FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
Lost the first version of this, so it'll need to be a bit abreviated.
Although, we both seem to agree that illiberals have a tendency to be uncivil to the outgroup.
No,
What is your claim, that liberalism is worse than illiberalism because liberals sometimes turn into uncivil illiberals?
You seem to be treating Liberalism and Illiberalism as equal and opposite ideological poles.
My claim is that Illiberalism is more real than liberalism, because Illiberalism is the base state and liberalism is a superstructure necessarily built atop it. Liberalism is a luxury that exists only where illiberalism has created the conditions necessary for its existence. Further, Liberalism tends to degrade those conditions, and the more Liberal we go the faster the degradation. When the conditions degrade sufficiently, Liberalism collapses back into illiberalism, often without many of the Liberals even noticing the change. Liberals who turn illiberal in a crisis are simply expressing their ideology's internal contradictions, and "more liberalism" will not solve the problem, but rather accelerate it.
Civility is not a product of liberalism. Civility emerges when values are mutually coherent, allowing the recognition of common interest and common humanity, positive-sum reciprocity, group loyalty, charity and so on. Such an environment can be codified as an ideology, which is what Liberalism is. The problem is that Liberalism confuses its progenitor civility not as a consequence of illiberal social organization, but rather as a constant feature of human nature, and concludes that since civility and its own emergence coincide, more liberalism will lead to more civility. But Civility maintains its rigor through duty, obligation, debt, conformity, enforcement, none of which Liberalism is fundamentally interested in, particularly resonant with, nor capable of maintaining from within its own ideological frame.
Liberalism, unrestrained, always degrade civility and values-coherence, until it triggers a crisis too undeniable and too acute to ignore, at which point it will transition back into the harshest forms of illiberalism and resolve that crisis with a bloody hand. The only way to prevent this ideological boom-and-bust cycle is to moderate Liberalism, to accept that "More Liberalism!" is not a universal answer to the problems of living together, and sometimes what we need is less. Likewise, actual civility requires rules and standards, and punishment for breaking them, which in a limited context can appear quite uncivil. "It's all good, man" is not a general answer to the question of how to live together; sometimes it is not all good, and something must be done as a result.
But I wont deny this sometimes happens. Liberal societies can decay just as illiberal and pre-liberal ones can and have.
All societies decay. But our society went hard on maximizing Liberalism and then very rapidly decayed, and the most liberal portions of the population decayed the fastest. The Freeze Peach meme emerged and was rapidly propagated from the deepest-blue, most "liberal" parts of our society. And efforts at effective mass speech control and censorship. And attacks on presumption of innocence. And mass political violence as a live and effective method for pursuing social change. And severe violations of freedom of assembly and movement.
Yet illiberals can often turn into liberals.
Can you point to some examples?
And illiberals can devolve/schism into tribal violence for reasons that have nothing to do with liberalism.
Schism and tribal violence are an innate and irradicable consequence of human nature, and are perfectly able to express themselves under Liberalism and Illiberalism alike.
You should give a lot of thought to the problem of prediction. Because if you are going to reject liberalism and replace it with some illiberal ideology, then it would be nice to know that whatever you replace it with does not lead to worse failure modes.
One might turn this around and ask Liberalism to predict whether the outcome of its unlimited and yet oddly selective tolerance might not lead to worse failure modes. I can point to a long history of Western civilization that operated on levels of liberalism considerably below our current norms. Can you point to an example of how injecting population-replacement-level amounts of Muslims into sclerotic western democracies works out long-term?
In any case, I'm not sure what is to be gained by discussing the problem in the abstract; it's better pursued at the object level.
I may or may not disagree depending on how you determine whether something is or is not a core value (in a way that's not tautological)... What distinction between values, ideology, and temperament are you making here?
Core values are values people will compromise all other values to secure, because they are valued more than those others. Ideology is a story people tell themselves to try to encapsulate their value judgements into general rules; when they run afoul of reality, often they change. Temperament would be a term, perhaps poorly chosen, for general bearing, apparent attitude, politeness or bluntness, the register of one's voice, the minutea of how one generally communicates.
In Harry Potter, Professor Umbridge's temperament is unfailingly polite and mild. Her ideology is bureaucratic managerialism. Her core values are totalitarian power and control.
In reality, the ACLU's temperament and ideology were staunchly liberal, but in fact their core values were Blue Progressive, and when those core values came into conflict with their professed ideology, the ideology abruptly and seamlessly changed.
Oh are they entirely bankrupt? You have not remotely justified that lofty claim.
The failures of Liberalism as an ideology are self-evident. Europe has implemented a variety of blasphemy laws and has been busily jailing, fining, or otherwise abusing people for the words they say or even don't say, and the European and American consensus is that this is fine. America retains some narrow, formal protections on paper, but our government has proven perfectly willing to violate these protections in egregious ways, whether to punish or to censor, on a variety of pretexts. More damningly, the ideals necessary to maintain formal free speech protections simply and very obviously do not exist. A probable majority of Americans believe that speaking the N-word justifies physical assault; one jury was willing to apply this standard retroactively, acquitting a stabber because his victim responded with the N-word. Large pluralities and perhaps outright majorities believe that firing people for their speech is good and necessary. A large plurality of Americans are willing to endorse violence and even murder as solutions to political disagreement. And at the end of the day, are they wrong?
What is your defense of Liberalism? Show me how it works, where it fits in to the world around us. Show me where you think we are and how you think we got here. I claim that in our present context, Liberalism is as useful as a warm pitcher of spit. Why am I wrong?
We can just observe how quickly the illiberal right (ham-fistedly) reached for classical liberal defenses such as free speech when their preferences were being contested.
Who, specifically? Which "Illiberal Right" are you referring to, when and in what context?
I made such appeals when I was still a Liberal, watching the Liberal consensus collapse around me. The consistent failure of such appeals is why I stopped being a Liberal: evidence showed that such defenses didn't work, because they were built on lies.
My speech, my arms, and my vote is not protected because of the Constitution and Liberal ideals. It is protected by anonymity, numbers, and an advertised bloody-mindedness toward those who would infringe upon them. These are not perfect or perhaps even very good protections, but they handily beat Liberalism, which is very clearly no protection at all.
that is an indication that liberal principles are game-theoretically valuable in a way that will ensure their continuation.
The Liberal Game Theory argument is trash. "Don't restrict the rights of others, or they might restrict yours." But if I recognize rights for others when I am in power, and then I lose power and they gain it, they are completely free to refuse to recognize my rights. And then, having violated my rights, if they lose power and I regain it, Liberals will not agree that I should refuse to recognize their rights in turn, thus providing the consequence their "game theory" relies on.
“When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles” is a pattern Liberal "Game Theory" has no answer for, but Illiberalism can handle easily and honestly. We should not live by lies. Skokie Liberalism is gone forever, and pretending otherwise will not help you. Liberal Maximalism depended on a fundamental lack of knowledge of the consequences of its policies. We have that knowledge now in abundance. Lessons have been learned, and will not be soon forgotten.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
aaaah, GURPS, my truest roleplaying love. My transition to young adulthood was marked by switching from Battletech mech design to GURPS Vehicles 2nd ed and GURPS Robots, the former of which I wore out the spine on in short order. Truly, a more elegant game for a more civilized time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
sci fi lasers and particle beams are boring if they don't create a more exotic experience than slugthrowers, and if they create a more exotic experience, that means they exploit different niches and so don't replace slugthrowers. Also, the AR15 is a reasonable guess at what a slugthrower will look like 300 years from now, odd as it may be to consider. The reasons are complicated and interesting, but the upshot is that there's a feedback loop running popularity > market share > stacking iterative improvements > excellence for purpose > popularity, such that the AR15 pattern is steadily outcompeting and driving to extinction all other designs, and it doesn't look like this will change so long as we're using chemical slugthrowers.
I will say, if I were doing far-future slugthrowers, I'd at least go electrothermal and try to drive design variation that way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
A fundamentally curious person would read both The Diary of Anne Frank and the Turner Diaries, and they'd have already waded through all of the reports around the UK rape gang scandals.
What would you guess the proportion of "fundamentally curious" people is in society at large? My guess is that they're a statistical nullity.
Time is limited of course, and no one will ever have time to read or care about everything, but it would be ridiculous for me to say something like, "I'll give a fuck about Karl Marx's Capital, when Gulag Archipelago is required reading in public school", because it is obvious posturing.
I'll take the other side of that one. Indoctrination is a real thing and works. I observe that the culture around me has few to no antibodies to the hazardous memes of the Left, and something approaching an auto-immune disease against the memes of the Right, hazardous or not. In what sense is it "posturing" to think that perpetuating this mismatch is a bad thing that should be stopped?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Governments depend on low-level government employees to enforce their decrees on the real world. Your postulated "300k trannies" are low-level government employees, and the drone systems you posit they will use have to be built and maintained by low-level government employees to function. It is possible to coordinate a level of meanness against such employees that they will not be willing or able to do the jobs assigned to them, and guns make the coordination of that level of meanness a lot easier.
You claimed snipers won't work because drones and AI. I'm pointing out that snipers probably would work despite drones and AI, at least for the plausible futures where ASI isn't exterminating all humans rendering the question moot. And again, snipers are merely one extremely obvious possibility your model didn't cover. There are many, many more.
And yet, Obama didn't massacre the bundy standoff, and Biden backed down rather than fight Abbott over Texas border enforcement, and Rittenhouse survived and was acquitted. The media's ability to dictate social consensus has declined sharply; Trump was re-elected.
Even European governments will semi-openly tell you they're working on AI that can clock terrorists from a picture of their face (as in: predicatively, not just matching them to a known terrorist), and apparently they got pretty good results.
This is not a capability I'm familiar with. Are we talking gait analysis, or is this a physiognomy thing?
High-value targets will have much better security (CCTV, gated communities, armored cars, armed security, etc), especially if that sort of thing takes off.
Are the foot-solder drone operators high-value? Are their families and friends? And again, this is one step out. There are a lot more steps obviously available, and each step imposes disproportionate resource and complexity costs on the defenders. It's possible that AI will solve the general case of the problem in the future, but at that point, it will also solve murder and drug-dealing in the general case as well. Do you think we are 10-15 years away from solving crime?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
It’s a 20 min video I tried skimming it but I am not sure on your point.
The threat elucidated is a suppressed sniper rifle, fired from total concealment at long range from inside a disposable vehicle which immediately departs and then is abandoned elsewhere, potentially a hundred miles or more away. How are you going to "detect the sniper shot"? Thermal imaging probably won't do it, and how do you know where to put the thermal camera? How are you going to get ubiquitous surveillance, and how much does this surveillance cost, and how vulnerable is it? Every capability you pursue increases the surface area vulnerable to attack. And again, this is one step. There are a lot more steps obviously available.
How is solving this problem easier than solving murder or drug-dealing in the general case? Do you think we are 10-15 years away from a general solution to the problems of murder and drug dealing?
That can all be true and drones are still a force that revolutionizes the battlefield in a way that reduces the role of small arms.
Drones will absolutely revolutionize the battlefield and will likewise absolutely reduce the role of small arms. Reduction is not elimination, nor is it necessarily "reduce to a negligable amount". Guns provide a tactical and logistical capability that is likely irreplicable.
It might be more complicated than rock paper scissors but that's not really saying anything. The typical American ideation of a group of armed men resisting the US government relied on a set of priors that drones all but eliminate.
But I'm not sure where you intend to find Americans who have the guts and ideological firmament to resist like the Taliban did outside of Amish communities. But in that case the victory condition is largely neither guns or drones.
This cuts both ways. You assume those resisting are complacent and cowardly, but you also assume those imposing tyranny have infinite courage and resolve. They don't, and in the words of the poet, they have moms. A fight of this nature would not look like the Taliban, because America is not Afghanistan, and Americans are not Afghans. It would be worse for the government in a whole variety of ways. It is very, very hard to make a bullet hitting you in the armpit from a thousand yards away with zero warning a negligible problem.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Can you expound on the narrowness of my argument?
I would guess your model of "using guns against the government" involves something like a human-wave assault on a federal building by guys on foot armed with ar15s. This is about the worst possible mismatch, and it's still a threat drones cannot obviate now and may not be able to obviate in the future, given the continuous development of cheap, effective, man-portable anti-drone countermeasures.
Here is a scenario a single small step outside that frame. Leave aside the tribal shibboleths and focus on the material specifics: how would 300,000 autistic trannies and their drones under the Biden clone presidency effectively forestall this scenario?
In any case, that's all the illumination I'm comfortable providing on this topic.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
My main comprehension of the 2A purpose was to either war Britain invading the US or to go to war with US government. Guns don’t seem to have any relevance for that in 10-15 years.
If there is still a government comprised of humans in 10-15 years, guns will still be quite useful if it becomes necessary to fight it. My guess is that you think otherwise because you have a very narrow model of what it means to use a gun to fight the government. You aren't entirely wrong within that narrow frame, but outside it you are very wrong.
There is no plausible future where I would be better off without guns than with them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Ai Drones with guns are certainly going to outperform humans with guns in the medium-term, possibly even the short term. They don't outperform humans with guns at present.
Also, a gun on a drone is still a gun. Guns themselves remain useful because of their innate capabilities: low-cost standoff firepower.
Also, ubiquity: you may not have a drone, but you always have you. And guns are much, much easier to make and use than drones.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
You asked whether guns were obsolete at this point. At this point, no.
Drones will continue to improve. Drone defenses will likewise continue to improve, but I'm pretty sure there are going to continue to be ground units, and I'm pretty sure those ground units are going to want to be able to shoot things rather than just drone them; it's much, much cheaper. Also, those ground units are going to want to shoot at drones attacking them, which again is much cheaper than using your own drones. Almost certainly, they'll want to automate this into something like a mini-CIWS turret, but that turret will probably be using a gun.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
This is the kind of person who has a rocky childhood, figures it out, and then kills his wife and kids at age 57.
I do not believe this is a valid "type" of person. That is to say, I do not believe that you can look at a random selection of people who had a rocky childhood and then figured it out, and then pick the ones in advance who are going to kill their wife and kids at age 57 at a rate significantly better than chance.
"This person will lifelong struggle with impulsivity" I find more plausible, but note that if insights of this sort were in fact considered broadly actionable, the criminal justice system's interaction with repeat offenders ought to look very, very different from the way it does.
We've recently discussed the connection between Psychology as a discipline and the law; this is a similar thread, it seems to me. When I blame Psychology as a discipline for Iryna, it's precisely because I observe psychologists individually and as a field advancing claims similar to the above, and I observe the strong impact those claims have had on how the criminal justice system operates and maintains its operation. Politicians justify releasing violent criminals from prison on the grounds that their problems are psychological, and thus implicitly treatable. They do this because Psychology has consistently claimed that this is the case. If Psychology said "we have no idea how to treat these people, we certainly don't think they should be released, we want no part of this and the consequences are on you if you let them go", the politicians, I think, would not be letting them go.
In that discussion, you seemed to be arguing that Psychology couldn't really predict criminal outcomes effectively, and so shouldn't be held accountable for bad outcomes delivered (in my understanding) by following their advice. But here you seem to be claiming that Psychologists can make accurate predictions about future criminal behavior, and so their advice should be followed even if based on nebulous evidence. Am I mistaken in this reading?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I read years ago that the Inuit were extremely fond of the .222 Remington, and used it for hunting anything and everything up to and including bear and moose. I don't think they were worrying about one-shot stops, though...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
My understanding is that Fauci wrote in his diary that the mortality rate was one figure, and then went on TV and publicly claimed it was roughly ten times higher, and worked to get anyone repeating the accurate mortality he himself had privately accepted as genuine shouted down and censored.
Also, he knew it was lab made, and appeared outside a lab where he and his underlings had been funding research to produce exactly this sort of virus, despite such research explicitly being banned by the federal government. I'm planning a larger post on the subject, but my understanding is that it's straightforwardly true that Fauci generated one of the worst clusters of bad policy decisions of the last century, is directly responsible for something like 32 million human deaths and dozens of trillions of dollars in economic damage, along with vast and pernicious violations of a variety of human rights.
The fact that this is now all out in the open and the elite class is choosing to attempt, even at this late date, to aw shucks it back under the rug is... well, "enlightening" is a start. Personally, I intend to employ these facts as a cudgel from this point forward, and find it difficult to imagine why I shouldn't.
Drones defeat guns.
No, they don't. Guns are effectively a very specialized kind of drone, and the specialization they're good at hasn't gone away. It would be more accurate to say that guns defeat soldiers, but even this is highly contextual so long as we intend to keep having lots of humans around.
You can have a human operated machine gun and you will lose to a drone.
Maybe someday, certainly not yet.
But we probably? can not let people own fleets of AI controlled drones.
You probably won't be able to stop them from owning these for roughly the same reasons you can't actually meaningfully control guns if the public wants them.
The backdoor they have on your electric car will get turned off when you resist.
Okay. Why are illegal narcotics still a problem?
Technology and the ability to have industrial and post-industrial society has always been an issue the American Democracy and Freedom project.
It is, but for exactly the opposite of the reasons you're thinking. Too much order is probably not the basic problem you should be worrying about. I'm not worried that Wokes or whoever are going to establish a permanent tyranny. I'm much more worried they're going to try, and the way they fail is going to have my kids dead or reduced to eating cat food.
From a more general legal perspective, the point of gun cases is not to secure redress from the government, but rather to build common knowledge that the government is incapable of providing such redress.
I'm going to plead "Fearful Symmetry".
I vaguely remember the essay, but after a quick scan find I don't understand the reference. could you explain?
More generally, which of the three types of answers you enumerated would you say this falls under?
[edit] - to elaborate on my interest here a bit, I went to some effort to defend Meshkhout here in his discussion of the 2020 election fraud theories, despite strongly disagreeing with his general takeaways. I defended him because, near as I could see, he was explicitly attacking falsehoods other commenters here were repeating, and I think that's a good thing. I strongly disagree with his takeaway because I think he focused his attention very carefully and very intentionally on arguments he could prove were false, in an attempt to dismiss a general argument that is in fact pretty damning.
The Democrats actually, in fact, did a bunch of bad shit to win the 2020 election, and suffered zero consequences for doing so. As a starter, they used Federal security and legal agencies to harm the trump campaign and protect the Biden campaign. I do not believe that an election in which the FBI and Justice Department is breaking multiple laws to help one side and harm the other is a legitimate election. To the extent that you or Meshkhout do not believe that this sort of behavior is worth talking about, I am willing to concede my error: these tactics are legitimate, and therefore my side should exploit them freely for our own advantage, and I'm confident that you and Meshkhout will obviously agree.
...To loop this back around, the rhetorical strategy you are talking about is both real and effective. But at the end of the day, what you're seeing isn't some tool that helps clear the fog of partisanship; it's just another symptom of the core nature of culture war. You're seeing how the capacity to live together decays, as the necessarily-simple heuristics we rely on to keep the peace break down under the unbearable strain of incoherent values.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
But don't let that disabuse you that there is still a contingent of people who care about this in principle.
That contingent has proved itself utterly powerless to advance its aims. Attempts to actualize the principle will simply enable the cheap radical chic setup, while providing no perceptible advantage to the supposed principle. Given this inability, the cost/benefit for arguing in favor of protecting "bad" material should be reassessed; if toleration of things you consider bad observably does not secure toleration of things you consider good in turn, what is the point of extending such tolerance? Previous arguments assumed some sort of reciprocity, but that reciprocity observably does not exist, and so it is necessary to reassess those arguments in light of this new data.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
To sum up: "what is a woman?" and "who won the 2020 election?" can expose someone as a lunatic with crazy beliefs. But even if they don't, they can still expose them as a coward or a traitor to their cause, and in some cases that can be just as useful.
It seems to me that this is a reasonable approximation of your thesis statement for this post; correct me if I'm wrong.
Some other examples I think might add meaningfully to the concept-space you're exploring here: DignifAI was a meme where people used AI image generation to take bikini/lingerie/nude images of various e-girls, and digitally re-cloth them in modest garb. This greatly offended the e-girls and feminists generally, for reasons that they struggled to explain. Likewise, there was a short fad of using AI to take mixed-race family photos and convert them to same-race family photos, presented as "what could have been"; there was discussion of both here some time ago.
The through-line here are novel attacks that turn one's own ideological commitments against themselves, exposing weak points and contradictions.
The flip-side is, rhetoric is not reality, and reality cannot be held off indefinitely by frame games.
You identify "who won the 2020 election?" as an effective gambit, and so it is. So here's one back at you:
"Republicans should adopt the strategies used by Democrats in 2020 in every election going forward." Agree or disagree? I think we both can see that this is far less effective rhetorically than "who won the 2020 election". I would happily accept the lesser rhetorical effectiveness in exchange for the actual benefit of Republicans acting this way in the real world. Does that seem like a good trade to you?
"Reds think violence is a switch, Blues think violence is a dial" is a phrase being used as a common point of reference. Both of them think that the "switch" version doesn't actually work, and for similar reasons: Reds are sufficiently invested in stability and the future to be deterred from ever using political violence on the scale necessary for it to be a meaningful threat. Hence "the switch is rusted shut" is a perfect metaphor for their understanding of the situation. It's such an obvious metaphor that they both arrived at it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
This is probably a reference to the Left Behind novels, using them as a synecdoche for the particularly American strain of Zionist Christianity notably prevalent in the Bush era, with its memes about support for the modern state of Israel being commanded by God, and the modern state of Israel being key to the fulfillment of various end-times prophecies relating to the second coming of Christ.
I might argue the prevalence of this memeplex in the present, but it has, regrettably, actually been a thing, and his description of it does not strike me as particularly uncharitable.
George asked about history and poetry specifically; poetry is more or less equivalent to art and similar critiques apply before even approaching the political and social questions, but History has a credible claim to being a serious discipline in our present context.
I do not think I am cherry-picking. My claim: the most significant output of historical academia in the last decade or so that I'm aware of is the 1619 project, and the runner-up would be the Kamloops mass graves controversy. I don't think it's unreasonable to describe both of these as serious sociopolitical events that had notable direct impacts on our society, and that both emerged from and depended on History Academia to do what they did, and that both are understood both within and without the Academy to be Capital-H History.
The claim here is not that the 1619 Project is typical of the average consequence of academic historians; I would guess that average academic historians have little to no perceptible impact on society at all. The claim is that if you ask what Society receives of consequence from its lavish funding of History departments society-wide, these are two of the most significant results. If you disagree, what significant results do you see emerging from History Academia with greater positive impact?
It really is quite remarkable the extent that this is true. 2000-2016 was a true golden age, and seeing the proliferation of skill, knowledge and training was something that filled me with a profound sense of optimism at the time. Even know, in the shadow of AI, it's still not completely extinguished.
The argument I make to the academics in my life is that I love teaching. Education is a profoundly important part of human existence! From the moment we're born, we're learning every day, and the sharing and cultivation of knowledge and wisdom and skill is among the most valuable activities humans can engage in! The reason I'm so opposed to the current system is precisely because that system is doing such a fantastically bad job!!!
Again, I'm caught here between trying to avoid the appearance of a Gish Gallop firehose on one hand, and providing evidence for inflammatory claims on the other. I know an English Academic who teaches honors English classes. They routinely have students in the Honors English class who don't know how a paragraph works. This is in an extremely expensive private university! That student is actively, objectively being exploited by the university! No one cares!!!
...But ranting aside, congrats on getting into art! I've been on a learning kick off and on for the last two years or so, and heavily on for the last six months. Feels good, man! What're you aiming for at the moment? Got any pieces you can show?
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