FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I read the whole thing in about a week, and then had a pretty significant narrative hangover by the end.
The recommendations you're getting are correct. It is an amazingly effective story.
...Is this a genuine question?
Suppose the police stop enforcing most laws in an area. They'll still show up for murders or rapes, after the fact, and they'll respond to gunfire, but they ignore threats or assault and battery or destruction of property or theft. Their clearance rates for crime are low, and after a while people stop calling them for "minor" offenses because they won't arrive in time and certainly won't do anything about it. They continue to arrest people for really serious crimes, but not in proportion to a very significant increase in serious crime and arrests for the "less serious" crimes drop through the floor. The crime rate is now ten, fifty, a hundred times what it was before. Crime is now ubiquitous, and the area is fundamentally unsafe to live or work in, and the police clearly have no intention of changing this state of affairs.
How would you describe the above scenario?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
But not an insane phrase to use for cohesive communities being destroyed by newcomers who inflict wildly disproportionate, racially-organized lawless violence on them, with the tacit support and approval of institutional actors. That most of the community members escape with their lives by promptly fleeing, losing their community and much of their wealth and resources in the process, does not change the fundamental nature of the situation. Nor does that nature change when the fleeing is conducted under color of law, through sale of their property.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
@Supah_Schmendrick is correct. The "Boston Massacre" was absurd propaganda, and the troops involved were successfully defended in court by one of our founding fathers.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken
"Watching other people making friends, everywhere, as a dog makes friends, I mark the manner of these canine courtesies and think, "here comes, thank heaven, another enemy."
― Edmund Rostand, Cyrano De Bergerac
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
There is an implication in your post where moves that offend one side, but could actually be promoting justice are a bad thing.
There is no objective definition of "Justice", such that we can measure it with a ruler or weigh it with a scale. I believe that Justice is both real and fundamental, but I have no way of making you or anyone else agree with my understanding of Justice other than persuasion or force. Persuasion pretty clearly doesn't work at this point, and we are devolving toward less and less veiled dependence on force.
We should talk about the facts and then argue whether one, or both tribes are wrong.
Do you believe that such arguments are generally productive? Do they tend to lead to consensus across tribal divides, even here? My observation is that the most "productive" outcome is the sort of Blue-Wins-By-Default both-sides-isms that you seem to be complaining about. For me, long-term, good-faith attempts to bridge the divide have resulted in deep cynicism and considerable radicalization. I think it's pretty clear that the tribal gap is currently unbridgeable, and rapidly getting worse. That's why I've written the OP the way I have; because the amoral, outside view of is and not ought is the only avenue for productive conversation across the divide that I can see.
I asked you about what you think about the facts of the case because it is directly related about whether one can argue that the pardon could be an escalation.
See the edits above, as well as my arguments in the rest of the thread.
I actually don't think it is much of an escalation, even if Perry deserved harsher punishment than a year, when considering how biased the system has been by the blue tribe.
It doesn't matter if you think it's an escalation, any more than it matters if Blues think barricading roads, attacking motorists, and facilitating and protecting those who do is an escalation. Your assessment of their actions is what matters, because it determines how you'll react. Their assessment of your actions matters, because it determines how they'll react. There is no way I can see to get either side to accept that the other side's last action was legitimate, or that their own actions were illegitimate. The result is obviously going to be escalating tit-for-tat until the system runs out of capacity.
Fundamentally, this idea of appeasement being the road to peace, doesn't work
I never claimed it did. In fact, it not working in either direction is my entire premise. Blues will not accept the pardon any more than Reds accepted the conviction, any more than blues accepted the shooting, any more than Reds accepted the rioting, any more than blues accepted the justice system's delivered outcomes. For the purposes of this analysis, it doesn't matter which side is right. Neither side is going to back down. The conflict is self-sustaining and will likely continue to expand until things break which we cannot fix or even patch.
Good compromise and mutual respect require the right to actually show up.
Good compromise and mutual respect do not seem to me to be options on the table. If you see evidence of them, I'd be interested to see it.
It is convenient and easy on contentious issues to take a stance that bothsides are unreasonable partisans. You don't have to take and defend positions and you present yourself as the superior referee and the others as culture warriors.
You have fundamentally misunderstood my post. I am not claiming that "both sides are unreasonable partisans, and they just need to be reasonable". I am claiming that our current system makes unreasonable partisanship the only viable policy option, and pointing out that anyone who expects anything other than an escalation spiral is lying to themselves. I am attempting to argue this from the outside view, ignoring any question of which side is right and which wrong, simply looking at the incentives. I obviously have my own opinion of who is right and who is wrong, and I've argued that further down in the thread. I am making this argument because it is common for moderates here to argue that the Culture War isn't that big a deal, that it's blown out of proportion, and that our existing systems are basically fine and simply need routine maintenance for everything to work out fine. I believe that such moderate arguments are dead wrong to the point of being actively dangerous, and I am attempting to communicate the basis for that conclusion across the tribal divide.
I have my own position, based on my own values and my own best interpretation of the facts. What I'm trying to show is that the larger pattern is obvious regardless of particular values or understandings of the facts: regardless of whether you side with Foster, Perry, neither or both, the situation is obviously unsustainable for our existing system. Rule of law requires common trust in the law and its application, and it, together with the rest of our sociopolitical systems, exist to constrain the scope and scale of civil conflict. These limiting systems have evidently failed, and those that remain are observably blowing out as the culture-war blast front washes over them in sequence.
As I see it, our current choice is between a near-total collapse in federal authority and semi-peaceful balkanization on the one hand, and large-scale fratricide on the other, with the latter being significantly more likely given our current social trajectory. I've been arguing this for a long time, this is just the latest data to illustrate the point.
If you think the pardon is wrong based on the facts of the case, I would like you to argue for this directly.
I don't. I not only support the pardon, but would be furious with any other outcome. I believe Perry's conviction was part of a pattern of nakedly-illegitimate prosecutions of armed self defense by Reds, while murder and attempted murder by Blues was treated with kid gloves. I've argued as much many times before.
I don't think the goal of the justice system should be to get different political tribes to agree.
The only point of the justice system is to get the population in general to agree. If it can't do that, it serves no purpose and will not survive. The whole point of the system is to constrain conflict, to get people to accept outcomes they don't like and maybe even hate, outcomes they consider deeply unjust, because it's still the lesser evil. If people stop considering the system to be a lesser evil, they will simply tear it down.
And if that is the goal, then it might require censorship, blacklisting, ideological selection.
Yes, obviously. Homogenous values are the result of these tools, and sufficient homogeneity for a sufficient amount of time makes it easy to fool ourselves into believing that the tools are unnecessary. We dispense with them, and as a result values drift apart until the homogeneity is lost, and then the need for them becomes obvious.
Coexistence, cooperation and mutual tolerance require coherent values, and cannot function in their absence. Values-coherence must be actively maintained, or it decays.
It should be ideally for cases to be decided based on their merits. By prioritizing agreement, wouldn't this encourage appeasement, realistically in favor of the blue tribe, even where it would result in people being unfairly prosecuted or not punished when they should?
I'll just quote myself here:
Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.
There is no reason I can see for Reds to not take the above stance. It is the objectively correct stance to take, given the realities of our situation. It is also true that this stance will not result in things trundling along as they have previously, with everything basically being fine. It is likely to lead to a fight, and that is again acceptable given the alternative of endless abuse without recourse. Those who value the current system and wish to see it perpetuated, though, should be warned that it is very clearly collapsing before our eyes, for reasons well outside the control of any individual actor.
If it is in fact biased in that direction due to the influence of the blue tribe, then the red tribe exercising pardons is not necessarily bringing escalation, but pushing the system in a healthier state.
As I am using the term here, "Escalation" doesn't mean "bad thing", it means applying additional force to the system in the hopes of changing the outcome. The system can only survive so much force, and past that threshold it fails completely. This threshold has no connection to morality and justice; being right doesn't grant the system additional load capacity. Embracing and facilitating mob violence was an escalation. confronting that mob violence with legal self-defense was an escalation. prosecuting the defenders and protecting the attackers was an escalation. Pardoning the defenders is an escalation. All of these escalations have been employed because people decided that escalating was preferable to accepting a loss. This last escalation will be no different: Blues will not accept it, and will look for an escalation of their own to top it. At some point down the line, the escalation for one side or the other will be unsurvivable to the system as a whole, and it will fail. Again, people counting on the system's survival should be made aware of this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
This works up until you discover a pattern of motorists intentionally running over cyclists.
Being "run over" in this case is not a regrettable accident that all parties were trying to avoid. The "protestors" made a general tactic of willfully breaking the law in an effort to force altercations, and the police and authorities let them do it. In numerous cases, including this one, they deliberately escalated the altercations in an effort to intimidate and victimize the law-abiding. It's true that their tactics were trivial to avoid for a large majority of the population, so long as we ignore the small minority they viciously brutalized, which most people were entirely willing to do. That doesn't make it right. Perry's response is straightforwardly preferable, and by no small margin.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
That is why the prosecution were trying to establish Rosenbaum had the gun pointed at him prior to him charging.
This is a common and extremely perverse pattern in prosecutions of self-defense cases, as well as in the general discourse.
At this point in the altercation, Rosenbaum had chased a fleeing Rittenhouse a considerable distance, and then cornered him. With no further retreat available, Rittenhouse turned and pointed his gun, hoping that Rosenbaum would stop. When Rosenbaum instead charged him, he fired.
As I understand it, the prosecution's claim is that if he were legitimately in fear of his life, he would have fired immediately, rather than trying to warn Rosenbaum off. That makes his threat illegitimate and thus gives Rosenbaum a right to self-defense against him, which he exercised by lunging at Rittenhouse.
This is not how it is supposed to work. Rosenbaum chasing Rittenhouse is an illegitimate threat, and cornering him is an illegitimate threat. Rosenbaum is very clearly the aggressor, and Rittenhouse is very clearly in a position of legitimate self-defense. Pointing his gun at Rosenbaum is a threat, but it is a legitimate threat, because all three elements necessary to establish the legitimate use of self-defense very clearly exist: Ability, Opportunity, and Jeopardy. Giving an aggressor a last chance to back down or surrender before employing lethal force is not supposed to invalidate a self-defense claim, and the prosecution's attempt to do so is appalling.
Compare the Arbury case.
Screaming at people, chasing them, and intruding into their personal space are innately threatening acts... Arbury did not appear to be acting in a criminal manner, so he had no obligation to refrain from self-defense. He was presented with what appeared to be an immediate, serious, criminal threat to his life, giving him ample reason to employ self-defense. Given that he was unarmed against multiple gun-wielding assailants, his self defense options sucked, but getting attacked by multiple gun-wielding violent criminals is likely to suck even if you make no attempt to resist. Attempting to fight his way out of the situation was some extreme combination of bravery and desperation, but given the stress and immediacy of the situation it was certainly not an "obviously stupid choice".
Arbury was clearly a case of self-defense because he was clearly not the aggressor: his attackers had no reason to consider him threatening when they initiated their attack, and he retreated from them until cornered. Rosenbaum was the aggressor for the exact same reason that Arbury's attackers were, because he illegitimately pursued and forced an altercation with no plausible justification. In the case of both Arbury and Rittenhouse, assuming that they did nothing to provoke their attackers, retreat should not have been necessary, and they would have been entirely within their rights to shoot their attackers on the spot. Still, to the extent that circumstances may have been ambiguous, the fact that they retreated until their attackers cornered them and forced an altercation should make their claim to self-defense immutable.
Unfortunately, that's not the way it actually works out. Motivated prosecutors and commentators routinely play the salami-slicing game with self-defense cases. It should be obvious that if you are justified in shooting an attacker outright, you should also be justified in pointing a gun at them in warning of the impending shot, provided the situation is favorable enough to leave you the option of a pause. And yet it's common to see this game played, where anything other than an immediate shot fired is used as evidence that the shooter wasn't really in danger, because they had enough time to try for a warning. Alternatively, if the shooter fires immediately, prosecutors can ask why they didn't give a warning first. What it comes down to is that some people don't believe legitimate self defense actually exists, and will twist the facts however hard they must to achieve their desired result.
Have any of the non-AR successor platforms taken off?
Not to my knowledge. I think the Army is still claiming they're gonna retire the m4 and standardize on Spears, but I'll believe it when I see it. There was a really good writeup I found once, talking about the "Glockpocalypse" that wiped out like 90% of variation in the handgun market, as everyone gave up on their bespoke designs in favor of various flavors of Glock clone. The Glock 17 was just straight-up better, cheaper, more durable, more reliable, and most previous designs simply couldn't compete. The AR15 has done pretty much the same thing, both because it's an amazingly good design, and because it hit critical mass such that the design has been perfected to an absurd degree as a result of network effects. At this point, it's hard to imagine it ever going away, or why there would even be competing designs in another few decades.
Did the IAR project for the Marines ever happen, or did it get shelved to buy them more anti-ship missiles?
Last I heard they were still gonna get IARs, but those were going to be piston AR derivatives from H&K.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Does it? Below someone said that because Foster had his gun angled down, but could have pointed it directly at Perry and fired in an instant that Perry was correct to have felt threatened.
The comment was that Foster had his gun angled down, from a standing position, which did point it at Perry, who was sitting in a car. Foster was also advancing on him while doing this. Rittenhouse did not point his gun at anyone until immediately before shooting, and he ran away rather than advancing.
It is difficult to overstate how absurdly perfect Rittenhouse's actions were, and how minimal the ambiguity was due to the abundance of clear video evidence. The fact that he was still charged and tried for murder despite the well-established facts was profoundly radicalizing for me, and I imagine for many other Reds. Rittenhouse should not be accepted as a minimum standard for what legitimate self-defense looks like. He is an example of how even complete, obvious, absolute innocence will not be accepted by the Blues as a tribe.
If one of those is a threat then surely the other is, even if we removed them from protest situations and just had them standing on the street minding their own business.
Carrying a rifle is not a threat. Aiming a rifle at someone while advancing on them, while they are already being illegally assaulted by your companions, is a threat. If there is ambiguity here, it seems to me that it is not coming from the facts but rather from a tribal tendency to refuse those facts when they are inconvenient.
I'm given to understand that other motorists reported that Foster threatened them with his rifle previously. If that were the case, would you agree that it undermines a claim that his actions were legitimate?
Are you familiar with Brandon Herrera? I don't think there's any connotation there. AKs used to be the "cheap" option, now they're sorta exotic/cool and impractical, but still generally beloved. ARs are slowly pushing them toward extinction, along with all other species of automatic rifle.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I suppose to turn the discussion back to you, if you had clear video that Foster did not point his gun at Perry, and was just walking around, would you accept that he like Rittenhouse did not actually threaten someone and thus Perry shooting him was murder?
Yes. See here. As @Capitol_Room loves to quote, "what profits a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?" Tribalism may be an inescapable reality, but it is not the foundation of Justice, and Justice cannot be denied.
I'm not sure how much that's worth, and I'm not sure how much worth it will retain as things continue along the current trajectory.
Also, in before a million arguments with your hypothetical.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Sorry, Mods. I really tried not to, but then I did.
Yeah, you did.
History shows two previous warnings, four AAQCs. I don't see the point of a warning here, given that you obviously knew exactly what you were doing and that we don't want you to do it. Banned for a day. Please do not make a habit of this sort of thing; the bans will escalate if you do.
But I do think reading the room would tell Perry that it was cosplay.
"The room" was a mob of protesters illegally blocking the road, swarming his vehicle and beating on the exterior while screaming at him, and then one of them advancing on him with a rifle raised in firing position. What part of that sounds like "cosplay"?
Do you have a source for vehicles being fired upon?
Armed "protesters" murdered a young black motorist and critically-injured his passenger under similar circumstances, roughly a month before this incident, and were allowed to escape without arrest or prosecution. Armed "protestors" in Georgia fired on a vehicle under similar circumstances a few weeks earlier, killing an eight-year-old black girl. Videos of protestors attacking motorists' vehicles and in some cases the motorists themselves were everywhere online. Likewise videos of protestors shooting up vehicles without hitting the occupants, or threatening motorists or counter-protestors with firearms.
I am referring to Foster as paying the asshole tax. You cosplay revolutionary, shit on the commons, and then probably actually pointed a gun at a person.
...Ah, I misunderstood.
The issue with this is Perry probably did just see the chance and killed him for fun.
He was driving on the road legally at low speed. his car was blocked by protesters barricading the road illegally, who then mobbed his car, while one of their number, armed with a rifle, advanced on him with the rifle raised. In that situation, how does one disambiguate "seeing the chance and killing for fun" from "legitimately fearing for one's life"?
Perry likely knew that the victim was cosplaying revolutionary and wasn’t going to execute him at any high non-neglible probability.
Why do you consider this "likely"? Protestors had been making a habit of attacking motorists for quite some time at this point, if memory serves. Vehicles had been fired upon, and motorists lawlessly threatened with lethal force.
In ordinary life when someone exposes themselves that you can do something bad to them and get away with it we usually choose not to do something bad to them.
This argument applies even better to Foster as well, doesn't it? Perry "exposed himself" by driving on the road; Foster's fellow protesters illegally detained and harassed him, and Foster threatened him with deadly force by pointing a rifle at him. Why should we not consider Perry shooting him in self-defense to not be Foster paying the "asshole tax"?
Possibly, but probably not for posts like this one. "I am angry" is not generally the type of post this place is built to facilitate. "Here is why I am angry" is much better. "Here is the situation, and here is why it is producing anger" is better still. Actual evidence provides much better grounds for discussion than raw assertion.
I greatly appreciated your previous post linking to Derrick Bell as well, in addition to the writeup on the Ctrl-Pew prosecution.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
It is hard to overstate the value of actual evidence in these discussions. thank you for making a habit of providing it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I agree, especially given that the video evidence leads me to conclude that Foster did, in fact, point his rifle at Perry.
Do you expect Blues to achieve consensus that their side was in the wrong, and the pardon is a legitimate outcome?
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a full pardon for U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry.
Perry was convicted last year of murder in the shooting death of Garrett Foster, a USAF veteran and BLM protestor. Foster had attended a downtown Austin protest armed with an AK-pattern rifle, and joined his fellow protestors in illegally barricading the street. Perry's car was halted by the barricade, Foster approached the driver's side door, rifle in hand, and Perry shot him four times from a range of roughly 18 inches, fatally wounding him. Police reported that Foster's rifle was recovered with an empty chamber and the safety on.
Perry claimed that the shooting was self defense, that the protestors swarmed his vehicle, and that Foster advanced on him and pointed his rifle at him, presenting an immediate lethal threat. Foster's fellow protestors claimed that Foster did not point his rifle at Perry, and that the shooting was unprovoked. They pointed to posts made by Perry on social media, expressing hostility toward BLM protestors and discussing armed self-defense against them, and claimed that Perry intentionally crashed into the crowd of protestors to provoke an incident. For his part, Foster was interviewed just prior to the shooting, and likewise expressed hostility toward those opposed to the BLM cause and at least some desire to "use" his rifle.
This incident was one of a number of claimed self-defense shootings that occurred during the BLM riots, and we've previously discussed the clear tribal split in how that worked out for them, despite, in most cases, clear-cut video evidence for or against their claims. The case against Perry was actually better than most of the Reds, in that the video available was far less clear about what actually happened. As with the other Red cases, the state came down like a ton of bricks. An Austin jury found Perry guilty of murder, and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Unlike the other cases, this one happened in Texas, and before the trial had completed, support for Perry was strong and growing. That support resulted in Governor Abbott referring Perry's case to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. A year later, the board returned a unanimous recommendation for a pardon to be granted. Abbott has now granted that pardon, and Perry is a free man, with his full civil rights restored to him. He has spent a little more than a year in prison, and his military career has been destroyed, but he is no longer in jail and no longer a felon.
So, now what?
It seems to me that there's a lot of fruitful avenues of discussion here. Was the shooting legitimate self-defense? To what degree did the protestors' tactics of illegally barricading streets, widespread throughout the Floyd riots and a recurring prelude to tragedy, bear responsibility for the outcome? How should we interpret Perry's comments prior to the shooting, or Foster's for that matter?
Two points seem most salient to me.
First, this case is a good demonstration of how the Culture War only rewards escalation, and degrades all pretensions to impartiality. I do not believe that anyone, on either side, is actually looking at this case in isolation and attempting to apply the rules as written as straightforwardly as possible. For both Blues and Reds, narrative trumps any set of particular facts. No significant portion of Blues are ever going to accept Reds killing Blues as legitimate, no matter what the facts are. Whatever portion of Reds might be willing to agree that Reds killing Blues in self-defense might have been illegitimate appears to be trending downward.
Second, this does not seem to be an example of the process working as intended. If the goal of our justice system is to settle such issues, it seems to have failed here. Red Tribe did not accept Perry's conviction as legitimate, and Blue Tribe has not accepted his pardon as legitimate. From a rules-based perspective, the pardon and the conviction are equally valid, but the results in terms of perceived legitimacy are indistinguishable from "who, whom". As I've pointed out many times before, rules-based systems require trust that the rules are fair to operate. That trust is evidently gone.
This is what we refer to in the business as a "bad sign".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I have.
I Am The Very Model Of A Culture-Warring Partisan, but the one good thing that has come from Biden's presidency is him slamming the door shut on the Afghanistan war. I credit him greatly with having the guts to do it, and I am pretty sure the disaster in the pullout was deliberate insubordination on the part of the Pentagon. For everything I've read about the incompetence of the occupation, I cannot bring myself to believe that they are actually incapable of executing an orderly pullout. To my knowledge, no one has ever been held accountable for the mess, and I'd really like to see that happen.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
What do you want exactly, in concrete terms?
Common knowledge that the Sexual Revolution was a catastrophic failure, on its own terms and according to its own values. Common knowledge that sex has immutable consequences deeply rooted in human psychology and instinct, and that no amount of social engineering is going to change that. Past that, I'm just here to watch Truth emerge from her well to shame the world, and to gather useful examples for teaching my kids and my nieces and nephews about how not to ruin their lives.
There's also the part where the execution is quite explicitly not the President's job, and that framing a withdrawal order as something that required presidential micromanagement to not completely fuck up raises some extremely serious questions about the competence and professionalism of our military brass. I'm pretty sure the withdrawal fracas petered out the way it did because actually litigating the question would burn a whole lot of people, none of whom are named "Biden".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
This poor gal is mentally ill.
Okay. Now you just need to convince women collectively that sex-positive Feminism works fine, actually, and their ocean of complaints and concerns should be discarded. That they shouldn't actually feel like shit when they get pumped and dumped, that the shame and humiliation are all in their heads and sex really is just an idle amusement with zero deep connection to human psychology that should have no consequences ever.
I haven't done more than skimming the article, but she seems to be laying out how she rejected her religious upbringing and went all-in on sex-positivism, and yet still found that sex-positivism didn't actually deliver on its promises. And your argument is... what? That she should have just gone ahead and fucked and everything would have been fine? What about the women who did fuck, and regret it?
You are straightforwardly wrong.
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