FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
The reason it is silly is because it is not, in fact, worth getting upset about. The quality of one's life is not reduced in any meaningful way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
As I noted the last time this was brought up, these are normal conditions. If you have a problem with how Jan 6 rioters have been treated in detention, you have a general problem with how the detention of accused criminals is handled in the US.
This presumes that the Jan 6 protesters are in fact criminals. If they are not, and are being treated like criminals anyway, that is objectionable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
I suppose you probably think that Red Army soldiers gang raping German woman was a good thing too.
Supposing this is an example of being uncharitable.
Assume the people you're talking to or about have thought through the issues you're discussing, and try to represent their views in a way they would recognize. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Beating down strawmen is fun, but it's not productive for you, and it's certainly not productive for anyone attempting to engage you in conversation; it just results in repeated back-and-forths where your debate partner has to say "no, that's not what I think".
If any poster here believes that Red Army soldiers gang raping German women was a good thing, they are more than capable of expressing that thought plainly themselves; your assistance is not required.
You've been getting better at acquiring AAQCs rather than warnings lately, but this sort of post is flatly and egregiously against the rules. I'm giving you a one-day ban. Please do not post this way in the future; ban length will escalate if you do.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
This post breaks a whole bunch of rules. You've had a couple warnings and temp-bans last year, but it's been a while and you got an AAQC recently. On the other hand, you pretty clearly know that this sort of foaming-at-the-mouth rant doesn't fly here. You are waging the culture war, not discussing it.
Take a couple days off, cool down, and come back with something other than tribal rage to contribute.
Free Speech is a spook, an incoherent concept that collapses the very instant it drifts outside the bounds of a rigidly-coherent values environment. To the extent that it has significant meaning, it has never been tried, and to the extent that it has been tried, it has had no significant meaning.
That being said, I see no actual value gained from taking these scalps. Let me speak plainly: I am confident that somewhere between a large plurality and an outright majority of Blues are sad that the assassin missed. If I'm correct in that assessment, it seems to me that the reality of modal Blue opinion is orders of magnitude more important than any aesthetic "norm" secured by enforcing a taboo on celebration of lethal political violence. Canceling people over their personal endorsement of political murder is not actually going to change the modal Blue opinion; all it does is help Blue Tribe as a whole hide the reality of that modal opinion, by coaching them through the entirely inconsequential and pointlessly pro forma rituals of "norms." Speech is information. Blue Tribe is leaking information, and the net result of these cancelation efforts is to help them stem the leakage. I would vastly prefer for people to speak and be heard honestly, so that we can more clearly see where we stand.
That being said, if we're going to do the comparison game, it would be better to be specific about the objects of comparison. I remember a working-class hispanic nobody getting fired for making the OK sign. Is that a good comparison to this? If not, which specific cancelation would be a better one? I remember a lot of people being cancelled for speaking or yelling the N-word in public; I also remember those people not actually getting a defense from the right. Would cases like that be a better comparison?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I don't understand why so many people seem to believe that Nazis have some kind of mystical totemic powers that make them an ever-present threat far beyond their actual material capacity. Like if 100 people do the Nazi salute at midnight, they'll be empowered with the strength of a hundred thousand Panzers, instantly overthrow their government, and invade Poland.
Please give some examples of people who hold the belief you are criticizing. This would be a very uncharitable interpretation of the post you're actually responding to, so let's assume it's not them you're talking about. Who is it, specifically? There's apparently "so many" of them, in your words, so examples should not be hard to find.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
Conservatives are now pushing for random passport/citizenship spot checks as you’re walking down the street, that’s what “freedom” and america means to you?
Do you believe that Conservatism is a live political force? Do you believe America is a live political entity? The Constitution? In what meaningful sense would any of these be true?
I think you perhaps should consider taking a few steps back and reassessing the realities of the present situation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
HBDers are ideological descendants of the Eugenics movement, which was as progressive as it gets. The Jim Crow South did not invent racism against Africans, and it did not have a monopoly on it in its own time. That being said, I am pretty sure the Jim Crow South did have a fair amount of ideological cross-pollination with the racialist end of the Progressive movement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
If the rule you followed led you to here, of what use was the rule?
I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.
We already know that our minds and wills interact with the material world. You can make me experience pain by poking me with a pin, or deaden the pain with morphine. You can make me feel euphoria by putting me on a roller coaster. You can make me stop completely by damaging my brain.
Think about it in computer terms: I/O is not Read/Write; naïvely, mouse and webcam drivers are not alone sufficient to work with CPU and RAM. Empirical demonstration of the brain equivalent of Read/Write would be mind reading or mind control. If this were even weakly possible, the world around us would look very, very different than it does. You can induce subjective experiences by zapping the brain. You cannot predict behavior to any significant degree by reading the brain, and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.
If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.
We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc. Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead. All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.
[EDIT] - It should go without saying that none of the above supports a claim that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Odinism, the Imperial Cult, Shinto, Buddhism or any other non-materialistic system of belief has a better claim to truth than Materialism. We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Your need
You rage
you're upset
hey, turn it down a couple notches. This is getting close to personal attack territory, we don't allow those here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
Having watched a number of these, I think it's entirely possible that she will get her job back, and that within a month this will mostly be behind her. I've seen no evidence anyone is actually trying to kill her. The hospital definately will not face consequences, as they've done nothing really wrong. It's not entirely clear that the young men did anything wrong either.
The hate mob is absolutely the problem, and its existence says woeful things about our society's future. Still, it could be at least a little worse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
Rather than asking questions you don't want answered, how about you do a little background reading?
Unkind. The background reading doesn't really answer the question to my satisfaction. This is a case where the words written down are projecting an image to the reader that they don't actually, specifically support. I happen to be fairly confident that the image projected is, in fact, quite accurate, but these sorts of ambiguities drive a lot of our worst conversations here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
Just so. And each lickspittle presumes themselves the herald of true Rightousness made manifest, composing paeans to the amoral, unaccountable, sociopathic power by which they derive some vicarious delusion of adequacy.
And who knows? Maybe they'll even be right this time. Even the most degenerate of gamblers can still roll boxcars every now and again. The revolver can't have every chamber loaded, can it?
Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?
It depends on the people in question, I'd imagine. I doubt there's currently any shortage of moderate Reds, your Rod Drehers and so forth, who still cling to "enlightenment values" and "Constitutional Principles", who derived great pleasure and satisfaction from the dash and élan of the middlegame. I think there's less and less of them over time, though, because they lose too goddamn always.
Censorship is a constant. Free speech, to the extent that it has ever existed as anything other than a polite fiction, is unstable and unsustainable. It destroys itself. Progressives are correct that they are only doing what everyone everywhere has always done: setting bounds on acceptable speech, and then policing violations thereof. Reds failed at this responsibility when last we had a workable amount of social control. This was a mistake, and we suffer now for it. If we should secure power in some eventuality, it would be regrettable in the extreme to fall victim to the same foolishness again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
We can only fight on in his name, because he was in fact right.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr 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
1yr ago
After mod discussion, we're bumping the original mod harrumphing into an actual warning, which seems entirely appropriate to me. If you think someone is being rude, report them. You've been here long enough to know how this works, sir.
For what it's worth, I'll second @self_made_human below; I think your hostility meter is set a bit light. I can see how you'd read it as an attack, but the solution is to keep your cool and report, not break out the flamethrower.
For what it's worth, @Eetan, you should tone it down too.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
That and the existence of the universe are two fairly important natural phenomena which remain unexplainable, and which the potential role or attribution to God Science has failed to minimize. In fact, Science resorts to unfalsifiable stories for the one, and resorts to solipsism for the other. This doesn't prove Christianity or Heaven true, but the standard materialist narrative on this topic is fundamentally dishonest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
You condemn the Enlightenment, but you ignore and refuse to defend the actual enemies it was up against : the ancien regime and its privileges, the absolutism of Louis XIV and Nicholas II.
Why do the features of the people the revolutions defeated matter? The revolutionaries won. They took absolute power. They built the societies they wanted, unconstrained by what came before. If they built abattoirs packed with human misery, how is that the fault of the people they overthrew?
Does that make the American revolution anti-enlightenment?
No, it makes it a less central example of the Enlightenment, and it weakens claims that Enlightenment values are responsible for American outcomes. This is important to do, because there is a very clear ideological core of the Enlightenment from its inception to the current day, that core is what America largely passed on, and that core has an abysmal track-record elsewhere.
I too prefer my revolutions with as little blood and terror as possible. The only interesting dilemma here is, revolution with blood, or ancien regime.
Ancien regime. How is this even a question? The Revolution killed a shitload of people, failed to solve the problems that propelled it to power, and collapsed into a military dictatorship that plunged Europe into a generation of brutal warfare before plopping the Bourbons briefly back on the throne, before continuing to modernize more or less alongside the rest of Europe. Why should we consider any of that remotely necessary? What possible silver lining are you seeing here?
Only way to dispell the magic “We will cut off his head with the crown upon it.” The King’s trial by ordeal. That lesson, and others, centuries of progress, france had to speedrun, while at war .
They failed, though. The whole thing failed. They accomplished nothing but mutual fratricide and mass murder, and then were swept aside by a tyrant who got a considerable portion of their population killed attempting and failing to conquer the world. They didn't dispel any magic. they didn't build a legacy. They didn't speedrun shit, other than than the pointless atrocity counter.
Those rascals, one crazy idea after another. The sheer hubris to think they could solve this problem, a venerable institution vetted by our ancestors and the bible.
It's another example of how the French Revolution was more Enlightened than the American. I wish the American revolution had abolished slavery as well, but the fact is they didn't, and had to solve the problem the hard way a century later. I think the French abolishing slavery was a great idea! ...But they also collapsed their whole society and got many millions of people killed through the secondary effects, and that happened precisely because of their hubris. So the hubris seems like kind of a problem!
Not defending it, but he was executed for being a top tax farmer, viewed as a Crassus , not a Galileo.
Maybe if their ideology had been a little less bloodthirsty, it might have been a little better at actual science?
It feels like you're focusing on one sort-of part of the enlightenment's legacy - technocratic administration (which is way older than the enlightenment) - and breezing by the part that's really relevant to people: individual rights.
If the French Revolution is indeed the more Enlightened of the two, then why should we presume that individual rights are, in fact, a core element of the Enlightenment's legacy?
From the post above:
What is the Enlightenment? What is its essential nature, such that a thing can be said to be more or less like it, more or less of it, more or less descended from it? Which of its philosophical axioms are foundational, and which are peripheral?
How do we actually go about answering a question like that? It seems to me that we can start with four types of evidence, in ascending order of reliability:
- The propositions of the theorists who founded the movement.
- The statements and writings of the revolutionaries who put those theories into practice.
- The actions of the Revolutionaries, which reveal preferences more surely than words ever could
- The assessments and actions of successive generations of ideologues and revolutionaries, which show which ideas and methods persisted within the ideology over time.
If I claimed that deep Christian faith was a core element of Enlightenment ideology, you would laugh. If I pointed to Kant's profound faith in Christianity, you would continue to laugh, and you would be right to do so. Kant's Christian faith may have been the core of his personal philosophy, but it did manifestly failed to propagate into the ideology as a whole. What did propagate are the ideas we see in the French Revolution: absolute, unshakable confidence in the primacy and sufficiency of human reason and rationality, militant hostility to traditional religion, enthusiastic secularism and atheism, and honestly not a whole lot else. Individual liberties get a lot of lip-service, but their actual record is a whole lot worse than the ancein regime's, from what I've seen.
I wrote this post to highlight what I see as the fundamental dishonesty of the consensus discourse regarding the Enlightenment. When people talk about the Enlightenment's results, they talk about outcomes in America or Britain, the two distant outliers of the entire Enlightenment project. When they talk about Enlightenment values, they go straight to Revolutionary France. They ignore the fact that the best results came from the societies that maintained strong Christian social integration and placed absolutely minimal trust in the products of human reason, and the worst came from the countries that embraced Enlightenment principles whole and without restraint.
By the way, the Americans founders were mostly Deists, a highly enlightenment-derived version of Christianity...
Several of the most prominent among them were indeed probably not too far in beliefs from Robespierre. And yet, the sum of their peers and society was such that they kept their opinions mostly to themselves, and often spoke even to each other of Divine Providence in contradiction to their own avowed beliefs. Meanwhile, in France...
The point of this comparison is not to argue that Christianity is awesome. It's to point out that Christianity is very clearly not part of the Enlightenment, and so the revolution that embraces the Christian faith of its populace is not a very Enlightened revolution.
There is little uniquely innovative or "enlightenment" about the fact that the Jacobins were despotic centralizers or that they persecuted religion
Your point eludes me. The revolutionaries themselves, and their subsequent progeny, seemed to find both despotism and religious persecution both innovative and eminently desirable. Here's Mark Twain offering apologia for mass slaughter a century or so later:
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
The mendacity of that passage galls. Leave aside the absurdity of the cited numbers; grant them for the sake of argument. He minimizes the crimes of his favored ideology by comparing them to all harms and misfortunes, natural or manmade, for a thousand years previously. In doing so, he demonstrates both the founding principle of the Enlightenment, as well as its first corollary:
- We know how to solve all our problems *If a problem can't be solved, that failure is the fault of specific people with names and addresses. These are the principles Twain enthralled himself to. He frames the slaughter of the revolution as an alternative to the pain and suffering of pre-revolutionary life, rather than an intensification of it. He learned nothing of value from the French Revolution, and neither did his fellow Enlightenment ideologues. The slaughter was at worst a necessary evil, at best a positive step toward utopia. That's the lesson they took from their revolutionary histories, not concerns about the limits of human reason or the necessity of safeguards against emergent tyranny.
You can't claim that the pathological hubris and maniacal bloodlust were tangential to the spirit of the movement, when the movements' own champions consistently affirm that that they were necessary and justified.
It's more than fair to say, as @IGI-111 does downthread, that it's debatable whether scientific government can be given credit for the industrial revolution. There is still, however, a strong argument that individual rights and liberalism can be given that credit.
And what sort of societies gave birth to such principles? Was it France, with its radical egalitarianism and staunch secularism and obsession with "scientific" progress? Or Britain and America, deeply Christian, cautious, skeptical of revolutionary change?
I don't know if I fully buy the argument myself, but anyone arguing against the enlightenment needs to be able to fully extricate all of its credit for the industrial and commercial revolutions to challenge the strongest arguments in its favor.
One would.
The other approach, of course, is to bite the bullet and say the post-enlightenment world has brought prosperity, but it wasn't worth what we lost.
I don't think the Enlightenment has any claim to creating our prosperity at all. It did not end the religious wars; the religions and secular authorities did that jointly before its birth, and once it got rolling it caused some of the worst wars we've ever seen. It did not establish universal literacy; the Protestants did that, with the able assistance of Guttenburg. It arrived after science was already organizing itself, and so cannot claim credit for establishing it. It cannot claim credit for the subsequent industrial and scientific revolutions, because its focus was always social science and the theories it promoted were uniformly garbage, and because the nations that drove those revolutions the hardest were not very Enlightened. It cannot claim credit for individual rights and liberties, because it systematically trampled those rights and liberties wherever its ideology was allowed free action. What it did do, quite reliably, was produce vast, pitch-black concentrations of human misery, the historical record of which our current consensus steadfastly refuses to seriously grapple with.
HBD is not a political movement.
You can argue the label if you like, but "person who believes in meaningful racial differences in intelligence, and thinks it's a good idea to implement racial discrimination on this basis" is a notable cluster here, and a lot of the ones furthest out on the "fan of racial discrimination" axis are in fact former deep-blues and still retain many of their blue values, or else current deep blues with a different set of preferred races.
Meanwhile, one of the best distinguishers both of Redness and of opposition to this sort of racial politics here is "do you regularly go to Church?"
D3R is a meme because it's ineffective against blues in most contexts, due to double-standards. There's no rule against racism here, though, and there's little likelihood there will be. We point it out simply because it's true and needs to be said. If you disagree with racism as a value, you should cultivate an understanding of where it comes from, and a big part of where it comes from is Progressive social engineering ideas mixing badly with scientific fact.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
The problem here is that you have a large chunk of the population who's experienced circumcision first-hand, and consider the anti-circumcision arguments vastly overblown. If you don't like the practice, don't practice it with your kids. There's no need for laws, you can just let people make the decision for their own children as they see fit.
If on the other hand circumcision were being mandated, or secretly being encouraged for children to get themselves while hiding this fact from parents, that would be a rather different matter.
Build a parallel status economy.
Every social system should either work for us or not work at all. Actively attack enemy-held institutions by any means necessary.
reject and subvert systems that work against our interests. Deny their power, hamper their operations, refuse their legitimacy, appropriate or destroy their resources.
Focus on outcomes, not process. Process is for coordinating cooperation, and that is not a thing our present society is capable of maintaining.
The goal should be a breakdown of federal authority, and acceleration in the decay of existing systems of social control such as the media ecosystem, educational system, academia generally, the courts, and the federal bureaucracy. Delegitimizing these institutions in the eyes of as much of the public as possible is a good first step.
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