FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
All this is true. And yet, collapses actually happen, have happened recently, and are likely to continue to happen.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
We can only fight on in his name, because he was in fact right.
I don't think this is surprising. A lot of Ukraine's ability to resist was predicated on US assistance, which has become increasingly rare due to resistance from House Republican leadership.
Maybe don't promise things you can't deliver? I never supported Ukraine, I have no interest in supporting Ukraine, and I'm not interested in voting for people who support Ukraine. If more people thought like me, it's entirely possible that this war would not have happened. Given that this war has happened, I'm not going to change my mind because "you broke it, you bought it". I didn't buy shit, and I think anyone who's still on-board with writing blank checks to the American foreign policy apparatus is too stupid to be allowed to vote. If the last twenty-four years of disasters wasn't enough to drive the lesson home, they're simply incapable of learning.
This is so bizarre to me. Ukrainian women are... people? They are not the property of Ukrainian men.
This would be a better argument if those Ukrainian men weren't faced with forced conscription into indefinite service in a meatgrinder war of attrition. They are also people, no? But naturally, when it's the men, it's honor and duty, and when it's the women, it's human rights and individualism. Women have, after all, always been the greatest victims of war.
I do not think "maintaining the territorial integrity of Ukraine" is an "abstract geopolitical goal of NATO."
Then I submit that you are not very good at assessing what is and is not an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle, that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement, and that their conflict with each other is fundamentally an example of the narcissism of small differences. To the extent that I understood his arguments, he also appeared to be correct about Hobbes vs Rosseau.
well, between you, @AhhhTheFrench and this in-depth discussion I'm hoping to continue with @jimm, We've now covered all the possible positions on the subject of hypnosis. I'd certainly be interested to see more discussion about the facts of the matter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
Consider Rome and the "Dark Ages", and likewise the Bronze Age collapse. It's happened before, and it will likely happen again. Will it happen soon, as in before 2030? I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn't bet strongly against it either. It seems like a distinct possibility, especially given the obvious trends in weapons technology. The tech that enforces our current peace is badly senile, and it looks to me like there's a lot of overhang for a really serious military disaster that I'm not sure the existing order could survive.
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true.
Every human has a lifetime of direct experience of something that appears in every observable and testable way to be free will. Complex predictions can be accurately made on the assumption of free will's existence.
Neither statement is true of Determinism, which, if it exists, can neither be observed nor tested in any way. Entire generations of scientists claimed otherwise, and their claims were dramatically falsified over the course of the last century. Belief in Determinism is axiomatic, not evidence-based.
To the extent that "true" is a meaningful term, free will is true. It is true in all the ways that gravity is true, and rejecting it involves exactly the same sorts of commitments and actions that rejecting gravity involves: namely, discarding huge portions of one's moment-to-moment experience as fundamentally unreliable, without any compensatory increase in predictive power.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26d ago
Your version might be correct; I don't know, and I'm generally suspicious of all narratives about presidential responsability for economic outcomes.
What I do know is that when Trump was elected, I declined to invest my money in the stock market because I believed mainstream predictions that his election was clearly going to tank the economy, and then distinctly recall watching in some frustration as the stock market boomed and continued to boom.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Shame is a low class cultural marker.
Shame is a human constant in all social classes.
If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame.
No human has ever or will ever exist in a state where nothing is a threat to them.
The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat.
For every shameless rich person, I can point to ten drug addicts shitting themselves on a sidewalk without apparent shame. Further, it seems to me that the absence of shame is the marker of defeat, when one is no longer even trying for goodness and virtue.
It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.
This at least is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, fear is a necessary and entirely rational response, because there are better states and worse states, and many of the worse states are extremely wretched. Rational fear is a motive force, a protective force. Its absence is a sign of insanity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
Those were under entirely different circumstances and the whole world would have to collapse at the same time to really set humanity back, not just one empire somewhere. We can't forget our technology, too much is recorded.
We don't have to forget it to stop being able to make it work because too many parts of the system break down at the same time.
"Collapse" as in a rapid slide into warlords and mad max is just a fantasy for people who don't like how things are, don't understand how terrible that would be, and think they would be king of the ashes.
I think that's a fair description of most people who talk about collapse. They have no idea what they're asking for, and will curse the day of their birth if they actually have to live through it.
Crucially, I think people not understanding the innate horror of such an outcome makes the outcome more likely, not less, and I do not think such an outcome is wildly unlikely in the first place. Revolutionary outbreaks enslaved half the world in the last century and killed ~75-100 million humans. We have nukes now. Every day that passes, technology accumulates that our society doesn't really have answers for, and in most cases hasn't actually thought about. We're coasting now on the inertia of previous generations, and our social structures are visibly decaying day by day. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we're going to get hit by something unignorable, and it's an open question whether our present society can survive a serious shock. Evidence from past shocks, IE COVID and the summer of Floyd and the 2016 and 2020 elections, are not encouraging.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Almost everything we think and do in the modern world has at least some of its roots in the Enlightenment.
A lot of what we think and do has some of its roots in the Enlightenment. There are notable exceptions, a lot of those exceptions cluster in thought-space, and they form the foundation of Red Tribe.
The United States itself is a product of the Enlightenment (founded by Enlightenment thinkers etc.) and he was a super patriotic Red Tribe American.
America (together with Britian and their progeny) appears to me to be a clear outlier in the range of Enlightenment societies, throughout the entire history of the Enlightenment from its founding till now. It is nonetheless true that America has much of its roots in the Enlightenment, though, and I would argue that is why America is doomed. We didn't get enough of the Enlightenment to wreck us on the spot, but we got more than enough for the social equivalent of cancer, which we are now dying of.
Taking his arguments seriously we could also accuse him of all kinds of things that he would disagree with and doesn't believe in because of tenuous links.
In the first place, he is not here to defend himself, so it seems rather unsporting. But I am here, I am better at maintaining decorum than he was, and I'm willing to defend most of his arguments or make similar ones of my own. If you think taking my arguments seriously leads to absurd results, feel free to elaborate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
I watched that whole horrible india video
I didn't.
I'm surprised you guys are letting that pure putrid propaganda piece just moulder on the front page like that.
As opposed to... what?
There is just too much of the Bible that is objectively false at this point that I don't know how a Mottizen would go about gaining faith.
I'm your huckleberry.
The popular understanding of Materialism is obviously bogus, and is protected from a rapid descent into absurdity by nothing more than irrational social consensus effects. It is exactly as ridiculous as flat-earth or young-earth creationism, for exactly the same reasons.
Note that the above does not apply to Materialism itself, which is an entirely reasonable position, but is considerably less attractive and persuasive. The difference between the two is that the popular version derives its force from a circular argument about the nature of epistemology, evidence and belief. The popular formulation holds that belief in Materialism is derived strictly from an impartial assessment of the evidence, and also evidence against Materialism can't possibly exist, so if evidence against Materialism appears to exist, it can be discarded without explanation.
Without this circular argument, Materialism is merely another faith-based argument that has retreated into the gaps of unfalsifiability. With this circular argument, of course, Materialism is obviously true by definition, and anyone who disagrees has volunteered for mockery. As long as people don't twig to the circular nature of the argument, the social effect is self-reinforcing. The many legitimate benefits Materialism claims to encourage, by contrast, are in fact equally available to non-Materialists, whose faith generally does not prevent them from designing rockets and microchips in any way.
"Objectively false" is an interesting phrase. I'm not aware of anything in the Bible that is "objectively false". On the other hand, I'm pretty sure everything Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is in fact objectively false, and yet people bought it entirely for a hundred years, and many people believe it to this very day. It seems obvious to me that Determinism is as close to "objectively false" as you can get, and many people here still believe it. It seems to me that belief in "objectively false" things is actually pretty common, and examining the phenomenon can teach you a lot about how human reason actually works and what its limits are.
The short version is that belief is not driven by evidence, but by acts of individual will. All significant beliefs are chosen. This is as "obviously true" as anything can be, but choosing not to believe it makes it easier to choose certain other beliefs that some consider desirable, and so those people generally do that. This is not to say that reality is as we wish it to be, only that our beliefs about reality are under our direct, willful control, and always will be.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
First time?
Everyone in the Culture War has this experience sooner or later. It sucks, but eventually the realization settles that this is how it is and it's not going to change, so you make your peace with it and move on with life.
For me, it helped to realize that most people who talk about politics and culture aren't actually engaging in analysis, but rather an informal group-bonding game built around call-and-response meme-trading. This doesn't make them stupid or irrational, any more than posting dogespeak memes means they don't understand proper grammar. They aren't trading John-Oliver-tier (or steven crowder tier) talking points because they're interested in pursuing objective truth, they're doing it because it generates a feeling of togetherness. Sure, it's alienating to you, because the pings they're generating are pings your brain rejects, but that's not really their fault. People are different, is all.
Do you have an experiment to determine if an individual exhibits free will as opposed to just making decisions based on its incentive landscape plus perhaps internal sources of randomness?
I don't think I do, no. All I can do is observe my own internal mental states, and compare those observations to other peoples' descriptions of their internal mental states. The result is, as I said, the appearance of free choices being directed by individual will, and that appearance is seamless. It may well be an illusion masking deterministic mechanisms, but if so, the mask is impenetrable under current conditions.
I observe myself exercising my will without apparent restraint, and making choices through the exercise of that will. Near as I can tell, this is what everyone else observes as well. All effective methods of human social organization assume that humans have free will, and then proceed with methods to either convince them to choose cooperation, or trick them into cooperation, or else nullify their choices through the exercise of power against them. No effective methods of social organization have been found that allow one to simply engineer cooperation from the uncooperative, and this despite many trillions of dollars and millions of human lifetimes spent explicitly trying to achieve that exact objective.
If humans have free will, do dogs too? LLMs? Frogs? Insects? A ball travelling through a Galton board?
The ball travelling through a Galton board certainly does not. We can predict when it will fall (when we drop it) and we can predict the statistical probabilities of its travel. We have a good understanding of the mechanics involved, and there do not appear to be any great mysteries involved.
Dogs, LLMs, Frogs and Insects, I don't know. I have no access to their internal experience. Is their behavior deterministically predictable and manipulable? If so, then clearly we have grounds to say that they're deterministic. If not, then it may be deterministic and simply too complex for us to grasp, or it may be something else.
For humans, I do have access to the internal experience, and it certainly is not deterministically predictable. I have no reason to assume that my observations, and those of all other humans, are mistaken, and they uniformly indicate free will. The direct evidence we have on the question in hand is that Free Will exists.
How is free will compatible with a physics world view?
It isn't. So either our understanding of physics is wrong, or our observation of free will is wrong. As it happens, we know for a certainty that our understanding of physics is wrong in other places, so it being wrong here too is not entirely unexpected.
It has been frequently claimed that Materialism should be the null hypothesis, and that there is no evidence against materialism. But if free will appears to exist, and free will cannot exist according to Materialist axioms, then the apparent existence of free will is evidence against Materialism in the same way that Materialism is evidence against free will. Likewise, the falsification of Determinist theories is evidence against Materialism. It is obviously not conclusive evidence, and it's still possible that further technological development will salvage Determinism at some indeterminate point in the future, or that Determinism is correct even if we can never prove it due to intractable complexity. But if one claims both that their position is evidence-based, and that contrary evidence must be discarded because it contradicts their position, they have left the bounds of rationality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news.
I think both the addict and the rich philanderer have, through their intentional choices, crippled their capacity to feel shame. I don't think this happens automatically; people who haven't intentionally crippled their own capacity for shame continue to feel it. Those who do cripple their capacity for shame in this way have damaged an important part of their own mind, making them less sane in a meaningful sense.
That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part.
I would argue that the boyscout part is a subset of the rational part. Shame is deeply rational. Those who have crippled their capacity for shame are less rational, not more.
Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.
Some fears can be vestigial nonsense, depending on the specific environment. Fear itself remains rational, and always will so long as humans survive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
Which seems more vile to you?
"We should maximize the devastation of the war to get more women outside the war zone"
or
"we should maximize the devastation of the war to maximize the number of Russians killed and Russian wealth destroyed"
...Like, where is the "vileness" supposed to be coming from? We're well past the point where people here make straightforward arguments in support of maximizing the misery of others because it provides benefits for ourselves.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
But it isn't going to be some kind of American Civil War part II that brings down humanity, as much as that would please @KulakRevolt
The global peace is enforced by America. American Civil War seems like an unpleasantly likely outcome given our current position, given that the culture war continues to escalate and norms continue to erode. If America suffers a civil war, it's probably not going to be able to keep a lid on the rest of the world.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
C.S. Lewis apologists generally don't believe the only escape is death.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Putin just woke up one morning and decided he wanted an invasion, and the rest is history.
I watched people predict this war at roughly this time well over a decade ago, so no, I'm pretty sure Putin didn't just wake up one morning and decide he wanted an invasion.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
It has a thumbnail of a haunting dead person on it, it makes the front page of themotte look like a gore site.
I'm pretty sure everyone here has seen worse. I'm pretty sure ~95% of people here or visiting here has literally paid money to see worse in movies, games, shows, etc.
I know you don't care that much, weren't you literally a boogaloo boy?
..."weren't"? More generally, I have no idea what the chain of logic you're pointing to here is.
I didn't watch the video because I don't find the premise interesting or edifying enough to be worth discussing. The question remains: what's your proposed solution, and why is it better than "don't touch the bait"?
Be nice, until you can coordinate meanness. Abbott appears to be coordinating meanness.
From a Red Tribe perspective, there is no rational reason beyond naked fear to respect or maintain federal authority. Nullification is indeed on the horizon, it's just the one behind us, given that we're certainly two and perhaps as many as five generations past the point where Federal authority could plausibly be claimed to operate according to well-defined and well-respected rules. We Reds already know that laws we pass at the Federal level aren't real laws, that our Supreme Court victories don't count, that it isn't actual democracy when we win elections, that we do not enjoy meaningful rule of law. We know the existing system has no intention of cooperating with us at any level. Our situation is a conflict, not a mistake.
We won on immigration law, and our laws were ignored. Blue Tribe spent decades actively facilitated the illegal immigration of dozens of millions of people from the poorest regions of the world, and they did it while explicitly celebrating the thesis that this would give them an insurmountable and irreversible advantage politically. It seems pretty clear that they have in fact derived a very significant and irreversible political advantage from this tactic. Blues look at this as a fiat accompli, but why respect a system that doesn't respect you? @TracingWoodgrains points out that all the establishment institutions are solidly against Red Tribe. Given that reality, why continue to support and maintain those institutions? Because we need them to keep society running? Have you seen society?
The correct move is to withdraw the consent of the governed, and make them fight for every step. Impose costs anywhere and everywhere. Impose friction. Deny them freedom of action at every possible point. Contest every issue under every theory imaginable, and when those run out, think up new ones. Never concede their legitimacy, never grant them authority, never cooperate. When they push back, escalate, and when they push back on that, escalate again. Attack their institutions and organizations. Locate, isolate and persecute their partisans. Engage in economic and legislative warfare. All this has been done to us; tit-for-tat is the correct strategy given the state of play. The Progressive Coalition is not a stable entity, and it is already suffering severe policy starvation. It does not appear to have unlimited state capacity to spare. It is entirely possible that we can grind them down to the point that the social structures they're leaning on simply collapse, and their project of cultural imperialism dies of exhaustion, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions. Formal secession is not necessary, much less the severing of economic ties or serious breach of the peace, only a destruction of the mechanisms of centralized power.
And if we are not so fortunate as to get the happy end, all the efforts put into this strategy pay dividends at the subsequent levels of escalation.
I think you are right they are not driven by evidence, but I have never ever in my life made a willing act of choice in my beliefs.
I think you have. Consider the following:
When someone presents you with a belief, you can choose to either accept or reject it uncritically. Either is a conscious act of the will.
If you choose not to do either, you can instead inspect the proposed belief critically. This involves comparing it to the evidence available to you. The consensus model is that you collect the available evidence for and against the belief, weigh the two groups against each other objectively, and allow yourself to be guided by the result. There are serious problems with this model:
- There is a very large, probably infinite amount of pieces of evidence for any possible question.
- For any given piece of evidence, there is a very large, probably infinite number of connections to other pieces of evidence.
- Pruning this infinite sea of data and data-connections to a practical subset involves collecting and assessing each piece and its connections for "relevance" and "weight". Neither "relevance" nor "weight" has any objective measure, and all but a vanishing fraction of the available evidence must be discarded. Consequently, there is no objective scale by which one pile of evidence "outweighs" or is more "relevant" than another. This process is irreducibly subjective.
When we examine a proposed belief critically, what actually happens is that we collect the evidence that is immediately convenient to us, prune it subjectively to the subset that seems weighty and relevant by our subjective, personal standards, sort it into "for" and "against" piles, and then compare the two to get a preliminary result. We then assess this result, and if we decide we like it, we keep it and draw a conclusion. If we don't like it, we go looking for more evidence. Either is a conscious act of the will.
Nor does anything require that this process ever terminates. Even if no "sufficient" evidence can be found to justify the conclusion we desire, we are free to assume infer the existence of such evidence from the conclusions we chose in previous iterations of this reasoning process. The end result is that we choose to search through a small portion of an infinite chain of evidence until we find the support we're looking for, and then we choose to stop.
But what if we wanted to go deeper? What if we wanted to try for something beyond subjective, piecemeal assessment of evidence? The last option is to reason about evidence by way of axioms. A given chain of evidence can fit within or contradict a given axiom, logically speaking. This process seems to be objective, or as close to it as humans can get. But all it tells you is whether a given chain of evidence fits or contradicts a given axiom, not whether the axiom is actually correct. There are still infinite evidence-chains, meaning that there are an infinite number of evidence chains that fit neatly into a given axiom. Choosing an axiom is a conscious act of will, and choosing which evidence-chains to compare it to is likewise a conscious act of will.
All consequential beliefs any of us hold are formed by one of the processes described above. All of these processes involve a conscious act of will. Therefore, all beliefs are arrived at through conscious acts of will.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. ...Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
It doesn't seem to me that the shaming norms immediately prior to the Sexual Revolution were particularly strict, from a historical perspective. Nor does this comport with my understanding of how revolutions generally work; they generally don't happen when conditions decline past some critical threshold, but rather when things are getting better, but people think they should be getting better faster. Is that not your understanding? In any case, it's hard to believe that 1950s America leaned harder on shame than, say, Puritan America. Why didn't Puritan America result in a Sexual Revolution, under your model?
The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers.
Historically speaking, I do not see the Sexual Revolution being driven by people who had been shamed reaching a critical mass. Rather, what I observe is people who were not being shamed buying into the idea that the shame-enforcement system they were already on the right side of could be dismantled without cost or consequence, that the fences against sexual misconduct were pointless and that tearing them down would have no downsides and only benefits, because We Had Progressed. Without a broad-based commitment to the big lie of Progress and all the "little" lies that supported it, the sexual revolution would not have happened. Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society desperately eager to believe them, the sexual revolution doesn't happen.
Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.
But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
Is it culturally formed, or is it culturally deformed? We agree that people can be made to feel shame about things that should not be considered shameful. The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.
I'm sure kids aren't born being ashamed of nakedness or of touching their genitals. On the other hand, they aren't ashamed of casual cruelty either; they have to learn that other people exist and to empathize with them, but that doesn't mean that empathy itself is a cultural construction that we can take or leave as we will. I think modesty is similar: you aren't born knowing it, but you learn about it soon enough unless others expend a great deal of effort trying to hide it from you, and even then sooner or later it'll be back.
The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine. That pitch has been gradually walked back as the resulting disasters become increasingly undeniable. The relatively slow pace of that walk-back has been, in my view, only achievable through large-scale deceit and the intentional obfuscation of the horrors the Revolution's architects unleashed and refused to recognize.
Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time.
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
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