FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Do you oppose the use of public resources to subsidize their lifestyle? Can you actually prevent public resources from being used to subsidize their lifestyle? Or is this just policy arbitrage, where we appeal to atomic individualism or social unity, whichever is convenient at the moment?
But in the same way that prediction markets help to reveal true beliefs, free economic markets reveal true preferences.
Would you agree that most poor people have a revealed true preference to invest most of the money they receive into credit card payments and similar fees, and that the people who receive those fees are benevolent actors working tirelessly to help such poor people live their very best life?
If not, I'm curious as to why you view the market as "revealing true preferences" in the one case and not the other.
That seems like an extremely bad question to ask. Do you interrogate all your moral intuitions off a similar framing, starting with what you wish was true and working from there? And note that you are treating "poor" and "unfortunate" as philosophical primitives, states that simply exist ex nihilo.
Suppose I assert that all humans deserve justice. How does this interact with your "how much would I want the poor and unfortunate to get, in a vacuum where it's no skin of mine or anyone else's nose"? Because my understanding is that what some humans deserve from justice is swift, merciless death.
The specific speech that brought the question to mind was Alexander's purported speech to his mutinous army at Opis. A neat parallel to your own choice, it seems.
I feel both these examples are quite distant, and that I have seen and heard many examples of leaders or prominent men being noted for addressing hostile audiences in circumstances of significant danger, and nonetheless persuading the audience by their appeal. Unfortunately, I can't recall them; as with our two examples here, it would be interesting to see what elements of shared culture people appeal to under duress, and assess whether those elements are meaningfully shared under current conditions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
The point is that happiness does not derive from material circumstances, in opposition to the underpinnings of the argument that all people "deserve to be happy", contrasted with "every person deserves to be as happy and safe as they can accomplish themselves". I'm not sure the latter is the precise wording I'd nail my flag to, but the former seems profoundly untrustworthy and dangerous.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
My concern is that WhiningCoil does not recognize that all else being equal it is always good, rather than neutral, for sentient beings to have nice things.
It seems to me more likely that they recognize that all else is, in fact, never equal, never has been, and likely never will be.
Solzhenitsyn figured out how to be happy in a death camp. Some Ukrainians in the Holodomor figured out how to be happy while they and their families were intentionally starved to death. These apparent historical facts appear to me to support @WhiningCoil's model of happiness, and undermine the one you are presenting.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest.
Why not? Everyone else does, and whatever objections you and I might muster have clearly failed.
To be clear, I do not endorse the assessment described above. I do not believe that "American" is a boundary that can be effectively drawn on racial or ethnic lines. Unfortunately, that agreement is downstream from my assessment that "American" is not a boundary that can be effectively drawn at all.
I think this is a pretty good effort at defining "American culture", and do not believe that I could do better.
Suppose you are confronted by an angry and possibly violent mob of Americans. Which of these features you have listed would you appeal to in attempting to talk them down and convincing them to disperse? That is to say, which of these features provide serious, reliable traction on an interpersonal level?
Talking down angry mobs is something notable leaders have needed to do many times throughout history, and generally "culture" is what has allowed them to do it. Do you believe you are describing that sort of culture above?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Good lord no it didn't.
I watched it happen. I lived through it happening. The GWOT drove me into the Blue Tribe for a decade, and I only returned when the existing Red establishment was driven out in turn. 2000s republican leaders now mostly vote democrat.
As for the destruction of America...
If anything, since it became a bipartisan thing to criticize it ought to be a unifying factor, right?
We don't have to appeal to theory when we can observe what actually happened. The GWOT burned the Reagan coalition to the ground and supercharged progressivism. Progressive overreach has, in turn, destroyed the nation. The Constitution is dead. Our system of government is pretty clearly dead. Tribal values are now mutually-incoherent and -intolerable, and the stress of tribal conflict is blowing out what institutions remain to us one after another. Reds and blues hate each other, wish to harm each other, and are gleefully seeking escalation to subjugate each other. This process takes time, but the arc is not ambiguous, and neither is where it leads. At some point in the next few years, it will be Blue Tribe's turn to wield federal power, and Red Tribe's turn to resist it, and at that point, if not sooner, things will get significantly worse. It is insanity at this point to think either that the tribes are going to coordinate a halt to the escalations, or that our society can survive another decade of accumulated escalations. The peace is not going to last.
But also, intervening in Iran doesn't have to involve an invasion and occupation. That is learning.
As we have previously discussed, Libya also did not involve an invasion and occupation.
You appear to be assuming that the general population of Iran is some sort of generic huddled mass, yearning to breath free, that the problem is just the Mullahs and if we sweep the mullahs out of the way Iran magically transforms into Michigan. But Iran is not Michigan; at this point, even Michigan is not Michigan. Iran's current government are not alien space invaders, but rather Iranians who emerged from the population of Iran, and are thus at least somewhat representative of the sort of leadership that population produces. The Shah was an Iranian leader who operated torture dungeons. He was overthrown by Iranian Muslim communists(?), who... then also operated torture dungeons. Why do you believe that radical change in the government will produce a totally new sort of government, when it did not do so previously?
Your confidence that an intervention likely leads to a better situation for all involved is contradicted by recent experience, which you are dismissing out of hand. I have no reason to believe that "this time, it will be different", because it has not in fact been different any of the previous times. I do not care that the mobs are crying out for our aid; mobs cry out for lots of things when such appeals are obviously in their immediate interest, but that does not mean what they are crying out for today is a reliable indicator of their future preferences, and intervention has a grim track record.
I am not questioning whether we can bomb a second-tier power. I am questioning whether bombing will do any good, with the full knowledge that if I and people like me consent to bombing, and things go sideways, next we will be arguing over whether we should bomb them more, or maybe send just a few troops, and then just a few more. I note that the US and Israel "dominated a second-tier power" less than a year ago, and yet here you are, demanding we bomb them again. Did we not dominate them hard enough last time? If so, why are you claiming that this current domination will succeed where the previous domination failed?
I think any objective observer who isn't suffering from Iraq Syndrome or a committed isolationist can see this is a good case for it.
Any observer who does not suffer from "Iraq Syndrome" is not thinking objectively. The GWOT destroyed the Republican party as an institution, and arguably destroyed America as a nation. It was ruinously expensive by every possible measure, for little to no perceivable benefit. Those responsible have taken no accountability and have suffered no consequences, and there is not even the slightest reason to be confident that Lessons have been Learned. And that was before we entered a fundamental revolution in military affairs, wherein it is questionable whether our comically expensive military is actually capable of surviving, much less dominating.
You should not need to stick your dick in a blender three times (four? Five?) to learn not to do that, but apparently some people need to go all the way down to the angriest inch.
What does the Alternate history look like if America stays entirely out of World War I? It's hard for me to imagine things working out worse than they did in our timeline. Is it enough change that WWII doesn't happen, or ends up as the West vs the Commies?
Again, I think there's a strong case to be made that our current position is pretty similar to 1910 or so, for a whole variety of reasons. I think we should try to lean hard into isolationism this time around, not least from observing how WWI and WWII went for the sclerotic, unwieldy empires that rolled into them. Modelling our current choices off WWII history is like a 55-year-old morbidly-obese former athlete with a bad back and a bum knee thinking he can throw down like he did when he was an 18-year-old in peak condition. We should be considering our future more from the perspective of Tsarist Russia or the Austro-Hungarian empire, not from that of a vital, highly cohesive, highly motivated state gifted with secure borders and unlimited, untapped natural resources.
I suppose you believe we should have stayed out of WWII as well.
The standard narrative on WWII is vulnerable to the complication that in defeating one set of horrifyingly evil tyrannies, we made alliance with and gave away half the planet to another set of at least equally-horrifyingly-evil tyrannies, who we then could not prevent from decimating, immiserating and enslaving the half of the planet so ceded, which we then had to spend the next two generations containing at ruinous cost, and whose ideology fatally poisoned our own nations. I think it's pretty easy to be happy that we crushed Hitler and the Imperial Japanese, while still noting that the outcome was not something we should see as the way we want to do business going forward.
Further, World War II appears to be a pretty contiguous outgrowth of World War I, where we "made the world safe for democracy" in a way that appears to have laid the groundwork for incalculable ruin over the subsequent century.
I think we are, at this moment, enjoying the twilight of our own Belle Epoque. The lessons that I draw from the last century is that fighting to impose control over the whole world is utterly unworkable, hubristic and ruinous. We have more than enough problems at home; we cannot afford to fix all the problems of the wider world.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
I think that's a colorable argument. The reason it is not my argument is that I learned growing up that the Constitution was a set of rules that we all had to follow, and then discovered in adulthood that the Constitution is whatever five justices say it is.
"Unconstitutional" in my childhood meant "a violation of one of the basic rules we and our parents and their parents have all agreed to live by, whose operation be fairly well reasoned out in advance according to basic logic." "Unconstitutional" now very clearly does not mean that any more. I am not deluded enough to think that reading the Constitution and familiarizing myself with the state of current precedent will allow me to predict what will and will not be considered "Constitutional" or "Unconstitutional" ten years from now. On the other hand, if you tell me who is appointed, I think I can predict what is and is not "Constitutional" ten years hence with much better accuracy than blind chance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Just stop replying. You are making it worse.
Hello. Your initial post in this thread drew three reports, and was indeed not up to the standards we enforce on comments here. The following two posts, though, are right out. You do not seem to be looking for a conversation here, so I think it's best if you take some time to acquaint yourself with the rules before posting again.
You have one warning on record for "smug antagonism" from nearly a year ago, no AAQCs, and very few posts of any sort. I'm going to start you off with a three-day ban. When you return, please refrain from engaging in these sorts of antics. Bans will escalate rapidly if you do not.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
What can be destroyed by the Truth should be... or perhaps there remains some room for mercy. Hope is not a sin.
In any case, knowing that peaches do not come from a can does not require one to love peaches less. Maybe a clearer understanding of where the good things the American Experiment generated actually come from will allow more us to produce more of them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Why? Surely it can be justified on the grounds that almost any replacement is going to be better for the US + allies than the current one.
The problem with claiming that things can't get worse is all the previous claims that things couldn't get worse, combined with the numerous, extremely horrifying examples of how they did, in fact, get worse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
If you want America to commit to yet another military intervention in the middle east, I think you should provide something pretty close to a guarantee. The last several interventions were all disasters, and further, demonstrated that the elites in charge of managing the interventions could not actually be held accountable in any meaningful way for their disastrous management and decision-making. This has been a serious problem, and until I see some evidence that it has actually been corrected, my vote is no, hell no, are you insane?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
We did that in Libya. The result was an unmitigated disaster.
There will not be a Constitutional convention, because the Constitution is dead.
The Constitution relied on common knowledge that obeying procedure was the best way available to generate and wield coherent power.
Manipulating procedural outcomes is, in fact, a superior method of generating and wielding coherent power, and we have created common knowledge that this is the case.
Because the Constitution relied on a form of common knowledge that no longer exists, not only is it dead, but the principles that generated it are dead. It is not just that the Constitution is no longer serving its intended function, but that the very idea that it could potentially serve that function is now understood to be ridiculous.
Or to put it another way, the Constitution required a particular set of beliefs to function. Those beliefs were fundamentally mistaken about core elements of human nature, the fact that they were mistaken has become common knowledge, and so now it is impossible for reasonable people to actually hold them.
I would like freedom of speech. There is no reasonable argument available that freedom of speech is a thing that can happen. The First Amendment has failed to provide meaningful protection for free speech in my lifetime, and the way it has failed to do so demonstrates that rewording the amendment would not help.
I would like my right to keep and bear arms to not be infringed. there is no reasonable argument available that rewording the second amendment would prevent the infringements that have been the norm my entire life.
The power to secure either my right to speech or my right to arms observably does not flow from the Constitution in any way other than the most trivial and incidental. I have watched presidential candidates publicly laugh at the idea that such protections could possibly exist. They were correct to do so, because such protections are a fiction.
You would be better off founding your political reforms off the divine right of kings. It would be a more fruitful soil than this appeal to the divinity of ink and paper.
you can make your own black powder, and your own cannons to shoot it out of.
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