FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
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.
Often. How is that relevant to the discussion?
@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?
My guy! Maybe you can call me retarded again. That seems like your preferred way to establish a dialog.
Only he didn't, and instead he wrote an actual argument in some detail. And you've just dismissed it by sneering, haven't you? I mean, let's make that an actual question. Do you think that this is a reasonable, productive response to his message?
You want violent confrontation to bend others to your will
No, I want me and mine to be left alone to live in peace. I'm happy for offer the same to others. That's just not the direction we appear to be heading in.
hoping for collapse for some excitement
How'd you feel about watching the police station burn?
and are dissatisfied when things are going ok.
Things are generally not "going okay". It's possible that they'll get somewhat better, and it's also possible that they'll get a whole lot worse. Even the worse outcomes are preferable to living at the mercy of people who hate myself, my tribe and my family, though.
On the topic at hand, I think my argument is pretty solid. The court exists to limit the scale of conflict, but it is failing to do that. If you think the Court is important, this should concern you.
Pretty aggressive stance here FC!
I think it's just about the right level of aggression, actually. You're staking out a position where you get to decide what beliefs and opinions people get to express. I wouldn't expect others to defer to my views of which beliefs and opinions people should be allowed to express, and so I won't defer to your views. If you were able to convince enough other people to go along with implementing your preferences, the correct response is to fight you.
Keep it where it belongs, in your heart.
No founding father I'm aware of ever expressed anything even close to that philosophy. On the other hand, your views sound indistinguishable from the Soviet maxim "Pray as much as you like, so long as God alone can hear".
Don't proselytize for it
All humans have a right to model the world as best they're able, and to share that model with those who are willing to listen. If I can tolerate the models I don't like and have zero respect for, so can you.
and belittle those that believe differently or not at all
Claiming that sin, divine judgement and punishment in the afterlife exist is not belittling anyone at all. Believing that some actions are right and other actions are wrong is not belittling anyone either, even the people who you claim are doing wrong. The rigor of your statement is so isolated we'd need a radio telescope to detect it. Everyone, absolutely every last goddamn human alive on earth, has a model of right and wrong and judges themselves and the people around them accordingly. We have a system whereby this is a problem if that judgement results in serious material harm to people, and otherwise is none of your goddamn business. It's a good model, and we should have stuck by it better.
Me believing in sin and hell, and stating that belief in relevant conversations, again, neither breaks your leg nor picks your pocket, any more than your belief that I'm a deluded idiot wasting my time praying to a make-believe sky-daddy breaks mine. As for the rules here, there's ways to express both those beliefs that cause no problems, and there's ways to express them that cause a lot of problems. I and most of the other people you're complaining about consistently confine ourselves to the former. You consistently fall back on the latter.
The basic problem is that you don't understand or don't care how the rules here actually work. Consider the following two phrases:
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"It seems obvious to me that God doesn't exist, and I'm mystified how others could draw any other conclusion on any rational basis."
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"God doesn't exist and if you think he does you're irrational."
The former is a reasonable attempt at starting a conversation. The latter is a pretty clear attempt at stopping one. This place exists to facilitate conversations, so the latter is antithetical to its purpose, and those who make a habit of communicating in this way draw mod attention rapidly.
don't propose it as a solution to poorly understood problems of modernity.
When materialists are freaking out over how serious and intractable those problems are, while believers are doing significantly better by the standards the materialists themselves propose, it behooves an inquisitive person to ask why.
If you do those things then no one will push back with upsetting comments like " it is all make pretend".
Honestly, it's like you aren't even paying attention to the conversations your in, but rather are running off some cached script. No one you're talking to is objecting to you expressing your non-belief. The only person trying to stop people from expressing their beliefs here is you. I'm happy to discuss the conflict between your atheistic worldview and my theistic worldview, and I'm even happy to overlook significant and entirely moddable rudeness on your part to do it. Only, last time we dug into it in detail, you're the one that begged off, not me, and I'm happy to continue the conversation whenever time permits. Only we won't be able to do that if you continue to break the rules on a routine basis, because sooner or later you will be banned.
The rules are not hard to follow, and if you are willing to follow them there is no practical limit to the opinions you can express here. The fucking nazis are able to figure this out. Why can't you?
Don't bring it up and neither will I.
No one is asking you not to bring it up. Both I and others are happy to discuss it with you. But there are rules here, we all have to follow them, and that includes you. I have zero respect for anyone who actually supports communism or fascism or, indeed, most variants of Enlightenment ideology. I still have to simulate respect for them in my communications here. If I can do it, you can do it.
The Supreme Court denied cert to multiple cases with more sympathetic defendants in favor of Rahami, whose case was brought by public defenders and not any organized gun rights organization. They chose a bad case because they wanted to have as much an excuse as possible for walking back Heller and Bruin, which the lower courts have rejected.
Why do you care? You are convinced the afterlife is entirely fictional. How can claims about fictions harm you or anyone else? Why is anyone's belief about the existence or non-existence of an afterlife, or any details of that belief, something you feel the need to make and enforce rules about? And if we grant that expressions of belief related to the afterlife deserve to have rules made about them, why is it your preferred rules that should be enforced?
This is not supposed to be a topic of debate in Western culture. The rule was supposed to be that people having metaphysical beliefs different from your own neither broke your leg nor picked your pocket. If mutual tolerance is not good enough for you any more, however, I for one am entirely happy to go right back to enforcing specific beliefs through force of law, and further fighting over which beliefs get enforced. Would that please you better?
The rhetorical point is well-taken, but if this is a genuine question that you're interested in discussing, I'd invite you to offer an answer to the questions posed in this comment.
I'm always up for reading, but I did in fact read a fair amount of 80s and 90s right-wing literature in the 90s themselves. I remember quite well the triumphalism of Bush's election in 2000, and the bellicose swagger post-9/11, and how it all went straight to shit in short order, because I lived through it directly. I'm aware of the intellectual failings of Conservatism as a movement, and to the extent that I hope for political solutions at all, those hopes are not based on what is commonly understood by the term "Conservatism". Also, I am neither expecting nor predicting a "Glorious Revolution".
One of our first conversations was about whether you would push a certain button. You said you would, because you wish that button existed. I would not, because I know that button exists, and further that, in a manner of speaking, a small but steadily-increasing number of those buttons gets mailed out to random addresses every day. Against all expectations, I'm hoping that things will somehow calm down before someone decides to press one of them, but if things don't calm down a press seems inevitable. And in the end, I'm okay with that; as a matter of personal inclination, I much prefer this flag to this one.
I don't have much to add, been reading you for a while, but just want to say that you have a fascinating blend of what I think is cynicism and naivete.
The perception of naivete comes, I think, from a gap in priors. Part of that is that I'm a Christian, so I am committed to a belief in objective morality and ultimate justice. Another part of it is that I am quite convinced that human systems are unavoidably fallible. There are no stable dystopias, nor stable utopias, no thousand year Reichs, no iron laws of history grinding out some inevitable sociological outcome. Everything we make ends, usually sooner than later, and sooner still when other humans are incentivized to hasten that end's arrival.
all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
This seems like a reasonable axiom. Would you mind examining it in a bit more detail, though? Specifically, the term "while evils are sufferable": is the sufferability of evils a universal constant, or does it change over time? Will all men in in all places and all times accept one specific evil and reject another specific evil, or do we observe variance in their tolerance over time? And if we observe variance, what causes this variance?
I think cooperation is possible at scale, because societies that can coordinate meanness to other societies generally tend to do better than those who can't.
Certainly. But when we observe past societies, we see that the capacity for coherent meanness ebbs and flows. The state long united divides, and the state long divided unites, no?
Radical federalism or large-scale violence, one imagines, but we will be free of each other, one way or the other. Society requires coherent values. That can be accomplished by all the blues sorting themselves into blue areas ruled by blue laws, and all the reds sorting themselves into red areas ruled by red laws, and the two areas generally leaving each other alone. Alternatively, it can be accomplished by not having a society any more. Those seem the most likely outcomes, and I obviously prefer the sorting one. I think you should as well.
It's possible I'm wrong, of course, and time will tell. Given that this is a massively-multiplayer game, though, I'm skeptical as to how long the waiting can really last before things break one way or the other.
Deploying troops is a serious matter and a last resort to only be used in the most serious riots that are absolutely beyond the control of the police and state National Guard.
Local authorities across the nation ordered their police to stand down. State authorities refused to deploy the national guard. Innocent people were victimized en masse and without recourse by organized political violence with clear, bidirectional ties to both the Democratic party and to Blue Tribe institutions generally. Those few who tried to defend themselves were subjected to nakedly political prosecutions on the flimsiest of pretexts and in defiance of the facts.
Blue Tribe, both its elite leadership and its general population, accepted, endorsed and supported these crimes. They collectively encouraged and enabled rampant, lawless political violence with the explicit goal to secure political and social power for themselves and their own interests, and they coordinated overwhelming retaliation against anyone who resisted or objected. Many of the Blue commenters here did the same. One of them argued at length and quite explicitly that it was better for people like myself and my family to accept beatings at the hands of a mob rather than defend ourselves with lethal force, because criminal mob beatings were statistically less likely to kill people than lawfully justified gunfire. That's the sort of conversation that leaves an impression.
Given those circumstances, the military would have been the correct response. It would have been an entirely reasonable response in the face of far less severe violations of the peace. The government's failure to deliver the appropriate response lingers, and the debt to justice will need to be repaid at some point in the future. It manifests, here and now, in markedly reduced trust in our social institutions, and a reduced willingness to expend efforts and make sacrifices for the preservation of those institutions. Every dispute is now conducted in the knowledge that Blues, speaking generally, are the sort of people who will happily endorse our victimization without apparent limit, and think themselves virtuous in the process.
but that they paid Comcast a ton of money to make it available for free on-demand. Considering that, most of the time, networks pay the creators to air their media and not vice-versa, this made it look more like a political ad than a normal documentary.
This seems like a remarkably poor argument. One of the most obvious characteristics of advertisement, relative to other forms of media, is that the people they are supposed to be consumed by aren't demanding them. If I make a movie and offer to pay the theatres to screen it for free, that is very, very different from me making an ad, and paying the theatres to play it before the movie other people actually want to see. As a general rule, ads are not made exclusively and intentionally for optional viewing.
But they can't help themselves.
Indeed not. But the broader point is that from the perspective of Red Tribe itself, there is no reason to accept compromise or any sort of strategy based on the long term. Our interests are best served by deriving maximum value from our temporary advantage, and then capitalizing on Blue resistance and defiance both in the past and present as a model for resistance and defiance of our own. Any path back to detente is a mirage.
And from the Blue perspective, as best I can model it, they are both correct and winning, and doing anything other than doubling down would be pointless compromise with evil. Red Tribe bigotry, superstition, and increasingly, criminality and treason generate no value that they recognize, while generating unbelievable amounts of harm. Just look at all that giant spike of murders in the last couple years, almost all of which gun control could have prevented. The arc of history is long, but bends toward justice, and they are on the right side of history. Progress is the whole point. Why sacrifice that progress to those who were never going to cooperate with it anyway? Especially when the Progress, once achieved, will greatly benefit those people anyway, once their defiance and their bitter, clinging grasp to their reactionary totems has been broken?
Why not? I think language has meaning.
Language has meaning to the extent that people are willing to cooperate in building and maintaining that meaning together. If they are not, then it cannot. For any deeper "meaning" than that, I think you need something approximately like an appeal to God. I'm willing to accept such appeals, but others are very clearly not, and neither you nor I have any means by which to compel such acceptance.
But pretty often, the reason why they want it to happen is because that's what they think the Constitution says, and they're trying to be faithful interpreters.
And it just so happens that "faithful interpretation" consistently results in judgements that match their own perceptions of what is just and good, and sometimes no more than what is expedient. Any contradictions between these judgements and the text itself are easily resolved by words words words. I'm given to understand that "emanations" and "penumbras" are sometimes involved.
This particular piece of language has managed to hold enough people in its sway that something vaguely approximating its meaning has been the basis by which we govern the United States of America. If you try to strip out the Constitution from your understanding of the United States, you will understand it worse, not better.
In the past, certainly. In the present, not really, no. In the future, not at all, I should think. Common knowledge and path dependency trump all other factors. It is certainly true that understanding the Constitution is necessary to understand how we got to where we are now, and the short version is that when it was written people really believed in it. But to understand where we are going, one needs to understand that this belief has largely died, and within a generation at most will be entirely extinct.
Supreme Court decisions favoring Blue Tribe observably have vastly greater impact than decisions favoring Red Tribe. Decisions favoring Red Tribe have been quite explicitly defied by lower courts, and the Supreme Court has then quite explicitly allowed such defiance to stand. I have no problem explaining such behavior: the Court realizes that its power derives from social consensus, not formal law, and recognizes that the consensus is against it and that further attempts to enforce the law will cost it more than it can afford. But if you believe the Constitution is really where their power springs forth, I'd be interested in your alternate explanation of such behavior. The Supreme Court sided with Dick Heller, yet he still can't have his gun. Why is that?
And given that I observe that decisions favoring my tribe are routinely nullified by Blues wherever they are stronger, why should I support upholding decisions favoring blues where we Reds are stronger? What value is secured by doing so?
No, it's not moot. The norm of following the Constitution is important and a valuable check against limitless power-seeking.
I don't think I can offer a response better than that of Lysander Spooner:
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."
The value of the Constitution came when it acted as a hard limit on the scope and scale of political conflict. People understood it to put many tools of power off the table for most practical purposes, removing them from the normal push and pull of the political contest. When we vote, the Constitution means that we're voting on policy, not on our basic political rights. If we lose, we suffer the other side's policies for a few years, but our rights are inviolate.
Only, they aren't, and anyone who believes otherwise at this point is quite foolish indeed. Progressives and their Living Constitution ideology mean that all bets are off, and indeed we have seen abuses and usurpations committed and upheld that would have been unimaginable as little as ten years ago.
"They wouldn't do that...." Yes, they would, for any value of "that" that one cares to specify. Americans, Blue or Red, are human, and "that" is what humans reliably do. Presidential candidates have campaigned on the idea of taxing religions they don't like, and openly laughed at the idea of constitutional limits on their ambitions. The theoretical grounding is solid, and the underlying logic is simply correct. Where your "norms" are supposed to fit into this picture I really cannot say.
Turn back to your favorite histories, and contemplate the fact that for all our technological sophistication, nothing about our core nature as humans has ever really changed. Humans will inevitably human. We create systems to control and channel our nature, but what our hands make, they can unmake as well. The Constitution arose from a specific culture, and it worked due to a specific set of cultural norms and assumptions. That culture changed, the norms and assumptions no longer apply, and so the Constitution is dead. To the extent that common knowledge of its death has not proliferated, it serves mainly to fool people into making sacrifices that will not be reciprocated by those who caught on a little quicker.
I'm not claiming the Court can't be defied. Obviously it can be, and in fact several of its recent pro-2A findings are being defied at this very moment in various states, most notably New York and California, and have been for years now. I'm claiming that to the extent that any outcome can be attributed to "The Constitution", it is actually happening because the Justices want it to happen, not because of the ink on the paper. There is no ground reality, there is no platonic form, and anyone who believes otherwise is fooling themselves. Abortion has both been protected and not protected by the Constitution, and the answer to the question of which state was "correct" is mu.
Why even have a country if you don't believe in anything except exatly what you want?
The point of a country is cooperation to secure the common good. This doesn't work if, as in our present circumstance, we collectively can't agree on the common good. It's not about getting exactly what "I" or "we" want. It's about whether or not there's a rational basis for believing cooperation is possible. With regard to the Constitution, such a belief is no longer rational, and it doesn't seem to me that it can be recovered, because the evolution of our Constitutional understanding is necessarily path-dependent. The arguments that worked before, worked because at the time we hadn't seen their long-term results. We have seen those results, so they won't work again.
You are kind of that guy though, you're a boogaloo boy.
If you say so. What follows?
This dude actually jokes around about suspending the Constitution
Why do you care about this, and why should anyone else care about this? The Constitution is dead, and there will be no resurrection. I do not believe that it protects me or my tribe in any meaningful way, and I do not see why I should respect claims of its protection put forward by other tribes. Constitutional claims are useful when they convince other people to drop opposition to one's values or goals. There is no reason to allow them to obstruct one's own values or goals. The constitution means whatever five justices say it means, without limit; benefits are entirely derived from controlling the mechanisms of interpretation, not the document being interpreted. If you have political and social control, you don't need the Constitution, and if you lack it, the Constitution will not help you. This is how the document observably works, and knowledge that this is how it observably works is now reasonably common across the population, and will only grow increasingly common over time as the contradictions inherent to the system continue to express themselves.
not-so-jokingly asks about deploying troops domestically which we've only seen in living memory a few times in the 60s and once in '92 for the LA race riots.
Deploying troops domestically was the correct response to the Floyd riots, and the failure to do so seriously damaged what remains of our country. The riots were the culmination of Blue Tribe's long-established strategy of employing organized, lawless political violence to secure political and social power, and they succeeded to an unbelievable degree specifically because no one was willing or able to deploy the appropriate response of overwhelming lawful force on the part of the authorities. That failure made the culture war much, much worse in a way that probably cannot be fixed.
Trump is not a unique threat. He exists because a critical mass of Red Tribe has lost faith in the existing system and wishes to coordinate meanness outside it. If he is finally destroyed that critical mass will find some other avatar or method to coordinate meanness through. They will continue to do so until either they find an effective method to obtain real address of grievances, or until society suffers a fatal rupture. The later seems, admittedly, a more likely outcome, but the former should not be underestimated. The current systems which prevent redress seem to me much more fragile than they generally appear.
The bulk of Red will accept the court no matter what, because they accept the legitimacy of institutions axiomatically.
This statement has never been true for any previous population of humans, and it will never be true for any future population either. The hunger for justice and the desire to rebel against the intolerable is innate to human nature. I say the same to you as I do to others: if you believe that there is a clean victory available for Blues here, you do so because you misunderstand both human nature and some extremely important features of physical reality. To paraphrase a better writer than myself, you've seen two girls and one cup, so you extrapolate out to, say, five girls and two cups. But this is invalid; what's actually going to happen is OnlyFans, something you never saw coming and would never have imagined.
Even if they can get another law passed, it doesn't matter much if a huge proportion of the gun-owning population already owns bump-stocks and are not inclined to give them up. It's the same thing we saw with the assault weapons ban under Clinton; before, autoloading rifles were somewhat marginal in the culture, and a lot of gun owners weren't interested in them. By the time the ban expired, the AR-15 was America's Rifle, and adoption absolutely exploded as soon as the ban came down. They'll never get another bite at that apple.
I'd expect the same pattern to play out for bump stocks. Back when the ban was being debated, I wrote a post arguing that maybe bump stocks weren't actually something we should defend all that hard, and that maybe, just this once, we should possibly consider that the proposed restrictions might be reasonable. given what has happened since then, I will never make nor accept an argument like that ever again, and I think my experience generalizes.
It's possible, but the problem there is that this is, long-term, likely to be a win for the Gun Culture. Gun Control is driven by sensationalized claims about the negative outcomes if the control schemes aren't implemented or maintained, and Gun Culture spreads by arguing that guns are fucking awesome, you should totally get one yourself. Gun control advocates claimed that concealed carry would result in turning our streets into warzones, but that didn't happen in the states that implemented concealed carry early, and the more states that went for it, the weaker the argument got. The same will happen with bump stocks.
The likely outcome of the decision is that the large majority of the gun culture buys one of these stocks, and then nothing statistically significant happens as a result. They get completely normalized, and banning them becomes completely impossible in any practical sense. This isn't helped by the fact that you can built an entirely-workable bump stock in about ten minutes out of cardboard and hot-glue. A motivated ten year old could do it as an arts and crafts project, it's that easy. Nor is the state of the art standing still; the gun culture is continuing to proliferate designs for pseudo-autofire, and those designs are only increasing in sophistication. As difficult as it might be to believe, the Gun Culture has not, historically, been terribly optimized for direct culture war. That is changing rapidly, and the low-hanging fruit for increased coordination and solidarity, practical lawfare, malicious compliance, and erosion of systemic control is plentiful.
I think the Justices are smart enough to understand that their authority is a product of social consensus, not anything innately derivative of their position. They understand that since Conservatives approached a solid majority on the Court Blue Tribe has pivoted to attacking the court's foundational social consensus directly with calls for court packing, smearing of justices and calls for their impeachment, and so on. They appear to be attempting to balance exercise of their power with maintenance of that power. I'm skeptical that such a balance is possible, but they've certainly pushed harder toward exercise than I expected, so I imagine we'll see.
I still do not expect the Court's foundations to survive long-term; there is no reason for Reds to continue investing faith in them if they cannot deliver, and there is no way for them to deliver without Blues killing the court. This realization undermines the social consensus foundation from the Red side, and we converge on both sides admitting more or less openly that the Court is only legitimate when it delivers their specific preferred outcomes, which is isomorphic to the court having no legitimacy at all.
The entire point of a Supreme Court is to settle tribal conflict. The court can't reliably perform that purpose now, and its ability will only further diminish over time.
I'm not sure I can add much to this beyond musical accompaniment.
And Blues are actively undermining the court because they find that situation intolerable.
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