described the problem, but there is no ruleset available to us that can actually enforce correct outcomes in the face of widespread personal bias. Every point in the sequence you describe requires subjective judgement and line-drawing. This can work if you have coherent values, and it won't work if you don't, but it is the coherent values that are the load-bearing element in any case. We might as well be honest and say "We believe speech should be free so long as it isn't too objectionable". That would be both easier to understand and considerably more honest, lacking only the gloss of self-righteous, unearned piety.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I believe that it is morally necessary to keep hate out of one's heart. "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you" is the correct path forward.
On the other hand, it does no good to pretend that they are not actually your enemies, or to imagine that this path is likely to result in net-positive material outcomes. It's how you secure your soul, not your life. Further, most people are not actually interested in securing their souls, so it is not a good framework for predicting behavior at a population-level.
You do not live in a world compatible with "the moral high ground" in any real sense. You can adopt the moral high ground regardless, but you should do so with the understanding that the likely consequences are net-negative for you from a materialist perspective. Certainly you should not expect the majority of those around you to adopt such a position.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
For a more recent pop-culture example, I've heard there's a scene in a recent episode of The Boys where one of the main characters infiltrates a villian's sex-dungeon, and get violated in various ways for his trouble, which is played for laughs.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Believing that the social forces at play can be leashed by cancelling a few people on twitter belies a surprising level of optimism. The violence is getting worse. The trajectory has not altered, and sporadic cancelations certainly aren't going to do the job at this late date.
Free Speech is a spook, an incoherent concept that collapses the very instant it drifts outside the bounds of a rigidly-coherent values environment. To the extent that it has significant meaning, it has never been tried, and to the extent that it has been tried, it has had no significant meaning.
That being said, I see no actual value gained from taking these scalps. Let me speak plainly: I am confident that somewhere between a large plurality and an outright majority of Blues are sad that the assassin missed. If I'm correct in that assessment, it seems to me that the reality of modal Blue opinion is orders of magnitude more important than any aesthetic "norm" secured by enforcing a taboo on celebration of lethal political violence. Canceling people over their personal endorsement of political murder is not actually going to change the modal Blue opinion; all it does is help Blue Tribe as a whole hide the reality of that modal opinion, by coaching them through the entirely inconsequential and pointlessly pro forma rituals of "norms." Speech is information. Blue Tribe is leaking information, and the net result of these cancelation efforts is to help them stem the leakage. I would vastly prefer for people to speak and be heard honestly, so that we can more clearly see where we stand.
That being said, if we're going to do the comparison game, it would be better to be specific about the objects of comparison. I remember a working-class hispanic nobody getting fired for making the OK sign. Is that a good comparison to this? If not, which specific cancelation would be a better one? I remember a lot of people being cancelled for speaking or yelling the N-word in public; I also remember those people not actually getting a defense from the right. Would cases like that be a better comparison?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
As someone who voted for him one time and stayed home the second, it didn't feel like he governed horribly. I think subsequent events have revealed extremely serious problems with his tenure, but at the time, in a blue information bubble, he seemed like the best president in quite a while.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
The point isn't to secure actual unity. It's to extend the hand in good faith, so that when they slap it away they're doing so in as obvious and public a manner as possible. Erosion of Blue Tribe social consensus is the name of the game. Very little else matters more than that, because unless Blue Tribe social consensus can be broken, Reds and probably the nation as a whole are screwed no matter what else happens. There is no peace or prosperity available in continuing to allow Blue Tribe to do our thinking for us, without accountability or recourse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
My post about my family's immigration situation didn't go down well. In retrospect, that makes sense given how scatterbrained it was. But one of the responses got me thinking about national identity in a way I never had before. In turn, it got me reading a lot of posts on this website and I came across a back and forth about white nationalism, which then led to the cited
No. You've been doing this schtick for years. Roll an alt, adopt a naïve persona, oh hey, check out all these white nationalist articles I've just happened to stumble across in a crazy random happenstance!
No one is fooled, you are immediately and obviously recognizable the instant the link spam starts.
Banned for egregious obnoxiousness.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
My understanding is that the shooter openly carried a rifle, climbed up the side of a building in full view of security and the audience, from a range of a little over a hundred yards, posted up and fired shots without intervention on the part of Secret Service or the on-site security.
Speaking plainly, I would not have believed an attack like this was possible under any circumstances, based on all information I've received about the Secret Service and its capabilities. Maybe that's ignorance on my part. Maybe it's even a deliberate strategy on the part of the Treasury Department, deterring assassination attempts by greatly exaggerating their competence. All I know is that I cannot reconcile the reported events with my understanding of the agency's capabilities.
Social confirmation, purity spirals. Humans inevitably human. the archive link has the thread, and his audience appears to be nodding along with his wisdom.
You guys, who haven’t heard a really bad Scissor statement yet and don’t know what it’s like – it’s easy for you to say “don’t let it manipulate you” or “we need a hard and fast policy of not letting ourselves fight over Scissor statements”. But how do you know you’re not in the wrong? How do you know there’s not an issue out there where, if you knew it, you would agree it would be better to just nuke the world and let us start over again from the sewer mutants, rather than let the sort of people who would support it continue to pollute the world with their presence? How do you know that you’re not like the schoolkid who superciliously says “Nothing is bad enough to deserve a swear word” when the worst that’s ever happened to her is dropping her lollipop in the dirt. If that schoolkid gets kidnapped and tortured, does she change her mind? If she can’t describe the torture to her schoolmates, but just says “a really bad thing happened to me”, and they still insist nothing could be bad enough to justify using swear words, who do you side with? Then why are you still thinking I’m “damaged” when I tell you I’ve seen the Scissor statement, and charity and compassion and unity can fuck off and die? Some last remnant of outside-view morality keeps me from writing the whole list here and letting you all exterminate yourselves. Some remnant of how I would have thought about these things a month ago holds me back. So listen:
Delete Facebook. Delete Twitter. Throw away your cell phone. Unsubscribe from the newspaper. Tell your friends and relatives not to discuss politics or society. If they slip up, break off all contact.
Then, buy canned food. Stockpile water. Learn to shoot a gun. If you can afford a bunker, get a bunker.
Because one day, whoever keeps feeding us Scissor statements is going to release one of the bad ones.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
grah. let's try a raw URL then.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229599?context=8#context
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
No shortage of significant changes in social conditions, though.
I've seen speculation that the snipers were expecting a long-range threat, and so were set up with high-magnification scopes that may have made target acquisition and ID difficult at close range. I'm skeptical, but it's something to consider.
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