FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
As bad as the "coming for your guns" is, it's nothing compared to "we should tax religions I don't like." Beto has been one of my go-to examples for why the Culture War is terminal, and the counter-argument previously was that Beto was a minor, dead-end presidential contender of no consequence. I was assured that his naked appeal to intolerance, for which his audience cheered and which the press responded to by stroking their chins thoughtfully, should not be taken as representative of Blue Tribe generally. Charitably, we shouldn't see him floated as a serious candidate now, because of course Blues wouldn't rally behind such an obviously unfit candidate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
A fair point, but the Commanche weren't taking scalps from the French Laundry either, were they?
The Cartels are extremely brutal, and their brutality has hit American citizens just on the other side of America's borders, and constantly hits the citizens of a close American ally. I grant that it's not a perfect comparison, but I think the OP's premise is questionable. We really have turned down the violence knob a whole lot in the last few decades.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
We don't bomb the drug cartels, and it's not obvious to me that they're less awful than the Commanche.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Why? What specific elements justify stronger language?
The special status applied to J6 was cemented with deliberate lies about the violence committed by the protestors. We know now that they did not, in fact, kill police officers, or anyone for that matter. We know that there was a complete failure of preparation and policing on the part of the government, which made crowd control completely ineffective. We can be pretty sure that there were many plainclothes government agents and informants in the crowd, encouraging others to break the law. We know that the police, lacking manpower, began waving the crowds through, and then that security forces shot an unarmed woman when the crowd tried to enter the chambers themselves.
We know that the protestors brought no guns, even though they could have. We know that they generally did not bring other weapons, despite lies to the contrary. We know they engaged in no serious violence, no serious destruction of property, nor even serious looting, despite complete failure to control the crowd. We know that protesters interrupting congressional deliberations is not some unprecedented event, and in fact Blue protesters have done it repeatedly in the past. We know protesters breaking into secure areas to confront and harass congressional officials is not some unprecedented act; blue protesters have done it before, and without being shot in response.
What's the actual argument?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Anyway, come on. Trump is a shady guy. He always has been.
More or less shady that multiple forcible rapes, and burning multiple dozens of men, women and children alive for a PR stunt?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
As you say, this knowledge is suppressed in any other context. Why grant charity when it cuts against those doing the suppression?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
That problem is not recognized in any other context, so why should it be recognized in this one?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Clinton on the other hand... man, I really think she should have had some major consequences.
It's good to see someone more or less on the other side willing to admit it. The problem remains that there were not, in fact, major consequences, that the way she escaped those consequences drastically reduced trust in the system as a whole, and that similar failures have multiplied over the last few decades. At this point, it's hard to see why we shouldn't simply continue to heighten the contradictions.
One of the major reasons I've supported Trump, from the start, is that I hate how establishment politicians are above the law. I am entirely willing to see Trump mulched by the justice system, but I see no reason why I or any other Red Triber should support this process in any way. Let the Establishment fight uphill for the rule of law they have consistently undermined and evaded. If they fail, then at least my champions will enjoy the benefits they have heretofore kept for themselves. If they succeed, then we should ensure they do so at the cost of significant investment, making it that much harder for them to evade these new precedents in the future.
I am willing to accept Trump going free. I am happy to accept Trump and most of the rest of Washington going to jail. I see no reason to accept Trump going to jail alone.
Spoken like a man who does not remember Fitzmas.
Maybe Trump really is just unusually shady?
"No reasonable prosecutor would bring such charges."
If Trump were unusually shady, the absurd amounts of scrutiny and procedurally-illegitimate attacks levied against him would have destroyed him already. We can actually observe the norms that have been violated and the procedures abused in an attempt to destroy him, and compare these directly to the treatment other politicians enjoy. It seems quite clear to me that he is, in fact, not particularly shady, if what they're hitting him with is truly all they could find.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
My reading is "you don't believe in free speech, the Chinese dissident does; if we could swap your places, you each would live under a government that matches your stated preferences."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
He argued to me that J6 was obviously worse, because the protesters were much, much more violent, killing five people including a police officer. Within a week or two, we knew that the statistic was completely fake, but by the time it was provable, the social consensus was already set. A fantastic example of how the Press manipulates social consensus, and another example of "no matter how much you hate the media, you don't hate them nearly enough."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Why do you disagree with it, or on what grounds?
It seems clear to me that most people who use illegal drugs are not using them for performance enhancement, but rather using them for pleasure. If that's true, wouldn't the above statement necessarily be true as well?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?
Absolutely not.
It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.
The Jacobins are the most central example of Enlightenment ideology possible. Bolsheviks are the grandchildren of the Jacobins, and the Nazis are close cousins, both being founded on hard Materialism and totalizing authoritarianism which founds its credibility on Enlightenment assumptions.
It is literally wrong! I provided 2 examples of it being dead wrong...
And I have accepted your correction, and asked "Would you agree that the second amendment doesn't exist in most Blue Tribe areas?" Is that statement inaccurate? Is it reasonable for me to ask how wrong I am, or is correctness purely binary? If you correct me by being more precise, then I can try to be more correct than you, and so on, and we can converge on truth. Or do you believe that the conversation should just terminate? I said something incorrect, you point out the error, and I shrink away, banished by the Light of Truth?
The Second Amendment doesn't exist in Blue Tribe areas," is an incorrect statement.
Then instruct me! Give me a statement about the realities of the Second Amendment in Blue Tribe areas that 1) communicates the reality of the overall situation and 2) is more accurate than mine.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
It seems like this is more or less isomorphic to utilitarianism, and my critique of it would be the same as my critique of utilitarianism: You seem to be trying to do math here, but I don't think it's actually math. That is to say, I don't think these calculations actually deliver repeatable answers independent of specific observers, and I don't think there's a way to fix that any more than there's a rigorous way to multiply potatoes by carrots.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
This reply nerd sniped me a bit, but I'll try to push through.
I think the list you gave is accurate, as far as it goes; my criticism would be that it risks getting lost in the details, given that many of the variables don't seem terribly variable, in addition to being difficult to quantify or measure.
1 - ???
2 - I assume that coordination is highly restricted, to the point of stochastic impossibility. This will not change.
3 - I assume that very few to no individuals or small groups are willing to risk adverse consequences. This will not change.
4 - I assume that things are getting observably worse, but gradually. This will not change.
5 - ???
6 - I assume that society is hard, but somewhat fragile. Society has vast capacity for coordinating meanness against the outgroup, but is rife with internal contradictions and corruption that impose a constant drag on productivity and coordination. This will not change.
7 - I assume society is extremely willing to punish rebels. This will not change.
8 - Society is not very competent. It muddles through well-enough on well-defined and familiar problems, but it handles novel, adversarial, and blind-spot problems quite poorly and with a lot of wastage. Like an elder suffering from the onset of dementia, it thrives on routine. This will not change.
9 - Society is not responsive at all to demands of the public. That is to say, to the extent that a public has demands that fall outside the established social consensus, Society ignores or suppresses them. This will not change.
Having left aside points 1 and 5 for the moment, do my assessments of the other seven factors seem accurate to you?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Would you agree that the second amendment doesn't exist in most Blue Tribe areas? Would it be better to break the areas down by population percentage?
All statements are wrong. Some statements are useful. I think my original statement is accurate enough to be more useful than your correction. My point is that important constitutional rights have been denied in large chunks of the country, and those denials have survived long-term challenges, to the point that they are probably not going to be defeated in the forseeable future under current conditions. Further, I argue that the failure of our established mechanisms for resolving constitutional disputes demonstrates that those mechanisms no longer work. Do you disagree?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Is your argument that Vermont and Maine are more central examples of Blue Tribe areas than New York, California, Washington State, Washington DC and Illinois?
- Open defiance to the Court's edicts from blue areas and blue courts, which now appear to have succeeded in forcing the Court to abandon those edicts. The Second Amendment doesn't exist in Blue Tribe areas, and it's now clear that the Supreme Court doesn't have the juice necessary to change that. This problem generalizes to the idea of Constitutional remedies generally.
- Court Packing or removal of SC justices squarely back in the Overton Window, driven by high-profile attacks on the integrity of the Justices and the legitimacy of the Court. We're now discussing whether the Court's composition should be modified by methods other than the nomination and approval of replacement justices, which is a fairly novel development. The previous precedent was FDR's attempt at court packing, which is widely believed to have shifted the Court's findings, and until recently was universally agreed to be illegitimate.
To quote some high-effort perspective contrary to mine:
And back to jurisprudence, there wasn't necessarily a strong reason to overturn Roe, Hodges was broadly popular but certainly a major event, and as a Supreme Court you do have a certain amount of political capital and around that point they really should have gotten the memo that they were stretching it to breaking.
The conversation is now converging irreversibly on the Supreme Court's "political capital", and that's the end of the Court as an effective conflict-resolution mechanism.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
And Blues are actively undermining the court because they find that situation intolerable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Apologies, I entirely believe that he called you a retard before. My point was that he is not calling you a retard now, so bringing it up and claiming that's how he communicates is sort of pointless, when that is in fact not how he's communicating in the conversation you're currently in.
I don't, in fact, think you're a retard. I do think you're possibly drunk, given past interactions, but I'm certainly grumpy from the week I've had and maybe that's what's up with you as well.
@SteveKirk as well, the conversation may be relevant to your interests.
So there's two variables we could propose here: how bad things are perceived to be, and the expected benefit of rebellion. An example of the first would be things like the common pattern of famine or other natural disaster driving a population to rebellion out of sheer desperation, and the second is the examples Tocqueville is pointing to, what we might call rebellions of ambition.
To these, I would suggest as a further variable the nature of the technology available to the rebels and their rulers. Looking at the BLM movement culminating in the Floyd riots, I think smartphones and social media are far more fundamental to how things shook out than how bad things were perceived to be and what benefits were expected. To speak a bit more precisely, it seems to me that innate effects of smartphone and social media technology were the dispositive factor in peoples' perceptions of how bad things were, and what benefits rebellion could deliver.
From this, one might argue that technology itself is a major variable in the rebellion equation. Through enabling communication, technology helps us form consensus on how bad things are, and through augmenting and adding to human capabilities, it has a huge impact on the expected benefit both in terms of the fight and in terms of the plausible prosperity victory might bring. On the other hand, there's the fact that it tends to distribute itself fairly evenly between rulers and ruled, at least in the ways that matter in terms of rebellion. You can't have a functional society where the rulers are running on microchips and the ruled are restricted to cuneiform tablets; the rulers need the ruled to do all the stuff, so they need them to work as efficiently as possible, so it's massively in their interest to share the wealth, so there's generally not huge tech differentials to foment massive instability. Still, what I think I see in the historical record is that major technological innovations do in fact seriously alter the rebellion equation, often permanently. Would you argue otherwise?
...At the risk of becoming a bit elliptical, there's two intuition pumps I can recommend on this subject.
The first one is found on page 22 of this rulebook for an old Live-action roleplaying game. left column, bottom of the page, starting with the word "guidelines:". Assume for the sake of argument that the descriptions that follow were reasonable approximations of physical reality, how would you expect the rebellion calculation to change over time? And let's assume we're talking about the trend described regarding technology as a whole, in the most general sense possible, discounting entirely the specific subject mentioned in this instance.
The second can be gained by inference from Nick Bostrom's essay The Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Bostrom, being a rationalist and an academic, comes at the question squarely from the perspective of existential risk, and the perspective of the establishment. He's seeking to advise our rulers about which policies they should implement. But if we approach from the perspective of citizens facing merely human tyranny, and if we ignore the specific technology his argument is built around and rather look at technology itself, in its broadest sense, what inferences would you draw from his argument?
What's the situation with Lloyd Austin?
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