FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
31m ago
I am not confident that the polls or the markets are capturing real signal, and so I bet against them with weak confidence. I am weakly confident that Paxton is going to win in Texas, and I am weakly confident that the Democrats will not take control of both houses.
I'm very confident that the Democrats are, at some point in the not-too-distant future, going to win an election soundly enough to regain significant control of the federal government. I'm extremely confident that when they do, they will make one or more of their available plays to punish those who opposed them and to reshape electoral politics significantly in their favor for the foreseeable future. My confidence approaches 1 that when this happens, few to none of the Blues here will object to such actions in any significant way, and the large majority will argue that they are obviously good and necessary. These are conversations we could have in advance, to the point that I feel confident I could write the resulting posts from the average Blue perspective verbatim. So it goes.
If Republicans get blown out on this election, I think it is pretty obvious that the Iran war is the culprit. It is the biggest, stupidest, most obvious political error I've ever witnessed, and certainly seems like a big enough error to destroy the Republican party long-term. I can understand why they thought it would be a good idea, I can even argue that their execution was fairly good given the givens, but one could say the same for suicide by shotgun. I do not think America has sufficient social cohesion to actually conduct a serious war at all, and I don't think most people recognize the problem even though it's staring them in the face. People used to argue that what we needed was a serious external threat to put the divisions of the culture war in perspective; after COVID and Iran, I think it's time to recognize that the scale of threat necessary for that logic to work would be on the order of an actual nuclear exchange, and even then I wouldn't bet on it working. We simply hate each other too much to cooperate in any meaningful way, no matter the consequences.
"Didn't do nothing wrong" is quite a phrase, which I wouldn't use myself, but I find this kind of post-mortem piling unfair and a black mark on the souls of everyone involved, especially as it continues years after he's not around.
What is, is. What was, was. Notoriety emerges in all social systems because it is a necessary consequence of human psychology. I spent many hundreds of hours of my life engaging with his ideas, and I have opinions as a result. If people are going to discuss his ideas and behavior, especially to make claims that run directly counter to my own experience, I'm going to point out that I disagree, and I'm going to point out why.
More generally, I think people ought to realize that Internet Forums are temporary structures even under ideal circumstances. There probably is no ruleset available that will maintain this space indefinitely, because rules can never account for the infinite variety of human behavior. Rules exist for people who want to follow them, who align with the values the rules were set up to reinforce. Against people who don't want to follow them, they are in the long run largely useless.
This is not my read at all. I don't know what the original Medium article said since it's been taken down, but if it didn't address the government vs corporation issue when it comes to censorship then it's woefully incomplete since that's like the first thing any leftist would bring up.
Here's an archive of the original article.
Your argument that this is a bad comment is that it doesn't go into more detail
No, that was not my argument. Nor was my argument that it's bad to play Devil's Advocate. My first inclination was to ask you to try again, but at this point, in a ten-month old thread discussing a some-years-old thread, I don't think it will work. I'll just try to speak as plainly as possible:
Being smug and dismissive is bad. It generates a lot more light than heat, and it actively makes it more difficult for people to have a constructive conversation with you. Darwin was habitually smug and dismissive, to a degree that few other posters have ever matched.
Refusing to speak plainly is bad. That large chunk of analysis of mine, linked above, is not an argument that Darwin "did not provide enough detail", or "did not respond enough", or "shouldn't have played Devil's advocate." No one can ever provide enough detail. No one can always respond to all counter-arguments. Playing Devil's advocate is a perfectly reasonable form of rhetoric. What is not okay, in my view, is throwing out arguments that you have no intention of defending to imply others are stupid for having a discussion you don't like. If you want to argue that a discussion is stupid, you can do that. If you want to argue that the conversation is missing some necessary line of argument, do that. But you ought to actually make an argument you are at least somewhat willing to defend, not just imply it and then sneer at anyone who attempts to engage with it. If you are posting here, you are supposed to expend effort to have a meaningful discussion. I defy you to argue that, at least in the threads I discussed, Darwin did so to an acceptable degree.
This forum runs on a reputation economy. A major axis of reputation is "willingness to recognize and tell the truth." If you make it clear to your opposites that the driving value behind your arguments is "say absolutely anything that advances my tribal interests in the short term regardless of previous statements", you will lose a lot of reputation, and people will stop taking your arguments seriously. The rule here is "discussing the culture war, not waging it", and the one about how this space is not territory to be claimed or fought over; If people conclude that you are not acting in good faith, they are not going to be interested in discussing things with you. The links I provided included long, thoughtful attempts by other users to engage with Darwin. I myself spent years attempting to have a constructive conversation with him, until I finally figured out how his gimmick worked. After that, I just pointed out the gimmick whenever I saw him trying it.
Being smug and dismissive is bad, and refusing to speak plainly is bad, and being fundamentally incapable of sincere discussion is bad, but the combination is notably awful, and that combination was what Darwin offered so frequently that it became both his calling card and his downfall. A useful question I try to ask both myself and others here is, "what sort of response are you looking for with the comment you're making?" Darwin's habitual style of conversation does not have a good answer to that question. If you disagree, I invite you to look over the conversations I offered as evidence, and point out which ones you think I'm being unfair to. If you think those particular conversations are uncharacteristic of his behavior, that's a separate conversation that I encourage you to pursue with others; I'm content, ten months later, with disproving your specific claims about this evidence set.
I've repeatedly and consistently argued that I do not think Darwin should have been banned, as indeed he was and is not. He was very good at staying technically on the right side of the rules, and deforming the rules to cover his behavior would not be good for the forum long-term, in my view. On the other hand, I think he was awful, and I think you and the others defending him are absurd. I do not think you would appreciate being treated the way he routinely treated anyone who attempted to engage with him.
Any chance you could post or DM pics of the output? I haven't experimented much with AI mesh generation besides really simple stuff, but I'd love some examples of what you're getting! Keep opsec in mind though, I only post some of my stuff to DM and don't post other stuff for that reason.
Yes, but then the civil war will be decided by US military fighting US military, with private gun owners watching from the sidelines.
And yet, this was where the conversation started:
Even under the current SCOTUS, this seems plainly false. You do not even have the right to keep the means to fight the ACW. And warfare changed a lot in the past 150 years. Automatic weapons are not the biggest deal. But what are you going to do about armored vehicles? Really hard to kill a tank with your AR-15.
Your argument was based on a fight between the military and civilians. My point is that there is probably going to be military on both sides, and also that militaries have civilian families and supporters, and these can also be attacked by other civilians. It is very likely that such a fight will actually be military/civilian vs military/civilian, at which point your original argument is entirely invalidated.
The only way private gun ownership would dominate is if the US military (including national guards etc) made a decision to sit the war out.
It is not clear to me what "dominate" means here. Guns as a sociopolitical coordination mechanism are extremely important completely aside from their use as weapons. As weapons, Guns are extremely useful for guerrilla warfare in a variety of ways that you do not seem to be aware of. Guns are useful for assassination, sabotage, siege/interdiction of supplies, area denial, self- and community-defense, and on and on and on. There is a reason all modern armies issue rifles, despite having access to much heavier and more sophisticated weaponry. I think the ubiquity of firearms ownership in America will be a decisive factor in the outcome of such a conflict.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation.
Yes. And much of it can (and in some circumstances, should) be inflicted with personal firearms.
If armed insurgents are fighting police for control of a city, everyone on any side will expect the US military to get involved.
Armed insurgents have repeatedly denied police control of significant parts of cities, and the US Military did not get involved, because the local population and thus the local government supported the insurgents. We've already seen this happen, we've already seen how it happens. Why do you believe it can't happen again?
In our enlightened times, we also do not generally consider inflicting misery on the civilian population supporting your opponent to be legitimate tactic of waging war.
The fuck we don't.
It seems abundantly evident to me that Blue Tribe is more than willing to inflict both orderly and disorderly misery on their opponents in times of relative peace and plenty, including lawless physical violence and actual murder. I see no reason to believe that their willingness to support such misery-infliction would decrease as we slide into open warfare. Nor do I see a reason to believe that Reds are unwilling to support such misery-infliction in return. The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.. We've already tested the question of whether your tribe will support mass mob violence, arson as a political tactic, shooting dissenters, government agents and rival politicians, and established that none of these are deal-breakers. I generously argue that my tribe is not necessarily your moral superiors in every one of these respects, and invite you to consider how symmetrical actions from the other side might play out.
Populations do not simply have a morale bar and once you have killed enough kids it drops to zero and they surrender.
And yet, killing children (and women, and men) is a notable and effective tactic throughout the whole of human history. You think this time will be different, when your tribe's own leaders talk about how they think their opponents' children being murdered would be a positive political development?
Typically, states ban tactics which are cruel but not very effective for them.
Bans are laws. Insurrection is also illegal. It turns out that when your society can't agree what the law is or how to enforce it, law and its enforcement break down.
Take the anti-ICE protests. To the degree that they are successful, they follow the playbook of non-violent resistance.
Repeated shootings. Numerous attacks on police and government agents, many of them quite violent. Rampant intimidation and threats against government agents, backed by local and even federal authorities, rampant intimidation and threats against normal civilians on the rumor that they might be involved somehow. I certainly would not agree that the anti-ICE protests followed the playbook of non-violent resistance, nor that these departures were ineffective or counterproductive. Your tribe backed most of it, and disclaimed all responsibility for the rest.
If instead they were aiming at maximizing the misery on their opponents, for example by bombing the families of ICE agents, they would be an utter failure.
From my perspective, we have already run this experiment many, many times, and the result has consistently been the opposite of your claim. Large portions of Blue Tribe are absolutely willing to endorse political murder of civilians, including children.
The winning strategy is not excessive violence, but baiting your opponent into using excessive violence.
No, the winning strategy is either controlling the definition of "excessive violence" such that your speech is violence and my violence is speech, or at minimum denying the enemy's ability to coordinate common knowledge of such a definition to coordinate collective action around and then winning through superior coordination of meanness. Your framing assumes some solid foundation of impartial law and sturdy social norms that can recognize and punish "excessive violence"; the legendary phrase "mostly peaceful" should put that idea down for good. I do not believe such a foundation currently exists, and certainly do not believe that such a foundation will exist in the future. The violence will be deserved, or it won't have really happened, or it will require historical context, or it will be a false flag by the hated outgroup, or it will be Just Some Crazy People who don't represent anyone, and the real problem is the people blaming your (or my!) tribe as though we're responsible in some way for the sort of violence we enthusiastically celebrate and constantly claim is absolutely necessary. And of course, the inverse Russell Conjugations for violence committed by the outgroup. If you want a demonstration, look at the October 7th attacks in Israel, and the response from Americans and Westerners generally. Your argument would predict that Hamas ought to be polling south of Satan; only, it's not, is it?
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. "getting in too much trouble" is a variable, and a very flexible one. A huge portion of the search involves that variable specifically. Many practical ways to manipulate it have been demonstrated, and many more can be derived even if they have not yet been implemented at scale. Guns are part of this equation in a way you really ought to recognize.
I argued with him quite a bit, and I don't think there was ever a point where I thought he should be banned. My personal conclusion was "God made Darwin to train the Faithful".
I think you ought to consider the fact that many Blues here and even some greys considered Darwin an excellent poster and continue to believe that we treated him poorly and unfairly, that he did nothing wrong and that the hostility he received was just from partisan jerks who couldn't keep up with his arguments.
My assessment is closer to yours: he was a one-man charity incinerator. He definitely played a significant role in my own radicalization. The problem, as I see it, is that most of us, myself certainly included, also burn Charity, and the mission of this space directly facilitates such burning. We can throttle it to try to keep it from burning too much too fast, but we can't produce new charity and the amount we collectively have generally declines over time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Irrespective of Dase’s ban, the motte is very much a case of an Animal Farm, and has been so for some time.
What's an animal farm in this context? Some animals are more equal than others?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
he got banned for breaking the rules. he's breaking the rules in a year-old thread because some of the greybeards here like to have long-running arguments.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I think an under-acknowledged challenge of AI is that it will dramatically increase the opacity of systems that everyday people use.
This is directly counter to my own experience with AI. AI is the best user interface I've ever used. It massively reduces cognitive load for figuring out complex workflows, which in turn makes engaging with those workflows on a granular level much, much less frustrating and intimidating. Whatever convolutions you go through, the AI can always explain how things work immediately and at an arbitrary level of elaboration. This is a complete game-changer, in my experience. It's search that actually works, it's manuals that actually work, it's UI that actually works, and on and on.
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If you think such a conflict would neatly contain itself to uniformed troops on one side and irregulars on the other, you are very high and should put the bong down. The military is not likely to break cleanly for one side or the other. The military cannot effectively police the north American continent. Everyone involved in such a war would understand it to be a tribal war from the start.
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War is about inflicting harm and misery on the other side. There are many, many, many ways to do this that do not involve getting in a fight with a tank, especially given that there are not remotely enough tanks to go around, and you can't actually live in one if you have one.
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Americans need electricity, and will experience its absence as harm and misery.
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Ditto for food.
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Ditto for water. American cities are not designed to survive sieges generally.
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Most decisively, nobody has to go into this thinking they're ending the concept of peace nationwide for the indefinite future. There's lots of little steps people can take thinking they're just making a statement, that only in retrospect will be recognizable as striking matches in a dynamite factory. Some would argue that this has already happened. It only takes a few, and then a few more. It doesn't have to involve killing at all, though notably political killings with mass public support are something we've been seeing on the left for some time now, with no evidence of reversal. Moderate, reasonable steps can get us there just as well as mouth-foaming radicalism.
We have actually had a lot of examples of examples of confrontations between government forces and disgruntled civilians lately. A lot of these examples have not gone well for the Government forces, and some of the more extreme ones are notable for the public support the insurrectionists have received. You do not appear to have a conceptual linkage between these many, many examples of the exact sort of thing you're arguing can't happen and the scenario you're trying to describe. I think you should rectify that lack.
It helps to have some background:
Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact...
...No side, after all, will ever accept a peace in which their most basic needs are not satisfied — their safety, and their power to ensure that safety, most of all. The desire for justice is a desire that we each have such mechanisms to protect ourselves, while still remaining in the context of peace: that the rule of law, for example, will provide us remedy for breaches without having to entirely abandon all peace. Any “peace” which does not satisfy this basic requirement, one which creates an existential threat to one side or the other, can never hold.
And yet, fundamentally… it’s not true that conservatives as a group are working for the same goals as I am but simply have different ideas of how to pursue it. It’s not true that conservatives simply think that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy or that economic growth works better than foreign aid to help the global poor or that, as regrettable as it is for gay couples who long for children, children will be severely traumatized unless they are raised by heterosexuals. I would certainly prefer it to be that way. I want to have respect for all belief systems; I want to believe we’re all working for the same goals but simply disagree on certain facts.
But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.
I thought I’d be done with this story in a night. Instead it’s taken me two weeks, all the way up until Halloween – perfect night for a ghost story, right? I’ve been alternately drinking and smoking weed, trying to calm myself down enough to think about anything other than the third Scissor statement. No, that’s not right, definitely trying not to think about either of the first two Scissor statements, because if I think about them, I might start thinking about how some people disagree with them, and then I’m gone. Three times I’ve started to call my ex-girlfriend to ask her where she is, and if I ever go through with it and she answers me, I don’t know what I will do to her. But it isn’t just her. Fifty percent of the population disagrees with me on the third-highest-ranked Scissor statement. I don’t know who they are. I haven’t really appreciated that fact. Not really. I can’t imagine it being anyone I know. They’re too decent. But I can’t be sure it isn’t. So I drink.
You guys, who haven’t heard a really bad Scissor statement yet and don’t know what it’s like – it’s easy for you to say “don’t let it manipulate you” or “we need a hard and fast policy of not letting ourselves fight over Scissor statements”. But how do you know you’re not in the wrong? How do you know there’s not an issue out there where, if you knew it, you would agree it would be better to just nuke the world and let us start over again from the sewer mutants, rather than let the sort of people who would support it continue to pollute the world with their presence? How do you know that you’re not like the schoolkid who superciliously says “Nothing is bad enough to deserve a swear word” when the worst that’s ever happened to her is dropping her lollipop in the dirt. If that schoolkid gets kidnapped and tortured, does she change her mind? If she can’t describe the torture to her schoolmates, but just says “a really bad thing happened to me”, and they still insist nothing could be bad enough to justify using swear words, who do you side with? Then why are you still thinking I’m “damaged” when I tell you I’ve seen the Scissor statement, and charity and compassion and unity can fuck off and die? Some last remnant of outside-view morality keeps me from writing the whole list here and letting you all exterminate yourselves.
So you vote for television and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to
fuck you with switchblades . That's voting. You're welcome.
So.
I mean in some cases it is necessary like literal wars or a group actively holding hostile views against another and opposes thier rights on the basis of prejudice.
"rights" is not a coherent concept. "prejudice" is a Russell conjugation.
Humans organize themselves by the values they hold. Many values humans can hold are mutually incompatible. When you trap humans with incompatible values in a space together and force them to compete for resources, the result is escalating conflict until they find a way to segregate themselves by values again. Values can drift over time if sufficient values-homogeneity is not enforced; a homogenous group can build high-complexity society built on cooperation, and then values-drift into incompatible values that make it impossible to maintain that high-complexity society as more and more value drains into zero-sum or negative-sum competition with the outgroup.
Our society was previously values-coherent enough to function. It no longer is, so its complexity and stored value are being cannibalized to compensate: culture war. When there's not enough complexity and stored value to cannibalize, we will transition to actual war. The alternatives are separation, which no one knows how to do, and re-alignment, which no one knows how to do and which neither side is willing to accept.
None of this is irrational or a mistake. This is what humans do. Any and all of us could fix it in an instant: just accept losing. None of us are willing to do that. We do this because this is, after careful deliberation, what we want to do.
Democrats very obviously intend to grant themselves overwhelming electoral advantages by making significant changes to America's political structure. They've been publicly discussing methods to achieve these goals for decades.
Most of these tactics, individually, stand a good chance of excluding Red Tribe from political power for the foreseeable future if implemented. You can claim that this is not the same as a one-party state and that all of these are legitimate and even necessary actions if you like; I'm sure that other Blues will agree.
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