FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21m ago
the modal reality "politics in a multi-party democracy" and "rule of law" are meant to evoke is one where hard limits on the scope and scale of political conflict exist and are respected, and where law is capable of settling conflicts. That is not the world we are living in.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24m ago
Can war be avoided, can any side triumph without vast bloodshed, can compromises be negotiated, can assurances be made?
Separation. Erode federal power, establish common knowledge that federal power should not be enforced or respected. That's the best possible use of power, and even that is Russian roulette.
On an individual level, allow the Sort to run its course, cooperate with it if possible. If you live in the wrong place, move. That's just common sense.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
Please do, I am frequently compelled to do the same and understand completely.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
Pinging @Stellula, as it may be relevant to their interests.
I said that it was transactional. I didn't say it was purely transactional. There's a difference.
Can you name a type of human interaction that is not "transactional" in some way? If I talk to a stranger, is that not in some sense transactional? When I catch some random family's baby staring at me in the grocery store and begin making silly faces to try to get them to laugh, is that not clearly "transactional"? When I have lunch together with a friend, is that not transactional in some sense?
You seem to be claiming that there's the set of human interactions, and then a subset of transactional human interactions, and then a sub-subset of purely transactional human interactions. But if in fact all human interaction is transactional, and then a subset is purely transactional, then the "transactional" label adds nothing meaningful to the term "interaction", and the joint in reality is the "purely", the compartmentalization and formalization of an interaction, and with it the exclusion and severing of other possible connections and relations and interactions. We "transact" because we wish for more interaction with someone, and the "more" is open-ended. We "purely transact" with someone because we want a specific interaction and no more. These two modes of transaction are notably distinct.
If your love for your beloved is contingent on them possessing some particular quality, then you are liable to the charge that you don't really love the person: what you really love is that quality. You are a lover of intelligence, or humor, or beauty, but not of that particular person.
Perhaps, if we confine ourselves to abstractions, though I'm skeptical that this is actually an accurate description at the object level.
But if you say that you would continue to love the person regardless of any qualities they possess whatsoever, even if they were stripped of all qualities and left only as a "bare particular", then it would seem that your choice is entirely arbitrary and without justification; for what could be motivating your choice if it is made in the absence of all qualities? And a baseless arbitrary choice cannot constitute love either.
I would not agree with this formulation, so far as I understand the argument; it seems to be a false dichotomy emerging excessive abstraction. The dichotomy is drawn between the instrumental "I love them for the characteristics they possess" and the arbitrary "I love them for for some ineffable, arbitrary themness", but there is a third option: "I love them because I have loved them." In this, the instrumental emerges from and utterly overtakes the arbitrary, while being inextricable from it.
Put a grain of sand into an oyster and wait, and the result often enough is a pearl. Pearls do not form without the grain of sand, but pearls are not themselves reducible to grains of sand. They are an accretion, a composite, of which the sand is a foundation but of which the foundation is far, far less than what is built upon it, like an inverted pyramid. One might describe them better as an investment.
My relationship with my wife began in a quite arbitrary fashion; having been acquaintances for a few years, we spent some time together at a church event and hit it off over a common love for movies, books and video games. On the other hand, this arbitrariness was only possible from an explicitly-instrumental foundation: we found each other because we were both actively looking for a sane, stable, committed Christian of the opposite sex to build a family with, and also there was some amount of behind-the-scenes matchmaking from mutual friends nudging things along.
The love we share now does not rest significantly on our common love for movies, books and video games. Nor is it based solely the instrumental desire for marriage and a family; we no longer want marriage in the abstract, we want this marriage, and our love were persist even if we were unable to have children. What it rests on is nearly a decade of choices made and actions taken out of love for one another: in-jokes, acts of kindness, acts of service, shared hardship, shared joy, shared knowledge, and so on and on. Further, these have accrued because neither of us acted as though these were "purely transactional", nor did transactionality enter the calculus in any significant way; we do the things we do because each of us perceive that such acts will please and support the other. I want my wife to be happy and to have a good life, and she wants the same for me, and the longer these objectives guide our actions the more solid and substantial our love grows, and the less we recognize a good apart from the good found in each other.
The conclusion we draw is that, if there is such a thing as "love" at all, it belongs to the domain of the unsayable.
This appears to me to be sophistry through a retreat to arbitrary abstraction.
And yet I will show you the most excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
What does that definition mistakenly contain that we might better remove? What does that definition lack that we might wish to add? It tells us that love is a terminal value, and it defines that love is and is not. In what way is any of this "unsayable"?
I occasionally become impatient with people who glibly assert that they are "in love" without realizing that they are uttering an absurdity (or without realizing that, statistically speaking, their relationship probably won't last the year).
I share this impatience, because such people are generally not describing Love but infatuation.
To assume that we know love when we feel it is presumptuous. We can always interrogate whether any emotion, action, or other particular entity is an instantiation of the general concept of love, whether the conditions of instantiation of love can ever be met at all, etc.
Just so. But equally, to claim that we do not know love when we have practiced it as an intentional way of life is sophistry. Certainly not all questions have answers, but just as certainly some questions do have answers, and this is one of them. Why ask questions if you don't want answers?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" shouldn't be taken to entail anything more than what it says on the tin.
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" is a claim that the exchange of resources for sex is the central feature of the relationship. It is true that marriage relationships involve both sex and the sharing (as distinct from exchanging!) of resources; they also involve a great many other acts and features: emotional intimacy, emotional support, the bearing and rearing of children, companionship, emotional and physical labor, cooperation, negotiation, and on and on; most forms of positive human interaction would either be included or approached by a complete list. What you are doing is to take two items from a very long list, and claim that these two items and their interrelation are central, and all else is peripheral. To say that this elides more than it reveals is a notable understatement.
Another concrete example: Parenting involves exercising total control over a human, while also providing for their physical needs. These two features are the essence of both slavery and imprisonment; therefore, parenting/slavery/imprisonment is basically just slavery/imprisonment/parenting.
One can play this particular game with any form of complex human interaction. Selectively ignoring and exaggerating the aspects and interrelations of any two forms of interaction allows one to claim that anything is like anything, but sophistry provides no actual insight, only the illusion of insight.
As I argued in another post, I don't think that the deficiency of prostitution (deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever the claim is) entails the moral blameworthiness of prostitution.
From a strict materialist perspective, it seems the chain of argument starts with noticing that these two modes of interaction appear to be mutually exclusive, and quite stubbornly so, and then note that one is very obviously more conducive to human flourishing than the other. It's really no different from materialist arguments against drug addiction, wireheading, or other forms of degenerate hedonism. If you yourself admit that prostitution is deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever relative to marriage and you recognize that prostitution and marriage appear to be mutually incompatible, then prostitution is worse in concrete terms, and in the abstract the situation is improved with less prostitution and more marriage, all the way up to no prostitution and all marriage. Why, from a strictly materialist perspective, should we encourage or even accept the worse state, rather than pushing people as hard as we can toward the better? Maybe that pushing grows counterproductive at some point, quite likely there's a level of coercion where the juice isn't worth the squeeze, but again, the same is true for all the other degenerate forms of hedonism, defection, and bad tradeoff behavior. We live in a society, as they say.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The American identity survives regardless of who makes up our population.
Can you offer a description of this "American Identity"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
"You have sullied your hands with filthy parchments of heresy, guardsman. How do you plead?"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Who is this person? I've never heard of them before.
It's pretty close to how it goes.
No, it is not.
As I have experienced it, marriage is almost a perfect inversion of my thankfully-secondhand understanding of prostitution. My relationship to my wife is not commodified, it is not compartmentalized, it impacts every decision I make each day in a significant way. In the sense that engaging a Prostitute is a discrete choice, my marriage is much less of a choice and much more of a consequence, an effect rather than a cause, leaning far more on path-dependence in a way that would be incoherent if applied to prostitution. You are attempting to fit something into a discrete box whose main feature is its inability to be discretely boxed, and then you are claiming that since everything outside the discrete box isn't inside the box, it can be safely ignored.
A concrete example: if we define "haggling" as "negotiation to maximize one's own benefit at the expense of one's opposite", then haggling's role in prostitution is straightforward and practical. And yet, in a proper marriage, there is no way to productively haggle, because your opposite's interest is your own interest. Most married men will grok the maxim "happy wife, happy life"; I am not aware of an equivalent formulation for prostitutes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
The weaponization of shame against your out group just leads to your out group being inoculated against all shame.
Long ago, a commenter discussing the Culture War claimed that Red Tribe needed to build a "independent status economy". The term stuck with me ever since, and is basically what you're describing here.
"Xianxai" is a genre of fiction centering on "Cultivators", martial-arts practitioners who develop various reality-bending superpowers by "cultivating" their chi, or mystical life-force. These stories tend to be produced in serial format, and are often very, very long, many hundreds of chapters for text versions being relatively common. Think Dragonball Z.
Cultivators generally congregate in "sects", communes dedicated to further developing and perfecting their particular method of cultivation and raising the power of the sect's members generally; these communes are usually depicted as rigidly hierarchical, and often mercilessly competitive and even grossly exploitative for those on the bottom of the hierarchy. Within a sect, someone lower on the hierarchy is one's "Junior", someone higher is one's "Senior". Seniors are often depicted intentionally stunting or interfering with their junior's training for various bad or even occasionally good reasons.
Cultivation takes a very long time, generally is depicted as passing through a long sequence of distinct levels and sub-levels demarcating significant increases in power. There's usually a pretty distinct tradeoff between slow, steady, diligent growth and rapid "get rich quick" growth that shoots up quick but plateaus early. The slow-and-steady growth is often referred to as "building one's foundation"; if you do this poorly you may grow quicker but plateau earlier, and the reverse might mean slower initial growth but much more capacity for growth.
The meme is portraying Xianxai fandom as recapitulating the medium; the "senior" (fan who has read tons of Xianxai) is misleading his "junior" (fan who has read less), claiming that he's read an extremely long work and that they should definitely read it as well. The story is "building it's foundation" and the quality pays off spectacularly 1400+ chapters in. In fact, the senior hasn't read a single page, but by the time the "junior" is in a position to assess the truth of this claim, it could be argued that they will certainly learn something from the experience, and perhaps will be Enlightened.
The specific context is that @self_made_human is claiming to have pulled this gambit in his previous recommendation of "Reverand Insanity", an extremely long and apparently quite polarizing Xianxai serial that's been discussed here in several previous reading recommendation discussions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I am not really the person to make the point, anyway. I saw @Hoffmeister25 make the point much better than I can, and if FCfromSSC had any satisfying response to it, he sure didn't seem to post it there.
The conversation continued here. @Hoffmeister has the last word there as well, as most people I engage with do. I have a lot less time for discourse than I used to, and on deeper subjects like this one, formulating replies can take awhile.
Not the person you asked, but I might be able to give an armchair perspective while you wait, because it's a question that interests me a lot.
In the real world, there is no minimap, there is no shared vision, and the terrain is orders of magnitude more complex than most games or even sims portray. You do not necessarily have a perfect or even particularly good idea of where you are, your idea of where your allies are and their idea of where you are is even worse, and the enemy's position is a complete unknown.
This would already be a pretty serious problem, but it is made much worse by the fact that real-world weapons have absurd effective range, penetration and killing power. This reality is greatly magnified for crew-served and mounted weapons, which are fantastic for inflicting what is known as a "mass-casualty event", a situation where multiple people go from effective combatants to dead or dying more or less instantly.
The combination of these two realities mean that it is extremely important to hide basically all the time. Hiding tends to degrade your situational awareness even more, and it's easy to end up with a worm's-eye-view of the world where you are effectively blind in all but a few very narrow sightlines.
Obviously that won't work for any sort of offensive, so you have to leave cover and move. But leaving cover means exposing yourself to an exponentially-increasing number of attack vectors. So you need to do this very, very slowly and very, very carefully, preferably in tight coordination with lots and lots of allies doing the same thing. But again, you probably have poor knowledge of each other's positions, so you need to be even more slow and careful, covering each other as you methodically work your way from cover to cover, clearing or maintaining watch on all the highest-value attack vectors. And often the way you discover the enemy's location is when some of you accidentally walk into a prepared ambush from cover, possibly by a heavy weapon.
The charge of the winged hussars, it ain't. it's more like four-dimensional minesweeper, plus the clearing numbers can lie, and you have to coordinate moves with five people, each of who has a different grid orientation. As @netstack mentioned, there's some games that actually try to simulate this sort of thing, but they tend to be very niche because very, very few gamers are actually interested in that particular flavor of masochism. You can get a small taste of it playing ARMA, that's probably one of the more accessible versions; even playing some of their goofy scenarios versus bots, it's easy to find yourself scrunched up against the back wall of some structure, panicking because you have no idea where the enemy is and you're pretty sure if you break cover you'll never see where the bullet came from. And that's baby's first easy mode, hide and seek against dumb bots carrying small arms.
So I am a little confused what you actually want if it's not "Assume everyone is in defect mode and loot what we can.
I am rejecting the Russell's Conjugation of "My entitlement spending is investing in the future of the American people, your entitlement spending is defection and looting." Notably, I'm rejecting it both ways, and precommitting to accept whichever half you or others prefer. If you believe that Entitlement/Defense spending has heretofore been defection and looting, than I am willing to agree that I am endorsing defection and looting of the exact sort that has been the bipartisan norm for my entire life. If you believe Entitlement/Defense spending has heretofore been investment in the future of the American people, then I agree that I am endorsing that my party should make such investments also. In neither case do I believe my faction should act unilaterally as the "adult in the room" who imposes hard-nosed, unpopular restraint on spending. The purse is common. Its benefits and costs should be common as well.
This is prompted by repeated claims here by a number of posters that MAGA should disapprove of Trump due to his fiscal irresponsibility and the fact that his budget bill results in considerable deficit spending. I understand that the Republican Party has previous held opposition to deficit spending as a shibboleth. The Republican Party has also held foreign interventionism as a shibboleth. Things change, and it seems to me that this change is preferable to the alternatives.
Whether it was blue-on-blue remains to be seen, but blue-on-blue is much, much easier to deal with than red/blue.
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