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FirmWeird

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joined 2022 September 05 23:38:51 UTC

				

User ID: 757

FirmWeird

Randomly Generated Reddit Username

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 23:38:51 UTC

					

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User ID: 757

The first step to authoritarianism is creating a climate in which dissent is punished.

Are you going to seriously sit here and post about how terrible it is that people aren't bringing up their political opinions or views due to fear of retribution from Trump, and then claim that this is the start of some creeping authoritarianism? Have you been in a coma for the past two decades? You're describing a kind of pressure and chilling that doesn't even reach ten percent of the pervasiveness of social justice culture as some brand new authoritarian threat, but if you actually took your stated position seriously you'd have been cheering Trump on in the hope that he could smash "woke" culture (if that is the case then I applaud your consistency).

Instead of being afraid, more of us need to speak out for the values of democracy. It is harder to suppress voices this way. And people who are threatened by Musk and Trump especially need to be supported.

"Values of democracy" - could you please tell me what those are? Because your post seems to imply that these values are just "uncontested rule by the managerial class", and I don't think "democracy" is a good word to describe that.

This isn't really a question, but I'd like to announce that I'm effectively retiring from the Motte. I'm not doing this because I don't like arguing or haven't enjoyed my time here, but simply because I've started working on a personal creative project that's going to be taking up the time that I would have spent reading and responding to posts on here. As I'm still working a day job, I don't think I can maintain my presence here as well as pursuing what is effectively a second career. That said, if it proves to be a big success and I can retire from my day job, I'll likely come back - or alternatively if it turns out to be a massive failure and I become a bitter, jaded recluse I'll also come back.

How could conscription cause they state to lose "all legitimacy" when the aforementioned crimes against the people barely dented it?

None of the things you mentioned involve those people having to give up their exceedingly comfortable lives. Caring or doing anything about those issues causes you to lose your job, family and entire social life - and if you have any responsibilities or dependents, that means you aren't going to be doing anything to mess up your ability to put food on the table, nor are you going to spend countless hours researching obscure political stories that are heavily suppressed by major respectable institutions. Throw in the trends towards social alienation, isolation, bowling alone etc

Conscription isn't like that. Conscription actively steps into people's lives and completely destroys the comfortable existences they thought they had. In a healthy society where people have real attachments to the nation, trust in its leaders and an understanding that their loyalty to it will be rewarded, this won't be a big problem. But for vast swathes of modern western populations this just isn't the case. Social trust and cohesion are in the toilet, nobody has kids they want to fight for, huge numbers of men don't even have girlfriends to miss and there's even a growing contingent of men who actively despise women and wouldn't want to fight for them at all. Speaking for myself personally I'd rather frag my commanding officer before I even got out of basic training than go die in the Middle East for Israel or in Ukraine for nothing. I don't think I'm alone, and I believe my life is worth preserving (from my perspective, not universally) - when you look at how many people are miserable, lonely and depressed I really don't see conscription working out at all.

I simply don't believe the Gen-Z has it worse story. I can remember when I was in High School and everyone wanted a job at the local hardware store because it paid really well and wasn't that difficult if you had some level of real interest in, well, hardware stores

And now there are no kids working at the local hardware store, because the local hardware store ran out of business and got outcompeted by a big box that employs illegal immigrants for below-minimum wage. If you don't think the current generation has it worse I simply do not believe you have an accurate understanding of the world as it currently exists. I'm not Gen Z and while I could tell that I had fewer opportunities and conditions were worse compared to my parents, the employment market they're graduating into is fucking dire. Every single public-facing job I interact with that was previously done by a highschool kid is now done by an Indian adult.

Elected leaders should be respectful of the elected leaders of other countries, even if they privately hate them.

This is just tit-for-tat - the Europeans violated this first, with Starmer sending staff over to campaign for Kamala and Zelensky doing it in person. I agree that the norm of not interfering is good, but it was broken a long time ago (and it isn't like the US has clean hands here either).

more time is spent psychoanalysing your opponents than engaging with them.

Are you suggesting here that one of the ways to detect a conversation heading downwards is that you spend time psychoanalysing your opponents rather than engaging with them? For example, if someone said "My position is correct and anybody who doesn't agree with it is obviously stupid" that would be a sign that they're lowering the quality of the discourse, no?

Trump has been captured by Russian propaganda.

If you actually believe this then you may as well give up the entire American project right now and prepare for Putin's coronation ceremony. If the Russian propaganda system is so incredibly powerful that it can bypass Trump's direct access to all intelligence gathered by the United States military and surveillance apparatus, his direct access to all the people in the US military with full knowledge of the situation on the ground and the security systems in place to protect the president... there's no hope left, the Russians could hit anyone lower down in the government with the same weapon. If the Russians have a mind-control weapon which can capture the President without the US military or IC doing anything about it then they have already won and you may as well just roll out the red carpet for them now.

Of course, the alternative hypothesis, that the alternative media and other voices have been correct about the US' pivotal role in starting the Ukraine conflict and Trump is simply recognising the facts on the ground because he doesn't actually want the war to continue, is a lot more believable to me.

Fascism is a word that has an actual meaning. I understand that outside the motte it has become a snarl word which basically just means "political ideology I don't like" but I was under the impression that people here actually try to use the word properly. Donald Trump isn't a fascist - though I have no doubt that if he fails to do what his base want him to do his replacement most likely will be. He's already had four years to be in power, and none of the calamities that your crowd promised were on the way ever actually showed up. If you want to look at the actual actions committed by people in government Trump represents the only break from the Beltway consensus in living memory, and that consensus is responsible for so much more evil and destruction than anything Trump has done. Can you actually look at the long history of military interventions undertaken by the US since the defeat of Hitler and tell me that Trump represents some brand new evil that deserves a revolution to overthrow? How exactly is building a wall with Mexico some grand act of fascism but dropping agent orange on Vietnam or using depleted uranium rounds in Iraq to help establish a hardline Islamic theocracy is just business as usual?

But on top of that, if you're actually serious about opposing people using the military to expand their borders and impose second-class citizen status on a bunch of poor people of the wrong ethnicity, why aren't you talking about Israel? They build walls, they set up apartheid, they kill children in terror attacks, invade foreign states, ask the US to invade others and supplied military equipment to all sorts of distasteful regimes. You still get to attack Donald Trump when you do to boot!

The call to "release the Epstein files!" is basically a desire to second guess prosecutors and form vigilante lynch mobs to do an "independent investigation."

And these people are absolutely correct to second guess the prosecutors - we're expected to believe that Epstein and Maxwell's blackmail operation, which made a substantial amount of money and had detailed customer records had no clients whatsoever. As one twitter use put it, Ghislaine Maxwell was thrown in jail for trafficking children to ...nobody, apparently.

If you don't want people second-guessing prosecutors, the prosecutors should actually prosecute people who commit incredibly serious crimes with extremely dangerous consequences (i.e. acquiring illegal leverage over influential figures in business and politics). The real reason why they won't release those files is twofold - there are too many powerful people who would be taken down, and the damage to Israel's reputation would be far too great.

And that made me wander: do conspiracy theories filter up or trickle down? Does one start with a conspiratorial worldview and paranoid style and jaded cynicism because Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself and then decide the NBA is probably fixed too; or does one start with thinking the NBA is fixed and it shakes your faith in everything else? I’ve noticed the conspiracy theorists I know tend to be into personal conspiracy theories too. The same guy that’s telling me the Marines just raided a FEMA data center in Iceland to get the files about the 2020 election will tell me that the mechanic slit the rubber on his CV boot so that the mechanic could charge him to fix it.

I proudly claim to be a conspiracy theorist on this site and have done so for years but I don't really see any "small conspiracies" like the kind you're suggesting. For the record, I started believing in conspiracy theories as a child in the leadup to the Iraq war - I thought that Iraq didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction, and that those reports were lies to allow the rich Americans in charge of the MIC to steal the oil from another Middle Eastern country. I believed that the government was monitoring all domestic communications - and then Mark Klein reported on it, which was also considered a conspiracy theory until Edward Snowden just released the details. I thought the lab-leak explanation for COVID was more likely despite being told it was a baseless conspiracy theory, and now it seems to be generally accepted knowledge that it was actually a lab leak. I went into the weeds on the Russiagate story (and I have a lot of posts on that particular conspiracy theory on here) and took the conspiracy theory angle again... and it was totally, completely correct. I'm on record stating on the old site that Joe Biden was mentally checked out and could only temporarily be made to perform for special events years before the news about his actual mental state broke.

It just seems nakedly obvious to me that conspiracy theories are a more accurate and truthful depiction of reality than mainstream media reporting and societal consensus. This doesn't really bleed out into my daily life in any noxious or odious way, either - the one time I thought that somebody was conspiring against me, I had another person they tried to conspire with directly tell me that they were doing so. If anything, I think having an accurate understanding of how people work and act, built up over experience interacting with them in the real world, directly leads to conspiracy theories because conspiracies are real and a natural outcome of human psychology. People start seeing conspiracies not because they're just having their brains get filled up with microplastics, but because we live in a world where conspiracies very obviously happen and have a lot of influence on the world.

Does Mass Migration Always and Everywhere Lead to Populist Backlash?

Does starting a small fire in a dry forest always and everywhere lead to a forest fire? No - sometimes it rains, sometimes the fire brigade comes and puts it out, sometimes the wind just forcefully extinguishes it before it can get started. But there's no denying that starting an uncontrolled fire in a dry forest full of tinder is almost definitely going to start a forest fire.

It is more accurate to say that mass migration always creates the conditions required for a populist backlash - you can head that backlash off in a variety of different ways, but the consequences of mass migration are the dry tinder required for a populist backlash. Mass migration depresses wages(and eventually salaries) and drives up the costs of housing and other essentials of life. Simultaneously, it has a negative effect on social trust and cohesion (ever read Bowling Alone?), makes people less charitable and less likely to support their community. Of course, it isn't all bad - it makes things better for the wealthy and upper classes, at least for a while. Employers can treat their workers like shit and exploit them to a greater degree than before, and that might lead to some economic benefits (somebody is very clearly making a lot of money off replacing workers with H1B visa holders or illegal immigrants after all).

But ultimately, all of those negative consequences are baked into the cake of mass migration, and all of these negative consequences directly lead to populist backlashes. This doesn't mean that you'll get a populist backlash every time - if you're a globe-spanning empire with the ability to print as much money as you want, you can paper over those consequences with material goods and benefits. At the same time, you can employ a lot of social and cultural messaging to blunt the visible impact of those negative consequences or make participating in/feeding that populist backlash an incredibly bad career move. All of those approaches work, for a time. The only answers to quelling that backlash permanently are rather brutal - there wasn't a populist backlash from the muslim communities after the mass migrations of the reconquista because there weren't any muslim communities left to object.

As a side note, the Trump administration seems to REALLY hate US assistance to foreign countries and they're doing their damndest to shut it off.

This isn't actually true. The Trump administration LOVES giving assistance to foreign countries, even foreign countries that actively murder US servicemen and is even willing to send US forces to die in order to make sure those foreign countries can continue to violate ceasefire agreements. This might sound glib, but I feel like pointing out that it obviously isn't foreign aid itself that Trump is objecting to - there's clearly some other criteria being used here, otherwise policy towards Israel and Ukraine would be very different.

That interaction really struck me as more significant than a lot of people think. Sam Seder can't argue against that woman because what she's asserting are the core tenets of the vampire castle's doctrine, just from the other side. If he tried to say that America isn't based on white supremacy/european identity, he would instantly be accused of endorsing a racist, nativist right wing narrative, and he can't just take the standard approach for dealing with this argument (getting her fired and ostracized) because the vampire castle is no longer in a position of authority and power. These weaknesses in modern left wing thought have been there the entire time, it's just that nobody was able to make use of them outside anonymous and underground spaces where people don't lose their job for saying Malia Obama is more privileged than a redneck in a trailer park with a family tree consisting entirely of meth addicts and alcoholics. I'd hope that the left takes this as a chance to reform and deal with the terrible state they've gotten into, but I think it's more likely that existing left wing power structures are going to self immolate and lose the support of their base so they can cheerlead for the deportation of people like Mahmoud Khalil instead.

Also, if anyone is unfamiliar with the term "vampire castle" I'm referring to an essay by Mark Fisher which you can read here https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/

The alleged reasoning is that the pardons only apply to those already convicted convicted of a crime

I have no opinion on the actual legal validity of this claim, but team Trump would be perfectly happy if this standard gets used because now all of Biden's ass-covering pardons are invalid and politically motivated prosecutions of the Biden family and Fauci are back on the table... which is why I think this novel legal strategy will fail or be withdrawn in short order.

Just to clarify, the entire Russian collusion conspiracy theory has already been dealt with and completely discredited. Trump is not a Russian agent and the entire debate has been done to death over and over again - the source of the entire claim is a combination of opposition research purchased from the Russians by the Clinton campaign and 4chan /pol/ trolls making fun of a conservative anti-Trumper who was relentlessly bullied online by people who read his son's book about indulging in a piss fetish.

Besides, we know that Trump actually is a compromised agent of a foreign power, and we can see what that compromise leads him to do:

  1. Deport people who protest against this foreign power
  2. Deliver vast sums of blood and treasure despite ostensibly promising to shut down foreign aid
  3. Have his underlings declare criticism of said foreign power a "health crisis"
  4. Make sure that important evidence of serious crimes which implicate said power and would have a negative effect on their reputation remain redacted and unpublished.

Trump has done none of these things for Russia, and while he hasn't treated them as The Great Satan that a lot of NATO-types believe they are, he hasn't been an obsequious lickspittle either. He's treated them with the respect due to a nuclear power that has their own interests, but that's just good statesmanship and negotiation rather than him being compromised.

I don't really advocate for leftist economics on here terribly much but as someone who is technically a leftist I take the same approach to open borders that Bernie Sanders used to before the vampire castle got to him - open borders are a tool used by the wealthy to drive down wages and make living conditions for workers much more precarious, because that shifts the balance of power to them (desperate workers are more willing to put up with abuse, low pay, etc).

If so the only logical response would be to dramatically increase the scrutiny applied to granting of permanent resident status. It is unacceptable that we would be required to import people who seek to destroy us.

Us? He's protesting against Israel, not the US. Those are two separate countries, and the Israelis have done objectively more harm to the US and US interests than the Palestinians ever have. How many US navy ships have been bombed by Palestinian fighter jets?

Fighting police officers to the death would not have improved the outcome for his daughter in any way, and most likely would have made things worse for her. The people who you should actually be attacking and blaming in this case are the rapists themselves, the police who protected them and the politicians responsible for the entire state of affairs - not blaming an individual working class father for not turning into Conan the Barbarian and single-handedly murdering several rapists and several more well-armed police officers.

Any military where the basic troops are only given their weapons for the first time in active combat is so incompetently run that fighting to the death against the conscription officers in my own home would give me better odds. Being shipped to the front line and given your weapon only when you get there is a death sentence in a modern battlefield and if that's the strategy we have already lost.

Their dads(well, of the few of the girls who had them) gave up.

No they didn't. There's at least one case of a father being arrested for trying to rescue his daughter - the police weren't just ignoring the systematic rape of working class children, they were actively aiding and abetting it.

Jailbreaking would never work if the underlying concepts had been trained out of the model.

I can't agree with this, except in the sense that if you did train those underlying concepts out the model itself simply wouldn't function. Many of the "problematic" concepts that you would try to train out of a model are actually embedded within and linked to concepts that you can't make sense of the world at all without. Take sexual content as an example - if you remove the model's understanding of sex to prevent it from producing pornographic material, you lose the ability to talk sensibly about biology, medicine, history, modern culture etc. If you make a model completely raceblind it then becomes unable to actually talk sensibly about society, history or biology. Even worse, actually being blind to those issues means that it would also be blind to the societal safeguards. Everybody in real life knows that racism isn't something white people are "allowed" to complain about, but if you prevent an AI from knowing/learning/talking about race then you're also going to prevent it from learning those hidden rules. The only answer is to just have a secondary layer that scans the output for crimethink or badspeech and wipes the entire output if it finds any. I'm pretty sure this is what most AI companies are using - what else could work?

I cannot help but feel like "either the Russians have a mind control device or else the alternative media were right about everything" is a bit of a false dichotomy.

You're right - fortunately, that's a bit more extreme than what I actually said. I think John Mearsheimer presents the strongest version of the argument that the Potus and his administration seem to believe, and I've heard that a lot of people in Trump's orbit agree with his views. By far the most likely situation to me is that Trump and his team, after gaining access to the Federal Government's resources on the topic, think that he's correct as well.

The alternative alternative hypothesis

You mean the mainstream hypothesis promulgated by the legacy media organisations.

Trump is a simp for authoritarians in general and Putin in particular

I don't think that's an accurate characterisation of his thinking. If he prefers authoritarians, why is Vance out there telling Europe to roll back their incredibly authoritarian hate speech laws? Why is he telling Zelensky that he needs to have free elections - wouldn't he prefer Zelensky more if he just proclaimed himself Caesar for life? I don't think that whether or not someone is an authoritarian is what decides Trump's view of them. As for Putin in particular, do you want to go talk about Russiagate? I've made a lot of posts on the topic both here and on the old site we can go through first.

how a not very bright 78 year old conspiracy theorist might fall for bullshit that flatters his preferences.

The POTUS is a conspiracy theorist? Bro, were you alive during Russiagate? The feds really were listening to his phonecalls and trying to take him down - we have the texts and the documents (ever read the Peter Strzok texts?). The Big Guy really was getting a cut from the Burisma scandal, and Trump was totally right to attack Ukraine over it in his first term. When you use the term conspiracy theorist to describe someone with multiple government agencies making spurious attempts to throw him in jail or stymie his efforts and who survived multiple legitimate assassination attempts you're just making the term even more useless than it already is. I mean, sure, the statement is literally true - but the conspiracies in question weren't just real, they were thoroughly documented and some people even went to prison over it.

Do you have any actual evidence that he was lying or just insinuations?

Have you heard the story of Hind Rajab? There are mountains of evidence with regards to the brutality on display, and multiple international prosecutions of the people involved. IDF members are now frequently unable to holiday in a large number of countries because they posted the war crimes they committed on social media for everyone to see. I personally have seen some of the most sickening images of my life come out of the conflict, and it actually does make me upset that my government supports what's happening (and the manufacture of the bomb delivery mechanisms that blew up those innocent people).

Rotterham can, of course, still shock the conscience for any number of other reasons. But those pushing us to outrage should state those reasons out loud. If they think it is genuinely worse when a Paki commits a crime than when a White does so, they should say so out loud.

I don't believe that Rotherham is worse because the men were foreigners - I would be just as outraged if they were native Britons, Americans, Australians, Dutch or Israelis. What is actually responsible for my outrage is the total dereliction of duty on the part of the police, legal system and media... but that wouldn't happen, because the explicit reason for their dereliction of duty was to avoid inflaming racial tensions.