FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Just offhand, government officials bragged publicly about lying to Trump in order to get away with disobeying his lawful orders regarding troop deployments. Does that count?
how much work is "within the last decade" doing here? We're currently discussing how government agents routinely break the law with impunity, illegally concealing their actions and deliberations from federal record-keeping, and have been for decades. To the extent that these deliberate attempts to keep the public in the dark fail, they usually take years to fail, and more years for the failures to become general knowledge. It's entirely possible that so long as you maintain a "within the last decade" standard, you can ignore an entirely arbitrary amount of malfeasance indefinitely. In fact, that conversation is itself about an example of the government lying to the public about an extremely important matter, in order to cover up their own involvement!
How do you disambiguate "unrealistically rosy assessment" from "lie"? Take Afghanistan, which started about two and a half decades ago. Were the twenty years of official pronouncements about that conflict "a lie", or were they "unrealistically rosy assessments"? Take the pullout specifically, which was less than a decade ago; no one has actually explained how such a clusterfuck occurred, or who was actually responsible for it. We have every reason to believe that particular disaster was the fault of specific actions taken by specific people, and those actions and people should be readily identifiable through the reams of paperwork the commands in question generate. And yet, nothing. It's just a thing that sorta happened, no idea why, no idea who, pay no attention, move along. Is the claim that the pullout wasn't really anyone's fault a lie? If not, why not?
Is Fauci and his underlings covering up the evidence of a lab leak a lie? If not, why not? Is the claim that six feet of separation or mask mandates or the safety and efficacy of vaccines being a matter of settled science a lie? If not, why not?
And this isn't even getting into lies laundered through private entities with the tacit support of the government, which in my view are still government lies. Does none of this register to you?
It's not clear how not banning him would be good for the community either. I'm not sure "good for the community" is on the table.
I miss him badly, and it's absurd to me that he's gone and I'm a mod. I originally wrote the above when I was expecting to be banned myself in relatively short order, and conversations with Hlynka fundamentally changed my perspective for the better.
It's usually pretty clear which users are heading for a ban, and I've been trying for a while now to find ways to engage with them constructively to try to stop that from happening, on the theory that the right conversation might be able to turn things around for them the way it did for me. Sometimes it sorta-kinda works. Sometimes it doesn't; I'm still frustrated that I never got to finish my arguments with fuckduck9000. In any case, the universal constant is that no one is happy with the results.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Not a bannable offense.
Indeed not, but deciding that rules are beneath you and that Charity requires too much effort, and then acting on that belief, is. My understanding is that Hlynka was neither surprised by nor in disagreement with his ban.
I remember reading about how the federal agencies involved in the Waco massacre claimed both in court and to numerous FOIA requests that they had little to no video or audio recordings of the raid or the siege, and maintained this story for years. Finally it was revealed through litigation that pretty much all the agents involved in documenting the operations had claimed to be using "personal" devices for their official documentation, with the understanding that anything useful to the agencies would be entered into the record when it was convinient to do so, and the rest withheld from public scrutiny indefinitely. This was in 1993, more than three decades ago.
Within the last few weeks, we've seen ATF agents involved in an unjustifiable no-knock raid resulting in the fatal shooting of a law-abiding citizen claim to have left their body-cameras behind. In the shooting of Bundy supporter Roy Finecum (Wikipedia, lol), FBI agents attempted to conceal having fired shots at Finecum while his empty hands were raised over his head. The record overflows with similar examples.
We discuss with some frequency the question of whether government conspiracies are possible. What we see here, as we have seen many, many times before, is that deliberate efforts to evade lawful oversight are both routine and universal. Nor is there any reason to believe that all or even most such efforts are caught; given the absurd scenarios that result in discovery, here being one email mistakenly breaking cover, or in Hillary's case an unrelated sex-crimes investigation snagging a laptop with emails on it, we are very clearly only seeing a small and randomly-selected portion of the cases. This was, in fact, a government conspiracy, directly related to one of the worst disasters of the last hundred years, which very well might have been directly caused by the conspirators themselves.
No one cares. Nothing will be done. Everyone knows it.
[EDIT] - Why not demand the emails from Google? The government spies on my emails just fine, why can't they get those of Fauci and friends?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I really like the roundups. It makes discussions easier to find later, which is one of the reasons I find these threads so valuable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
On the contrary, I don't think anything Musk has really accomplished rises to the level of the iPhone, which is, so far, the defining innovation of the 21st century.
In magnitude, surely. In terms of positive outcome, that seems pretty questionable.
Diversification seems like a really good idea here, in that it seems to bring the nature of the disagreement into focus. Almost all the replies I'm seeing are related to SpaceX, but Musk has multiple businesses. Is the general consensus that those other businesses are write-offs, and thus SpaceX has all the value? Does anyone actually expect him to crack auto-driving or tunnel boring or robots or making twitter profitable? Is it just the rockets? Maybe the rockets are enough, maybe not, but is any of the rest plausible enough to bet on, or is it essentially fog?
I guess the flipside, though, is what the alternative is supposed to be. Like, let's say I conclude you're probably right, and Musk is probably going to fail. Why is that information useful? Is there an effective way to "short" him? What's the benefit to doing so, beyond bragging rights on the Motte? If he succeeds, I think that's probably a very good thing, and if he fails, I'd agree that's almost certainly a bad thing, but if we knew for sure that he was going to fail, right now, what should we do about it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I am curious why are you so driven to go after Musks?
My impression is that he believes both that Musk is likely to fail, that his failures are going to be catastrophic for the interests of the people supporting him, and that the resulting risk profile is not properly appreciated by his supporters, who are backing him because they confuse memes for reality. This seems like an entirely reasonable thing to be concerned about, and comparing it to holocaust denial seems pretty inflammatory.
As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters.
Why does it matter?
It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends.
Why does every other issue depend on it?
Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time.
Buys the Right more time... for what?
There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago.
What does a "European-style nationalist policy platform" look like, and why should I want one? IIRC, you were pretty bullish on the UK Tories. How's that working out these days?
Is the problem Immigration, or is the problem Blue power? If you had to choose between immigration and no Blue power, or no Blue power but lots of immigration, which would you pick?
Immigration isn't the only thing that matters, Blue power is. Immigration matters because it's a Blue Tribe win condition under the old system, but that win condition has already effectively been executed. Having been executed, its further importance is only going to diminish over time. Controlling the border was a means to an end, which was keeping Blues from engineering unilateral control by importing voters; having failed, the priority transfers to other methods of denying, constraining and deconstructing that control.
What is the goal? The OP in that thread seemed to think that passing favorable laws should be presumed to be useful, and you appeared to agree. I'd guess that you're comparing our current situation without the law to a hypothetical with the law, and the latter seems obviously better to you, because we would have the law, and then it would be enforced. So the choice is between getting things we want, versus not getting things we want. But passing the law grants legitimacy to the existing system, and there is zero reason to believe that actual enforcement would happen. This is the fundamental problem with that thread's OP, which spends a ton of words describing the bill, and then throws this in towards the end:
In the world of Republican vibes, there’s the idea that conservatives are always the suckers when it comes to immigration. The idea is that Reagan’s bill was supposed to fix the issue, but the Democrats skillfully reneged on their promise. There’s also the idea of the ratchet, that Republicans will compromise with Democrats, and Democrats will get a bunch of concessions but won’t actually fulfill their end of of the bargain, either because the Republicans are RINOs who don’t actually care about limiting immigration, or because the true-believer Republicans are simply outmaneuvered. Then in the next round of dealmaking, more concessions will be given, and on and on it goes until America is overrun with illegals. For example, in the first deal, “illegal aliens” are reclassified as “illegal immigrants”, and amnesty is provided for, say, 3M of them in return for enforcement of the border laws. Then the enforcement doesn’t happen, ten years go by, and another round of negotiations happens. This time “illegal immigrants” is changed to “undocumented persons” and now we need to give amnesty to the first 3M AND the 5M that arrived since then, but in exchange now we’ll totally have enforcement… pinky promise! And then it doesn’t happen again and… you get the picture.
There’s a kernel of truth to that idea, although it’s obviously extremely oversimplified and lacking in nuance. That said, those vibes are powerful enough that compromise is thoroughly delegitimized for the Republican rank-and-file...
...There's more than a "kernel" of truth in that idea, and if it's "extremely oversimplified" or "lacking in nuance", I'd be fascinated to hear how. @gattsuru has written a lot of quite excellent posts detailing evidence for the problem, and I've tried to contribute where I could. We had all the laws we needed to prevent mass immigration. They didn't work, because Blues actively subverted them, as they subvert every law, rule or decision intended to serve Red Tribe interests. What is the point of passing additional laws in "cooperation" with Blues when we already know any part of the law that serves our interests will not be enforced, and any part of the law that serves Blue interests will be expanded light-years beyond the scope provided by the text?
Why is this law more valuable than the defiance against Blues coordinated and the legitimacy for Blues denied by refusing it? If we can break Blue control, it doesn't seem to me that immigration actually matters much any more, and passing that law doesn't seem like it helps break Blue control. Again, "more time" for what?
And all this applies to Trump as well. It is questionable whether good governance is even possible under current conditions. Failing that, stripping the system of its legitimacy is the best alternative, to open up more space for state-level leaders like Abbott and De Santis, and possibly to accelerate Blue states like California and New York further down their current ideological trajectories. Trump continues to accomplish this, which is, I think, why his support remains so strong: he coordinates defiance, whether he means to or not, whether he even understands the situation or not. No matter what happens, the system will have significantly less legitimacy next year than it does now; given that the immigration has already mostly happened, that seems like a good thing to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
thanks for the recommendation!
Stephen Jay Gould, obviously.
...For some reason, my mental picture of Gould was always of a youngish guy, and pictured the guy in the books as old. It's weird how those things get cached in the brain.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
The commenter could have as well as written in a non-sophisticated fashion saying "This guy is lying, and I don't believe him [and so I can evade commenting on the content of the post]"
"This guy is lying and I don't believe him" isn't ideal. Better to say why you think they're lying and you don't believe them. On the other hand, the post you linked to did in fact communicate why they found the quote unbelievable: it's a completely unverifiable anecdote written in a style very similar to an /r/thathappened post. Now, one could argue that this is still not ideal, because some people might not understand what /r/thathappened is or what it means for a text to have the /r/thathappened nature, but at some point demanding effort and rigor grows counterproductive to our purpose of enabling good conversation.
So, what's the actual disagreement here? Are you unfamiliar with /r/thathappened, and so don't understand the reference? If so, why not ask for clarification? Are you familiar with the /r/thathappened nature, but think it doesn't apply here? If so, why not offer an argument as to why you think the quote is plausible, or what you're drawing from it that others are missing?
It takes two to tango. You offered a link with a low-effort one-sentence description, something we generally frown on here. The replies you got were people who were unimpressed and uninterested, stating that they think the text lacks credibility and explaining succinctly why. You responded with specific quotes, again posted with a minimum of effort, and again, people were unimpressed, because the quotes in question seem even more incredulous than the text as a whole. You reported them for antagonism, but my understanding as a mod is that our standards for charity mainly apply to the people you're actually talking to here, and less so to people somewhere else that we are talking about. We ask that people not be dismissive of the arguments presented to them here, but you have yet to actually present an argument in that thread, just a link to some random other guy's argument, presented with what appears to be a shrug. The comments you've received, even pre-edit, were more effortful than what you offered, and your response was to report them and then start a new thread complaining about the lack of moderation.
All this to say, the comment you reported was by no means AAQC material, but did in fact appear to be a reasonable comment, containing both an opinion and an explanation for the reasoning behind that opinion. It could have been better (and now certainly is), but it doesn't seem to me that your complaint is well-founded. That's my opinion, anyway. I'm happy to discuss it further if you like.
(modhatted to verify that I am, in fact, a mod, since a response from the mods seems to be what you were looking for.)
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
We ask users to refrain from low-effort posts that round to "I agree". If that's all you've got, just hit the upvote button and move on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
More or less. And to be clear, by "people" I'm referring to myself, and presuming that others read for roughly similar reasons.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Well, in that case the HBD doom and gloom is overblown. If things get bad, it'll just take a few disasters to knock off the rust and return a given race to fighting trim.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
if you don't mind adding some more spoiler tags, how did
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Interesting analysis, and exactly the sort of thing I was asking for elsewhere in the thread. I read the whole thing in more or less one sitting for fun, and so while I wasn't terribly impressed and definately think it suffers from some a lot of the problems I perceive in rationalist fic generally, I'm not at all confident that I really got the intended message.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
You know, I just got through a book about the Irish potato famine and the parallels between the 'Democrats run modern welfare plantations' narrative and Trevelyan are pretty interesting.
In the most general terms, I have to ask: do you believe that the Resource Curse exists?
More specifically, you believe that responses to an acute problem over seven years and a chronic problem lasting since somewhere between 1964 and 1866, depending on where one starts the counting, generate parallels because they both can be summarized as "giving poor people handouts doesn't solve poverty"? The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops. Is the analogue to the potato blight racism? I'm gonna bet it's racism. But the fact remains that giving poor people handouts has not, in fact, solved poverty, and there is, in fact, a large and by all evidence permanent underclass utterly dependent on the handouts, a problem those proposing the handouts did not predict and those defending them have no idea how to solve. Especially given that black people were not in fact generally suffering a famine when we instituted handouts for them, is your argument that a famine would have resulted anyway if they had not been instituted?
Trevelyan may have been correct that the situation in Ireland was untenable (TFR >4, increasingly small plots of land that necessitated subsistence potato farming, rampant poverty and illiteracy), but his actions directly led to the preventable deaths of 750,000-1,500,000 Irish and the emigration of a million more.
Indeed, which is an excellent argument for why Trevelyan was dead wrong in his case. What does this tell us about our case?
Perhaps more germanely, are you confident that slashing welfare programs in the US would lead to the outcomes you (we?) want, and do you have any examples of underclasses being cut off from welfare and becoming prosperous within a generation or two?
...And this is a good point to ask whether you actually read my comment.
They need tight-knit communities who deliver immediate punishment to defectors, with those continuing to defect written off. "aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.
Which part of the first sentence do you disagree with? Because this was not, in fact, an argument for cutting welfare subsidies, or even a comment about welfare subsidies specifically. Underclass blacks are born, raised, and die in a system they neither have created nor can effectively control. It's not just the welfare checks, it's the schools, the police, the laws, the economy, every aspect of social structure beyond personal interaction. We made a society for them, and when that society delivers miserable results some of us invite them to place the blame on others of us. Notably, the people targeting the blame are those most involved in implementing those actual social structures, and those of us getting the blame are involved chiefly in paying for it all with our taxes.
You understand that my critique isn't the wastage of money, right? Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!
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 through in something about the zone expanding if its population rises too high.
Far-fetched, I admit, but I think something along those lines would probably improve our situation immensely. Given the current trajectory of Blue Tribe, it's entirely possible one of their cities would even be willing to implement such a zone in-situ rather than trying to build one from scratch. Chicago, maybe? Detroit? Maybe give it two years' lead time so people can move in or out according to preference. Whaddya think?
...In closing, I'm left with a surprisingly similar impression as by some of @2rafa's comments in the recent thread about the immigration bill, and again when that alt-right article got posted that proved Hlynka was right all along. People keep talking as though it's Reds versus blacks or browns, but I can live with blacks and browns happily enough. It's Blues that are an actual problem.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Immigration is the 1st or 2nd best issue for Trump (along with inflation) so the democrats are trying to paint the republicans as blocking immigration reform in order to please Trump.
To do this, they need to portray immigration as a problem that needs to be solved. This is difficult, because they have been blasting their base with the message that all concerns about illegal immigration are illegitimate racism for like thirty or forty years now, have actively worked to massively undermine border security for something like two decades now, spent four years attacking Trump's every attempt to secure the border, and directly caused the current crisis. I don't doubt the media's willingness to step up to champion the lie that this is all Red Tribe's Fault, actually, but I am skeptical that it will work all that well.
It's never left my mind, and is both the reason I posted the OP and the reason I'd be interested in hearing what people liked about HPMOR.
This thread, via Orwell, is me poking at the same general idea. Sherlock Holmes is another example, as is Orson Scott Card from Ender's Game, and I think Tolkien's negative assessment of Frank Herbert's Dune. For examples of the opposite, one of my favorites is Hammer's Slammers, by David Drake, especially the first chapter of the first book.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Why does this work need to be three times as long as war and peace?
Because it's being written for narrative addicts. People enjoy the altered flow-like state created by reading a long narrative for hours at a stretch, their own consciousness and volition being overridden by the flow of the story. For such people, the story concluding is a problem because it breaks the state, while additional length is pure benefit, because it allows for more contiguous false-memory and thus more verisimilitude to the experience.
I just linked my best assessment of the reason. What's yours? What's wrong and what should we do about it?
I'm on record arguing at length that Darwin was one of the worst bad actors this community has ever had, and one of the conditions I gave for joining the mod team was that I'd never be asked to mod him or to be involved in mod decisions about him in any way. Why do you think he left? More generally, what are the serious changes you think should be made?
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