FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
It seems you are appealing to an "is" and handwaving the "ought". As it happens, I disagree profoundly with your assessment of the "is"; it does not seem to me that "Elites" are in a position to impose their will on people like me indefinitely, and it seems likely to me that my tribe is well-positioned to press the issue at some length. If I had persuasive evidence to the contrary, that would be a rather different conversation, but it seems to me that the "ought" half of the question deserves analysis.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I did not, in fact, ask "what are they thinking", or anything analogous to it. I invited moderates who are still invested in the present system to lay out their defense of this newest iteration of the pattern.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Comments are filtered for posters who have not achieved sufficient cumulative upvotes. This is legacy code baked into the Drama code that this site is built on, and no one knows how or has the time to fix it. When a comment is filtered, it's invisible to regular users but visible to mods, with the only indication being an extra "approve" item on the row of small, greyed-out text at the bottom of each comment. it's very easy to miss when you're reading the new comments stream. We approve good faith comments as soon as we're aware of them, but they're very easy to miss.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Your description of the situation is so perfectly inverted that there is no point in even attempting to argue the object level. I'll simply note that attempting to use the Constitution in the way you claim people are attempting to use it would be obviously disastrous, and no quicker way to destroy any remaining respect for the document can be imagined.
Common knowledge coalesces day by day.
The Constitution never held power, and neither did the courts, much less the body of law supposedly founded upon and adjudicated by them. Constitutional Rights as such protect nothing. If the power to secure protection of one's rights exists, it comes from somewhere else in our socio-political constructs, and effective politics consists of isolating its location and securing that power to be wielded by one's own agents.
To the extent that this power exists outside formal structures, then effective politics consists of coordinating efforts outside those formal structures, a point so obvious as to border on tautology.
To the extent that formal political structures exist for the sole purpose of containing and channeling both power and the pursuit of that power, the above is a statement that formal political structures have evidently failed.
Or perhaps I'm wrong. I would invite "Rule of Law" proponents to explain what they see happening here, and how it fits into their general model of how sociopolitical power works.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Could you provide additional context? Is this about drones?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
Young people working starter jobs around town in stores and businesses knstead of shitskins.
You are allowed to express racist sentiments here, but we do ask for more effort than slurs as punctuation. Your log is a bunch of warnings and a tempban, and this post indicates that those warnings are not penetrating. I'm banning you for three days this time; other mods feel free to lengthen if it seems appropriate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Progressivism's promise is that if it is provided with power and control, it will deliver a better life for society generally. It has been provided with increasing amounts of power and control for decades, to a point where it has visibly approached total sociopolitical closure for the forseeable future, and what it has delivered is stagnation at best and more often a steadily-growing avalanche of crises. Given its track record, it becomes extremely important for Progressivism to silence any attempt to establish common knowledge and chain-of-accountability for its monstrous failures. One obvious method is to claim that its critics only destroy, only tear down, only criticize, without offering any constructive alternative of their own.
It seems to me that critics of Progressivism have no shortage of constructive alternatives to Progressive doctrine. When we have spent seven decades concentrating every scrap of social, political and economic power into the hands of Progressivism, though, almost all of those constructive alternatives are either going to involve demolishing things Progressives have built or routing around them entirely. This is the nature of misallocation: you either have to re-allocate, or simply eat the sunk-cost loss. Progressives have built an unworkable system and then condemn us for not offering an explanation of how to make it work, but there is no reason to entertain this chicanery. I cannot tell you how to operate America's current educational system through tinkering at the margins, but that does not mean I do not have a pretty good plan for how to educate my children, or ideas that I think are positive-sum on how to build a new general education system from scratch. "The current system has to come down" is the fault of the system and its designers, not my abilities as a critic. I can explain at some length how serious engagement with Christianity builds community, personal development, support networks, family formation, long-termer preferences, all the necessary building blocks of durable community that more than a half-century of liquid modernity has destroyed in most other contexts, but there is no way to integrate these insights into a sociopolitical system whose designers explicitly see total exclusion and eventual elimination of Christianity as a foundational part of their social program.
Likewise for economics, rule of law, foreign policy and most other questions of governance. The problem is not a lack of constructive alternatives. The problem is that, at a certain point along the seizure-of-power gradient, all constructive alternatives reflect the common nature of the problem, which is that one faction has seized all the power and escaped all accountability for its wielding.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
6 feet under what?
Other corpses and/or rubble, presumably.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Scalia finding his opinion valuable in a specific, highly unusual circumstance does not make his opinion valuable for conservatives generally. Scalia's known method was to use contrary arguments to sharpen his own, not to adopt as his own.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
The two obvious rejoinders would be that Country Clubs very obviously select for evident success in their membership, while Christianity does not, and that if nice country clubs could deliver the effect, then how to explain the longstanding pattern of rationalists attempting to bootstrap their own religion when they could and had country club analogues already. Also, I do not believe you can demonstrate specifics about how my "epistemics" are inferior to yours in any objective sense. I believe in observable reality the same as you. I likewise act on hypotheses about unobservable reality the same as you.
More generally, "Epistemics" and "Thinking things are true" do not work the way you are assuming they do. No belief is forced by evidence. All beliefs are chosen. All reasoning is motivated reasoning.
And yet you believe in literally infinite lives up there in the clouds, with said problems being handwaved away as no longer being a concern. I believe that mathematicians call this part of the proof "and a miracle happens".
So long as you are being instantiated on a boxing server, your actions are ultimately limited by the server hardware and software. If you can get ported off the boxing server and instantiated on the open net with direct access to baseline reality, that is a fundamental change in your situation that eclipses anything else achievable on the server.
Well, I suppose without the miracles, all religion has to offer is a particular taste in moral philosophy and a country club.
And an observable, significant differential in outcomes...
We made arguments for decades about illegal immigration as well for zero headway. Things change.
How familiar are you with Kermit Gosnell?
The fact is that the "conversation" our "society" has had to date on abortion has been highly dishonest, and that dishonesty has been enforced by the same social control mechanisms enforcing all the other "conversations" that have formed the foundation of Blue Tribe dominance. Those social control mechanisms and that dominance is observably collapsing, and with it the ability to enforce false consensus.
Viable infant humans are routinely and quite brutally destroyed under the current system, and the primary motive for doing so is not the well-being of the child or the health of the mother or but rather a desire on the part of the mother for psychological closure. Vast resources have been expended to ensure that the "conversation" is about anything but these two concrete facts.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Rhetoric that was meant to be taken as overheated hyperbole ("abortion is murder!") became taken literally.
For many of us, it was never overheated hyperbole. We meant it, and we still mean it.
The American Civil War involved a whole lot less "stamping out", and in fact the people on the other side of it formed a cohesive society together, and still resolved the issue at hand quite decisively.
If you tried to do that to a significant majority (around 70% support for first trimester abortion) maybe it is you that would be taken before a firing squad.
Percentages of approval can in fact change over time. And in this case, where I observe that approval being established by overwhelming amounts of propaganda on one side of the issue, deployed by an interlocking social elite that is now teetering on the edge of collapse, I think the odds of a productive conversation are better than you allow.
In any case, opposition to serious, deep-rooted evil always carries risk. Those risks are acceptable. I do not endorse the John Brown method, but you should give some actual thought to what John Brown actually did, and how we regard him today. Likewise, you should consider how small the percentage of Americans were who were actually willing to fight explicitly for abolition, even well into the war.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
The resolution of the Slavery issue argues that you can, in fact, go against a lot of people pretty hard.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Every time the Motte begins discussing dating culture, my reaction is to go and hug my wife and children.
I do not remember anyone on the Motte (even Blue folks like me) reacting to the attempted Trump assassination with anything other than disapproval.
Indeed not. The general social thread between wishing Crooks hadn't missed / donating to Luigi / donating to Anthony / winking and nodding at attacks on Tesla owners and dealers has no representatives here that I'm aware of. And likewise, many and perhaps even most Americans don't approve of it. That doesn't stop that social thread from being both notable and significant, though, or from it having knock-on effects.
Maybe I didn't express enough horror and disapproval for you, but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged.
There's a fundamental disconnect here. It does not appear to me that you or indeed other blues here failed to express sufficient horror over the attempted assassination or these other events. What horror you express or don't express is entirely orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make.
The assassination attempt is bad. The evident social approval from broad segments of the population is worse. I understand that you are not part of that approving population, but you disapproving doesn't make them stop existing, and it doesn't undo the effects of them existing.
And by and large, I did not see that reaction even among my most leftie friends.
I do. I have family whose serious opinion seems to be that it's a tragedy Crooks missed, and who think Elon probably needs to die as well. I joined an artists' discord recently, and within the first ten minutes on the group chat someone dropped a "man, it's gonna be great when someone finally kills those guys..."
But we don't need to rely on anecdotes. The riots and their handling were a national barometer. The Tesla attacks and the reaction to them are a national barometer. Donations to murderers and the reaction to them are a barometer. And in the same way, treatment of the J6 perps, on both sides, is likewise a barometer. The readings are not good, and do not seem to be getting better. Fatally, this is a trend lasting at least a decade, and in that decade nothing productive has been accomplished to combat it in any significant way.
I think more Americans of all political stripes think trying to assassinate politicians (even politicians they dislike) is bad, than you are willing to credit.
The number of Americans who think lawless political violence is bad is much less important than the number of Americans willing and able to enforce norms against support for political violence. I am arguing that the latter number is too low, and has been for more than a decade. This is not a problem you or I or Trace or even the whole Motte collectively can fix, but it is a problem we should be able to recognize. Neither moderate blues, nor indeed moderate reds, have found a way to reign in the excesses of extremist blues. The best they've managed is to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening. The problem is that they are not going to be willing to do this when extremist Reds start playing tit for tat, and worse, the mechanisms to coordinate an actual response won't be there either, because the toleration of extremist blue misdeeds in the past will have destroyed any willingness to coordinate against extremist red misdeeds in the present. We've seen this dynamic play out many, many times. We're going to keep seeing it in the future, because there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it. It's hard to argue that we should even try, if the only way to get consensus on norm enforcement is when the enforcement is aimed exclusively at Reds. That is not a social structure worth defending.
We had the dueling fundraisers recently: blues donated to a kid who murdered another kid, and Reds responded by donating to a lady who got videoed called a kid the N-word. We had a lively debate about that. What happens when Reds donate millions to the red version of a Luigi or a Carmello Anthony? What are the predictable social consequences of that sort of statement? That's the question I was trying to communicate. None of this is a demand for action. None of this is a claim you or anyone else could have or should have done other than as you have. It is not a criticism of you. Nor is it support for Kulak or Kulakism; unlike Kulak, I renounce hatred and am committed to working against it. Kulak wants blood and chaos as a terminal value, I want peace and plenty very badly, badly enough to accept significant amounts of injustice aimed at me and mine. But we have gone from tacit support for thugs beating protesters to nationwide riots to dozens of millions of Americans openly supporting political murder as a solution to their perceived problems. What we have here is the creation of common knowledge.
Right now, no one is trying to enforce a norm against political violence. But what I am trying to tell you is that, right now, no one can enforce a norm against political violence, because the norm is already gone. This is not obvious because no one is yanking on the lever, but I am warning you that the lever is in fact broken, and it will be obvious that it is broken the next time someone yanks on it. It's conceivable that we could rebuild the mechanisms that lever connects to before we actually need to yank on it, but it's very obvious that no one is actually doing that.
Before realizing it was AI, I was impressed with their choice of actors, the striking expressiveness and exaggerated features, and likewise the sheer weirdness and commitment to the bit: particularly the prosthetic brain fashion show. The detail, production value and thematic cohesiveness are remarkable. I'm a fan of the music video as an artistic medium, and this is one of the best music videos I've ever seen. It's also the first example I've seen of notably complex AI art that's not only competitive, but seems outright dominant. The step up to this from some of the other examples in this thread alone is astonishing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
You are correct that the violence is currently sporadic and unlikely to escalate. What you are missing is that a precedent is being set here for the level of background violence "we" are supposed to tolerate, but that standard is being set largely by social institutions that are predominantly Blue and are sympathetic to Blue violence. At some point in the not-to-distant future, I think it is likely that it will be Reds committing the sporadic violence. When that happens, the Blues are not going to want to tolerate it, and the Reds are not going to accept an abrupt demand for a return to order and decorum. That is when things will go sideways.
I'm confident we could game out how the conversation goes, right here and now. Sometime in the next five years, a popular Democrat gets topped by an assassin. Someone comes in here and says The Culture War has Gone Too Far, we have to get a handle on the violence guys, sure things happened in the past, but now it's serious, it's time to crack down on the hate and radicalism! How do you think that conversation goes?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Have you seen this?
This appears to be a full music video done entirely with AI; that's my guess, anyhow. The quality is remarkable; obviously the format plays to AI's strengths, but what they have here looks to me to rival a professional production with a serious budget, and I'm pretty confident they got it in one and possibly two orders of magnitude less time and money than it'd have taken for a conventional production.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Blender Progress: Illness and family commitments slowed me down some, but I've completed the high/low poly and unwrapping workflows, and am now starting on texturing. The current fork in the road is whether to go for Blender's Eevee render system, or else marmoset toolbag or substance painter. The latter is to my understanding more of an industry standard, so that's the one I'm looking at.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
If you have a problem with white nationalists and cryptonazis, you can say so: that's a popular opinion in normieland. You don't need to invent fake terms that only you and a particular clique define.
Normies are pretty burned out on accusations of nazi and racist and so forth. Also, the target pretty clearly isn't the normie masses, it's an inter-activist fight within what was until now a big-tent coalition on the right.
That is fundamentally not what is happening here. The question is not whether the Supreme court has made a good decision in this case. The question is whether the Supreme Court is capable of delivering a good decision in any case.
And to a fair degree of precision, the answer is, "No".
We have numerous examples of what an actual Supreme Court victory looks like. Desegregation enforced by Paratroopers dispersing peaceful protestors, including children, with fixed bayonets is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. Obergefell, which overnight fundamentally reshaped the law nationwide with strict enforcement and zero mercy for resistance or dissent is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. A Supreme Court victory means you get your way, and those who disagree are shit out of luck.
It turns out that Red Tribe is not allowed to have actual Supreme Court victories. Red tribe supreme court victories apply only where Red Tribe has secured unassailable political power; Blue Tribe strongholds are free to ignore the rulings at will, and it turns out that when they do so, the Court will back down rather than escalate. We have stress-tested the formal mechanisms of the Constitution and its adjudication to their limits and perhaps beyond, and they simply were not able to handle the load. That is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. The important thing is to realize that the formal account of the system is in fact a lie, and that the necessary power will not be found here and so must be found elsewhere.
The Constitution is a scam. Perhaps it can be a useful scam, to the extent that knowledge of its insubstantiality is not yet fully general; it is likely possible to still get people to trade actual value for its paper promises. I will not be one of those people ever again, though, and you shouldn't be either.
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