FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
"Civil Rights" is a wholly-owned trademark of Blue Tribe, and as such nothing Blue Tribe does can be recognized by them as a civil rights violation. The right to keep and bear arms obviously is not a real civil right, and neither is the right to practice Christianity; such activities are simply too harmful to society, and of course things people want must be balanced against the interests of the public, as understood by Blue Tribe. They will never stop violating these rights, because they fundamentally do not and cannot recognize them as rights. If they have power, this is how they will use it.
[EDIT] ...And of course nothing in the above is exclusive to Blue Tribe. Rights are, in fact, a spook. The vast majority of people will never respect them as anything more than a means to an end, and ends differ between tribes. As our values continue to diverge, the "Civil Rights" framework becomes increasingly unworkable.
It's helpful to note the ways in which consensus is formed. You wrote this up yourself, pulling together a dozen or so articles to attempt to generate context. When it goes the other way, that job is done by a professional class who are paid to do it and outnumber you, roughly speaking, 9 to 1. That means they can generate at least nine times as much context as you do, and even if that "context" is absolute garbage, it's still inescapably dominant. Naively, people look at that information and drift naturally to the easy conclusion, that the truth generally lies with the majority. This naïve base impression persists even in relatively sophisticated environments like this one; we triangulate based on our data, so controlling the data means controlling us, even here. The only possible response as an individual is epistemic closure: to refuse to update based on discredited sources. Not doing this means allowing yourself to have your dataset irreparably corrupted. Doing this means foreclosing any ability to conduct constructive object-level dialog with the outgroup.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
I’m pretty sure the genocide necessary to achieve this will raise much more vocal and far longer lasting accusations of racism than anything you’re bothered by now.
It won't, though. Arabs engaged in quite a bit of slaving against europeans for quite a long time, with all the rape and brutality you could ask for. They also castrated the male slaves, so those male slaves had no descendents. Thanks to that innovation, their centuries of brutality is treated as a curious anecdote, not a crime that echoes down through the centuries and demands restitution.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
Yes, they are, they’re just not allowed to use the words ‘gentile whites’ to describe themselves.
This is your reminder that "It's okay to be white" flyers posted on a university campus resulted in FBI involvement.
I have zero desire to organize based on my race. That doesn't change the fact that actually doing so is social/political/legal suicide.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6mo ago
That would be a foolish way to read it.
You should value statues of Lee because you should value peace. You should value the idea that there is a limit to warfare and strife, that the sword can be sheathed, that people who have fought to the death can reconcile, that bloody civil war can in fact end. It can do this because the people fighting it did not perceive the conflict to be existential, and so at some point they were willing to stop. That is a rare and profoundly valuable virtue, and one that people should not treat with disdain.
You should value the idea of leaders who conduct themselves honorably, even for an evil cause. You should value this because no cause, no nation, no people, not even individuals are ever truly virtuous, as the line of good and evil runs through every human heart. You should value this because people following orders, even bad ones, and obeying what they see as honor and duty, even if woefully misguided, is what makes conflict survivable for a civilization. Fools mock the idea of "just following orders" because they've forgotten what it looks like when generals or the armies they lead don't. Fools mock the the idea of "honor" and "duty" as applied to those they see as villains, because they are stupid enough to believe that morality is a solved problem and that one can simply "do the right thing". Having a historical understanding that amounts to a Saturday morning cartoon, they presume that the moral equilibrium they have received from their present environment via an entirely passive osmosis is obviously and eternally correct.
If you believe in prioritizing the destruction of everything your opponents value, it's because you don't want to coexist with your opponents in any way. If you are unwilling to coexist with your opponents in any way, there is no way to make peace, as conflict becomes by necessity existential. It seems to me that most people advocating this sort of conflict have no conception of the horror they are asking for.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I don't believe your motivation for engaging is to discuss the culture war. I think you're waging it by manipulating people into passive acceptance.
I have spent a lot of time arguing with CPAR, and I assure you he is in fact here to discuss the culture war in good faith, and is not here to run a scam.
You are freewheeling. You have bitten off too large a chunk of the culture war to be chewed and swallowed, and you are metaphorically choking on it. What that looks like is a moment of crisis, where one is seized by the certainty that the present situation is absolutely intolerable, and that Something Must Be Done. I have experienced this myself, a number of times.
The Motte is not intended, nor is it fit, to Do Something. It does not exist to coordinate action, only discussion. The good the Motte has done is to allow people very different from each other to converse. That's it. It is not going to help your friend relying on expired baby food, nor is it going to deliver solutions to the problems you list in your OP. It never promised to, and was never intended to.
The horrors you are seeing are not new. Large segments of human experience have always been "intolerable", and despite this, have been tolerated by previous generations. Your great grandparents lived through a global economic collapse and trench warfare. The present situation is not even that bad, historically speaking, and we have so, so much further to fall.
The culture war is not going to stop soon. The part that has been going for a decade is only one battle; the actual war has been going at least since the 60s, and arguably since the 1600s. It is probably going to continue to impinge on your life and awareness in unpleasant ways for the rest of your life; if we are all very lucky, our children might potentially live to see the other side of it. You should attempt to make peace with that fact, because if you do not it is entirely possible that the culture war will drive you insane.
None of the above is an argument for quietism or surrender. There are many useful actions to take, many useful things to be done, many choices to be made, many strategies to pursue. It is, in fact, possible to Do Something, but it helps to have a clear idea of what one is trying to accomplish and what the actual effects of a given action are likely to be. Lashing out is not advisable, and is likely to be counterproductive. What the Motte can help with, for those with the patience to use it correctly, is to learn better about the realities of the situation, which makes productive action easier. I appreciate that this is not a satisfying answer, in an emotional sense. The truth rarely is.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
...This issue is not unique to True Detective.
Marvel and Star Wars have been effectively destroyed as cinematic and streaming franchises through this same process. The Witcher, Wheel of Time, Rings of Power, Indiana Jones, ghost busters, too many cinematic franchises to name.
I've been considering a retrospective of the topic, because we frequently debated whether there was a real trend of "get woke, go broke" going on in entertainment, whether casting choices and crew statements for various media indicated a coming drop in quality. It seems to me that it'd be worth an update, looking at how the culture war has actually cashed out for one of Blue Tribe's most secure bastions. Then, too, I'm curious whether the decline is overstated, and whether people are still optimistic about Hollywood's general state in the current year.
Had you heard of the Irgun generally, or read about their other actions prior to the founding of Israel? Have you heard about how the soon-to-be Israelis purged Palestinian villages, systematically bombed homes, raped and murdered indiscriminately, and broadcast their atrocities and their threats of worse to come in an attempt to induce the surrounding natives to flee?
Had you heard of Sabra and Shatila, presided over and actively facilitated by an IDF commander who went on to be elected Prime Minister of Israel?
Had you heard of "the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah, and the nation of Israel" by shooting up a crowded mosque with an assault rifle, killing 29 and wounding 125, whose grave was subsequently made into a shrine by his fellow settlers?
Are you familiar with the settlers generally, how they're armed, how they operate, the sort of abuse and random violence and murder they've spent decades inflicting on their Palestinian neighbors, including women and children, with the tacit and occasionally explicit cooperation of the Israeli government?
Are you familiar with the concept of a "price tag attack"? What's your estimate of the efficacy of Israeli law-enforcement against the perpetrators of such attacks?
Are you familiar with the long, long history of incidents like this one? I recall you being somewhat off-put by the results of police procedure in the case of George Floyd; How would you compare those to a policy whereby a 13-year-old girl with a backpack can not only be shot on sight while running away, but can be finished off by point-blank rifle fire, the officer who pulled the trigger can be caught lying about the details of the incident, be charged only with minor offenses, and then be acquitted on all charges by the courts? Have you read enough about the general policies and actions of the Israeli security forces to get a feel for whether this sort of behavior and legal outcomes are representative, or just Chinese cardiologists?
Are you familiar with the history of Israeli involvement in the incubation of Hamas itself, in a bid to play divide-and-conquer against the PLO?
The above is by no means exhaustive. You and a great many others here seem to be operating under the assumption that the story requires there to be a good guy. It does not. Both sides can in fact be completely awful, even if one side is relatively rich and sophisticated and produces fancy microchips and CS papers and has lots of influential supporters. Nor is there any requirement that there be a reasonable solution to the situation. It is, in fact, entirely possible to create a situation where the only sane option remaining is to leave, and those who choose to stay deserve what they get.
I do not care what the Palestinians do to the Israelis, and I do not care what the Israelis do to the Palestinians. I am thankful that I live nowhere near either of them, and wish to have as little as possible to do with either of them. It seems to me that they are best considered a cautionary example, not a problem with a solution. Observe from a distance, and learn from their miseries.
[EDIT] ...If the above comes across as hostile, I apologize. If you managed to get this far in life knowing nothing of significance about the Israel/Palestine conflict, I envy you, and encourage you to attempt to maintain your streak.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot.
You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. We're just warming up here, the election race has barely started! There's a whole year of this to go, and that's just until the election is "over".
Some obvious predictions:
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Trump will be the Republican nominee.
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Trump will not take office next year.
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This will, again, be the "most secure election ever".
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A year from now, public trust in the election, the courts, the media, the federal bureaucracy, and the federal government will be significantly lower than it is now. The pattern will hold for subsequent elections.
[EDIT] - To put it more plainly, the point of this isn't to keep Trump off the ballot. The point is that this is a way to hurt the outgroup without getting in too much trouble. If it actually keeps Trump off the ballot, fantastic. But the actual value is the incremental reduction in probability of an effective Trump administration, verses the predicted cost, which I'd imagine is perceived as negligible. What you are seeing here is Blue Tribe's institutional dedication to picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And why not? Look at all these free pennies!
Speaking as plainly as possible, would it be fair to say that your argument is that Conservatives should refrain from employing one of the core political tactics of Progressivism for the last, oh, sixty years or more, a tactic that has been enormously successful and has directly contributed to the current social dominance of Progressivism, with the full understanding that Progressives will never reciprocate in any way, and that the failure to reciprocate will never be punished in any way? If not, what's the distinction I'm missing?
...On the one hand, one might reply "well, when you phrase it that way, it sounds terrible." On the other hand, sometimes the reason a thing sounds terrible is because it is terrible.
Similarly, I’d find it wrong if and when a progressive Supreme Court limited gun ownership rights in a conservative state.
What does "wrong" mean to you? Like, they've absolutely done exactly that before, and they absolutely will do it again. What follows?
It doesn’t seem bad if Texas is the Wild West and Hawaii is East Asia when it comes to gun policy.
I agree that this would be most agreeable in the abstract. But why do you believe that we can get there from here, in any meaningful sense? If so, how? If not, why advocate a "solution" that you yourself do not believe will actually solve the problem?
I personally endorse the "sanctuary" approach. I think Conservatives should actively and collectively dismantle respect for authority and law not their own, that they should systematically stonewall and impede the ability of distant outgroups to play any significant role in the governance or regulation of their communities. This appears to me to be the "what follows" to the attitude you seek to be displaying above, because "local majorities overrule global majorities" is absolutely not how things actually work now or have worked in the past. But on the other hand, until they're actually able to achieve that state, how do unilateral concessions help to secure the general rule?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5mo ago
I work in video games, you may recall. I've recently been making art for the in-game stories, and for promotional material. It has been communicated to the art team that representing diversity is a requirement in every image by default, with rare exceptions. Diversity means non-white and/or female, preferably both. Exceptions are images depicting individual characters (some of whom are still allowed to be white, but of course are balanced by the requirement that other characters be non-white) or bad guys, who are of course not subject to diversity requirements. Assuming you aren't depicting a villain, white characters are required to be balanced by diverse characters. Diverse characters are themselves, of course, balanced already and need no corresponding balancing.
I'm a little amused that we're still debating whether this sort of thing is happening. It's absolutely happening.
(This post has been sitting half-completed in my drafts folder for at least a month and a half. Thanks to @fuckduck9000 and @Hoffmeister25 for inspiring it.)
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? Which historical events are a result of its influence, and which are unrelated?
The question of the Enlightenment's central character seems like it ought to be easy to answer, given the ideology's prominence in our consensus origin myth. The Enlightenment is generally held to be the author of the modern world, the philosophy that ended millennia of benighted rule by superstition, ignorance and cruelty, the wellspring of humanistic ideals, of compassion and empathy, of the meteoric progress that has since transformed human civilization beyond recognition, shattered the fetters of hunger, sickness and want. Its hopeful brilliance is contrasted with the strangling dogmas of the dark age that followed the collapse of Rome. Indeed, I expect most of the community here probably holds that describing the nature of the Enlightenment is easy, almost too easy to be worth bothering with.
I disagree. I've tried to present this disagreement numerous times, but each time I've found an inferential gap that swamps whatever the original topic of the discussion might have been, and that required a level of effort that seemed prohibitive. This post is an attempt to approach that gap on its own terms, and at least somewhat methodically.
I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?
These two revolutions occured a mere 13 years apart. Both societies were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideology, and conciously sought to recast their social structures according to the precepts of that ideology. On the other hand, the interpretations, implementations, and ultimate outcomes differed vastly between the two. Clearly the divergence was significant, and it seems reasonable to presume that one diverged further from the root ideology than the other. By describing our understanding of that divergence, we can give a clearer picture of what we see as the Enlightenment's core nature, while being kept honest by the historical record of its commonly-accepted champions.
The American Revolution:
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The American Revolution emerged from an emphatically Christian society; that is to say, a society of serious individual and communal Christian faith welded together by the Protestant tradition. It was a society with a 70% and rapidly growing male literacy rate, thanks largely to Protestant commitments to the necessity of widespread literacy, the better to read the Bible.
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Both Leadership and the public see themselves as explicitly Christian. A lot of the leadership really is devout, those who are not (Jefferson and Franklin most notably) at least pretend to be both in public actions and private deliberation. (It's possibly also worth noting that Jefferson and Franklin were notably sympathetic to France's revolutionaries).
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The revolution's social goals are limited. No universal equality, no abolition of slavery, no overturning of the existing social order. It's not even really a change of government, as most of the revolutionaries and their support structures are already de-facto running things.
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The Revolution consistantly aimed to limit the power of government, even popular government, even if turned to apparently noble ends, against the rights of individual citizens. In doing so, they expressed a deep skepticism for all human judgement, even their own.
The French Revolution:
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The French Revolution emerged from a very different sort of Christian society. Faith appears to have been far less personal and far more communal in nature, with enforcement being top-down rather than bottom-up. I've been unable to find figures for literacy rates, but the references I've found indicate it was considerably lower than in America, perhaps in part due to the linguistic fragmentation of the French populace.
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To my knowledge, the Revolution's leadership were uniformly militant atheists, or else hiding their faith very, very deep. Religious belief was considered obvious superstition. Numerous attempts were made to channel religious impulses into the deification of human reason.
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The Revolution's social goals were extremely broad, perhaps unlimited. They aimed not merely to build a new country, but explicitly a better society, a rational society, a just, free, equitable society. Universal equality of all citizens was the standard. Slavery was abolished. The existing social order was demolished, the monarchy and nobility slaughtered or exiled, the Church brutally subjugated, religious observence suppressed. The revolutionaries believed that they had everything they needed to build, if not an outright utopia, at least the best society the world had ever seen, by far, and they intended to make it happen.
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Given their faith in human reason and scientific insight, the Revolution felt no need to limit the power of government, especially popular government, in pursuit of noble ends, even if this meant trampling the rights of individual citizens. They believed they knew what the right thing to do was, their reason was sound, and checks and balances just got in the way, slowed them down in the fight against their enemies.
Which was closer to the true spirit of the Enlightenment?
My answer: The French Revolution, and by a wide margin. The French Revolution was built around the idea of Progress, of man's capacity to fundamentally reshape his conditions and himself, of his ability to cast off the shackles of the past and move on to a brighter future. It was built on a supreme confidence in human reason, a self-assurance based on what I consider to be the core thesis of the Enlightenment:
We know how to solve all our problems.
Over and over again, its leaders and the policies they implemented demonstrate an unrelenting, unreflective certainty; they were not experimenting, inching their way through possibility-space in search of an unknown solution, but rather executing a recipe with a firmly-expected outcome. They considered themselves pre-eminent scientists, not because they were actually engaging in science, but because they zealously and meticulously applied the label of "science" to their ad-hoc, utterly untested and (as it happens) completely unworkable social theories. Actual scientific results were mixed: the metric system seems to have been a tolerably good idea, metric time less so. Shutting down educational institutions over charges of inequality and guillotining Lavoisier were perhaps less than perfect contributions to the advancement of human knowledge. Though the lip-service to science, progress and reason never wavered, it is easy to see that ideological commitments to entirely unscientific and even irrational beliefs remained dispositive throughout.
In these features, the fundamental nature of the Enlightenment is revealed.
(The above was written off my best understanding of the two Revolutions, and a moderate amount of googling. Corrections and arguments over the description are welcome as well.)
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
It might help to understand that the Atheist movement was sort of built around the idea that the Problem With Modern Society was that it was still beholden to religious superstition, and that if religion's stranglehold on the general population could be broken, a new era of reason and cooperation and enlightened policy could dawn. A lot of them weren't just arguing that religion was dumb, they were arguing that religion was the obstacle to a better world.
One of the problems is that this wasn't actually true. Once religion appeared to be on the run in the Obama years, it turned out that none of the problems were actually solved, and so they needed a new target, a new explanation for why everything was still so fucked up even when they'd won.
Hence, Wokeness.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?
I would not, and the above quote strikes me as about as obvious a case of squid-ink as it's possible to have. Mulvaney's video ad was a video ad, bought and paid for as part of the new marketing strategy by AB. Why would it be relevant whether it was on TV or on social media? They chose to put this person's face on their merchandise as part of that marketing strategy. major marketing pushes are not "jokes".
They designed and implemented an edgy mass-market social media campaign. They don't get to do that, and then claim that people reacting poorly to their message is due to "the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplifying it". They are the ones who fed a specific message into the biggest amplifier there is, with the specific intent to get it seen as widely as possible. People aren't worried that they're going to get a beer-can with a picture of a trans person on it, they don't want to buy beer from a company that thought it a good idea to advertise by teaming up with what they perceive to be a weird sex cultist.
The WSJ is spinning like a tornado in service of its tribal interests, not engaging in honest analysis of the facts at hand. As for AB, talk is cheap. The only reason they're apologizing is because they've actually taken a significant hit. If consumers actually object to AB's behavior, the only way to demonstrate that objection that AB and its peers will understand is to make the error hurt as badly as possible. To the extent they do not do this, their preferences will be deliberately minimized and ignored. AB volunteered to be a cautionary example, and is getting their wish.
Very briefly, because there is more to legitimacy than the strict letter of the law, most notably when "the letter of the law" is so obviously dependent on adversarial interpretation. A number of laws were broken in the leadup to the election, and a number of misdeeds were committed that were very real, but were not adjudicated as crimes. My assessment is that the collective result of those actions is that rule of law and the democratic process were breached, and that those victimized by such actions should adjust their expectations and commitments accordingly.
I am pretty sure that @ymeshkhout is correct that many and perhaps all the dramatic claims of ballot fraud are either spurious or intentional lies. On the other hand, the FBI really did break the law to illegally spy on an opposition candidate, and the broader set of the FBI and their close associates coordinated with journalists to lie to the public about this and many other facts, in a direct attempt to influence the outcome of the election. That seems like fundamentally illegitimate behavior to me, and the fact that it happened undermines the legitimacy of the subsequent election process. When enough such incidents accumulate, as I observe they did in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, I think it is reasonable to conclude that the democratic process is not only threatened, but has in fact been compromised.
I think a lot of the support for dramatic fraud theories comes from people recognizing that something is badly wrong, and defaulting to the scripts that society and the media have provided them for what "wrongness" looks like. "election was illegitimate" > "ballot stuffing makes elections illegitimate" > "ballot stuffing happened." This combines with a fair amount of grifting by people seeking to exploit this tendency, along with the general tendency of large, complex, contentious issues to generate considerable amounts of FUD as a simple consequence of mass human friction, distrust, misinterpretation and bias. It seems to me that this tendency is entirely worthy of criticism; you have to have some way of separating the wheat from the chaff, or tribalism will devour you completely. If you are going to discuss the issue with people on the other side, that requires some measure of common ground, and actual, observable facts seem as good a place to start as any.
the missionary is acting as though there is a law to be followed, when there obviously is not. The checkpoint guard is a potential threat, the "service charge" is not optional, and these realities must be engaged with. The missionary is thinking there's some system in place such that these realities are Someone Else's Problem, that the proper response is to file a complaint form and let the system handle it. He's blind to the fact that there is no system, that this is the way things are.
The cat lady is doing the same thing. She acts as though there's a system to enforce her will over and above her immediate actions. She apparently thinks there's a system that prevents the cat from walking out an open door, ignoring that no such system exists. She wants such a system to exist, ignores the fact that it does not, and so suffers the consequences.
The "dishes" poem (one of my favorites, by the way) illustrates the disconnect between cooperative systems of the type the people in these two examples are imagining exist, and the reality of individual choice. Washing the dishes is supposed to preclude breaking them, but there's nothing innate to the task to actually prevent this. What prevents breaking dishes is something entirely different, a whole other complex of assumptions and interactions with no actual connection to the act of dish-washing itself, and the existence of those assumptions cannot simply be assumed when it's time for dish-washing.
Assuming the above is correct, let's see if I can extend the pattern.
This scene from The Wire is all about the divide between the power of a hypothetical system and the power of material reality. The guard wants it to be one way: his whole job is in fact to be that system, that's the whole reason he's there, the reason he draws a paycheck, he has a uniform and everything! And yet, it's the other way: the system doesn't actually exist, even though he wants it to, even though he's paid to implement it, because at the end of the day, cooperation has to either be consented to or enforced, nd mechanisms of enforcement are both very expensive and quite limited in what they can achieve. Stanfield refuses to consent, and the guard, and the people the guard represents, aren't actually prepared for enforcement. They're bluffing, and Stanfield calls it. The guard's response is to try to guilt-trip him over his defection, as though Stanfield doesn't understand what he's doing, as though he's just making a mistake, and once this is pointed out he'll fall in line with the system. This doesn't work because Stanfield is not making a mistake, has no intention of cooperating, and knows that neither the guard nor the people behind him have any way of enforcing the system they're claiming exists. In reality, he has all the cards, and recognizes no reason to pretend otherwise. He is able to inflict emotional whiplash on the guard at will, by allowing the guard to pretend the system exists, and then demonstrating that it does not.
Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is. The point of all these statements is to highlight different ways that this system vs reality disconnect applies to the system of the Constitution: the document itself is not the power, the justices aren't even the power. The paper and ink and the justices interpreting it are just coordination mechanisms. The power comes from the social consensus that they exist to coordinate, and that power can be manipulated in a whole variety of ways that have nothing to do with a fancy piece of parchment or five people in silly black robes. A foolish person might imagine that their ignition key is what powers their car: they turn the key and the car starts! But of course, the ignition key is only indirectly connected to the car's engine, and if there's something wrong with the engine the key certainly isn't going to help.
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
I would take the other side of that bet. What makes it different than Oblivion's potato faces is that they already had good art, and replaced it with bad art. The difference is not subtle, so a lot of people knew in advance that the new art was bad, which would obviously undermine any plausible benefits to the change. Nor is there any serious technical challenge to hide behind; these are low-fi models and textures implementing what is probably the single best-understood and simplest-to-implement 3d art style there is. There's a DEI entity being paid by the company to propose CW changes to the game, and this matches quite well to a DEI change. Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past, that's what this looks like to me.
If what you say about locked accessories is true, this was probably seen as the cheapest way to double the number of custom options available to each player.
I'm sure that's roughly accurate to how they sold it to management. From experience, my guess would be that the artists got their marching-orders from management, decided it wasn't worth fighting, and did exactly what they were told with full knowledge that they were making trash, given that the alternative would involve a direct threat to their employment for a ~zero-percent chance of achieving anything. Your boss paid money for the bad advice because it's the bad advice he wanted. Having paid for the bad advice, he's not interested in you telling him that it's bad. Shut up and push the buttons, art monkey.
This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.
Centrist types frequently argue that Trump is a person of bad character, and that his bad character should be a matter of concern to his supporters. Romney is brought up as one-half of a refutation of this argument (the other half being noted rapist Bill Clinton), demonstrating that any Republican will not only be accused of bad character, but that the accusation will stick, regardless of their actual character, while any Democrat will be presented as heroic and that presentation made to stick, again regardless of their actual character. Romney is the Republican example because he was widely perceived to be the cleanest-cut, most virtuous candidate Reds could possibly have gotten, probably the most virtuous candidate either party has had in a generation or more, and it made precisely zero difference and arguably handicapped his ability to fight and win. It follows that such arguments should not be taken seriously, either now or in the foreseeable future. Good-faith conversation about the character of the candidates is impossible, at least across the aisle, and probably at all, and those who think otherwise are either ignorant or deceiving themselves. The fact that, having smeared him, Blues went right back to pretending they preferred him is merely the icing on the cake.
This argument does not rely on liking or supporting Romney in any way. I think it's a decisive argument, and I voted for Obama.
More generally, this is one of a class of arguments demonstrating that the basic assumptions civil society is built on do not hold, and that cooperation across the tribal divide is not positive-sum.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
A big part of it is that they don't know what they don't know. Violence is memetic, and they have received a particular set of memes that deliver these particular results.
Think about it. The individuals in question are part of a very particular form of gun culture: they live in areas where guns are de facto illegal, and where all the firearms use they've ever heard of or experienced is criminal. That means there's no range time, no formal training, no places to do the training, no people to teach. The high turnover from prison and fatalities means there's little to no institutional culture to build on, no accumulation of knowledge. What you get is lowest-common-denominator stuff. Actual training takes significant time and effort to deliver results even for things as simple as basic marksmanship under stress; where is a gangbanger going to get a thousand rounds of ammo and ten hours of range time? I've been in the gun culture my whole life, and I only recently learned about dry-fire as a training tool; where are they going to hear about it? How are they going to learn to mount a scope or zero a rifle, much less learn more elaborate and esoteric ideas like small-unit tactics?
Gangbangers appear to think of gunfights the way they think of fistfights: an act of raw imposition of will on another. They see using a gun in terms of chunky primitives: you shoot, they die, rather than the specific mechanics involved: situational awareness, contact, identifying targets, aiming, firing, reloading, cover, clearing malfunctions and so on. They don't think of guns as specific tools with specific capabilities that can be optimized for, they're super-knives that stab from range. The memes they've received shape their intentions and their methods decisively.
It's worth considering that, from the perspective of the gangbangers, what they're doing works. They've almost certainly seen multiple friends and acquaintances killed by the time they're old enough to participate, so they know that their forms of combat do actually kill people. Their form of violence is reasonably effective, derives them benefits in the form of honor, and the significant decrease in mortality is probably a feature, not a bug, since it generally increases survivability for all involved. Gangbangers generally are attempting to assert dominance or to make a point, not to annihilate the opposition like John Wick.
It's exactly the behavior in the Crump tweet linked above. Ditch the particulars, go straight to the tribal pattern. This shit will be the death of us.
I wasn't terribly impressed by her behavior in the brief section of the video I watched. I think it's certainly possible that the kid and their friends were actually trying to scam her. Maybe she's a progressive and this is just desserts. Whatever.
The rage mob is a vastly larger problem than any of that. The rage mob is a vastly clearer problem than any of that. These people are making a living off generating large-scale hatred, and no one has the slightest idea of how to make them stop. I am convinced that the hate they generate has serious, long-lasting consequences in the real world, and the harm they inflict is reliably rewarded, and on a vast scale. This is a career now, with significant growth potential.
...And people tell me we're peaked, and it's gonna get better from here. Yeah, sure.
Hlynka was, in my opinion, one of the best posters this community has ever seen. I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence. What he had to offer, this community needed quite badly, whether the members recognize it or not. I'm quite sure he was right about most things, and of the few I'm less sure of, I'd still rather bet with him than against him.
That being said, I am pretty sure he knew the ban was coming, and was in no particular hurry to forestall it. My impression is that he just got tired of the bullshit, a situation with which I sympathize even if it doesn't change the outcome. We ask questions to find answers, and having found them, the purpose of a space designed to facilitate question-asking falls rapidly to zero, and it is time to move on. Godspeed, good sir.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
...Something it might help to keep in mind is that you're, like, two or three standard deviations more cheerful and positive in your outlook than a lot of the regulars here, who, having spent some time marinating in the unique local atmosphere, tend to have formed a pachyderm-like outer husk of bitter, misanthropic cynicism, the better to endure the chronic disappointment inherent to chronicling humanity's failures. It can take some of us a bit of time to shake the rust off and switch gears, and a few of us are just... permanently stuck in the frowny-face setting. Sloot in particular, I think, believes that they have divined the fundamental nature of all women, and does not like what they think they've found.
Personally, I find your attitude and general approach quite refreshing, so thanks for that. You're a good egg.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Accusing your critics of being some form of -ist is just another part of the standard playbook now. No sane company would shy away from using this highly effective tactic just because the show they're defending is actually bad.
The tactic in question appears to be "effective" in the way that taking out new credit cards to pay off your old credit cards is an effective strategy for managing your money: it might work in the short term, sort of, but in the long term it's a disaster.
Disney appears to me to have straight-up destroyed Star Wars as a brand, and arguably has done the same to Disney as a brand. that is a staggering achievement, and it bears notice.
Officials in Colorado and California (and more states to come soon, doubtless) can do this because they have the support of Blue Tribe, its captured institutions, and the consensus-generating machine that they collectively control and operate. A theoretical Trump presidency will have none of those things, and so cannot employ symmetrical tactics.
You might as well wonder why the BLM riots don't give Red Tribe a license to riot wherever they please. The answer is that Blue Tribe is the cultural umpire, and their statements on what is a riot, what a protest, and what an insurrection are dispositive. Likewise, you might as well ask why Blues get to flaunt repeated Supreme Court decisions at zero cost, or why Republicans can't use the FBI to hide their own scandals and spy on Democrat rivals. That's not the way any of this works. The power isn't in the rules, it's in the people interpreting them and building consensus around those interpretations. Two pounds of dynamite detonating in a national security facility is either terrorism or a harmless prank, depending on who the bomb belongs to.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Given how hard the US right is now pulling for "1. feed Ukraine to Putin 2. ???? 3. PROFIT!"
The implication being that the pro-Ukraine side, by contrast, has a plan?
How'd Syria go?
Libya?
Afghanistan?
Iraq?
Iraq the first time?
Iran?
Afghanistan the first time?
...Like, what's your actual conception of how this is all going to roll out? Putin is couped by the competent, democratic statesmen who form his opposition and then Russia reforms into a functional capitalist democracy, thereby nullifying the threat of their considerable nuclear arsenal? Is that the road you're looking for?
If you want to defend the interventionist consensus, defend the results it has delivered over the last thirty years through the multiple fucking iterations it has played out, very publicly, at vast economic and social and human cost. Show how all the previous disasters were really just faulty perception, or working the kinks out, or something other than simply a blind-spot in your geopolitical perception the size of the fucking moon. I'll cop to not expecting the Russian army to be a shambolic trash-disaster, and sure, right now we are fairly thoroughly mauling that army for pennies on the dollar, given that Ukranian and Russian lives are considered to have no value in the equation. But what's the endgame, here?
What are you willing to call success, such that we can move on, job well done, no more entanglements and expenditures needed?
What are you willing to call failure, such that you agree that it's time to cut our losses?
Because I have heard this fucking song and dance before, where "these next six months are critical" for ten or fifteen or twenty years at a stretch, and my heuristic is that anyone selling that bullshit is either a braindead incompetent or a literal vampire who requires decapitation and a stake through the heart. I refuse to play this game where we pretend that all those previous disasters and betrayals and massacres and atrocities didn't actually happen or were just crazy random happenstance, where we pretend that American foreign policy and leadership should be presumed to be competent and efficient and generally on the ball. I can't pretend that hard, and I have zero respect for those who can.
Certainly. Since you ask, though, allow me to provide additional context.
FC stands for Faceless Craven. I joined this community explicitly to better understand the threat posed by Social Justice ideology, and I did so from the start with a strong awareness that maintaining anonymity was extremely important. My introduction to Social Justice in its modern form was getting "cancelled" by a close friend for speaking the truth in good faith, and having experienced the process first-hand, I had zero intention of ever running that gauntlet again. Seven years later, that intention has not changed. I have made a serious effort to maintain anonymity, do not attend meetups, and consciously remove or obfuscate most personal details from my posts.
This specific topic has come up semi-regularly over the years, and my advice on the question every single time has been to prioritize protecting yourself, to keep your head down, and not to play stupid games for symbolic prizes. Progressives have built a massive, interlocking system of social control backed by the power of the state, specifically to abuse people who expose themselves in exactly this way. I do not think marching into a meatgrinder is brave, and I do not believe that those who do so are setting an example that will inspire a hundred others. they will be significantly harmed, those harming them will suffer zero perceptible consequences, and the harm they suffer will be used to intimidate the rest of society. I've made no secret of this view, or about the fact that I do not engage in any significant political speech in public under my own name, to the point of avoiding lawn signs and bumper stickers. I do not believe that I live in a tolerant, pluralistic society, and I see no point in making it easy for people who have openly declared their intention to abuse people like me.
I mean, not everyone says that. Some people do in fact stand up bravely. Most of them get promptly crushed. Awareness of the nature of the collective action problem has greatly increased, and yet none of the people who periodically attempt to resist it actually succeed, even a little. Most normies are still oblivious to the problem's mere existence. Almost all normies have no comprehension of the sheer scale of the problem, how deeply entrenched it is into every significant social system.
There was a time, early on in the original forum, where the "we all just need to stand up at the same time" argument seemed, if not persuasive, at least colorable... And then Damore wrote his letter, and got promptly smashed. The other side is not looking for dialog. We are not participating in a good-faith conversation. The problem will not be solved "if only Stalin knew". Progressivism is not a common-knowledge problem that will go away if enough people just say "no", it is an intentionally-created and -maintained system of dominance, and dismantling it is going to involve a considerable amount of bitter conflict.
I don't think the stuff I make provides any significant contribution to the general problem. I don't think I could persuade my boss that we shouldn't be making it. I don't think the stuff I'm making is evil enough to refuse to make it on moral grounds. There is a difference between compromising and being compromised, and it seems to me that this is the former. It is humiliating and infuriating when I have to deal with it, but humiliation and infuriation are part of life. I use the money to make a home for my wife and my children, and I put my effort into things that might actually make a difference.
That's fair enough. It's legitimately shameful.
"Be nice until you can coordinate meanness". The important term there is coordination. Fighting a civilization-spanning system of control as an individual is a bad idea. In the long term, the goal is to find ways to coordinate large-scale resistance, or to develop capabilities that increase the effectiveness or lower the costs of that resistance.
On the coordination side, politics is a dandy coordination mechanism, but individuals have little impact on it. Integrating into healthy local-level communities and, if possible, hardening them against Blue infiltration and attack seems more immediately important. Building a family, having kids, and raising them properly seems like the most important thing of all.
On the capabilities side of things, my personal efforts are in the general spirit of Defense Distributed. The goal, as I see it, is to find and exploit significant vulnerabilities in the existing gun control regime, and to develop techniques that move us as close as possible to a state of weapons being, for all practical purposes, uncontrollable.
In all of these areas... Guns aren't valuable because you can use them to fight the Blues. Guns are primarily useful because they serve as a coordination mechanism, a banner to rally around. Politics isn't useful because winning an election means winning the culture war, they're useful because they are a coordination mechanism. What we need to be coordinating is a complete rejection of Blue Tribe, of Progressivism as a whole, root and branch. In order to do that we need to build common knowledge of what Progressivism actually is, what its actual history is, how it actually works, and what steps are necessary to actually dismantle it. Most of my participation here is focused on trying to gain an understanding of these questions for myself, such that it can be communicated persuasively to others, and especially to normies who don't spend all day Very Online.
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