BANNED USER: /comment/193024
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.
User ID: 659
Banned by: @cjet79
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Continued:
My chain of command have been shitting on me and occasionally acting as though they were trying to get me killed but they were also on my side. How can that be you ask? It comes down to the "functional" in there being two key elements to a functional hierarchy. So long as the fire keeps climbs up the hill, the needs of an isolated individual can mobilize the might of a nation. At the most fundamental level, the answer to what it means to be on "a side" is the same as what makes a tribe or a nation. Your side is not your culture your ethnicity or your religion. Your side, your tribe, and your nation, is who's back you have in a crisis and who has yours.
Tyrone Woods had many friends. Friends in the military and veterans' communities, friends in the EMS community, friends in the So-Cal surfing community, friends amongst the surfers musicians bikers and drunks who inhabited the dive bars of San Diego. Many people who would have had his back, flown a plane to get him out, or taken up arms beside him if granted the opportunity. Unfortunately he didn't have any friends where it really counted, The White House or the State Department. Simply put Hillary got her 3:00 am call and let it go to voicemail. And as all these well meaning very intelligent people who said they loved America and wanted my help to put a Republican in the white house, also told me I was over reacting, being silly, that we shouldn't allow a mere four deaths (how many die in car accidents again?) influence national policy. ...and in that moment I understood, these people were not going to be on my side.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Do you have a source for that?
You mean aside from assorted Muslims that I've spoken to? No not really, but I could just as readily, ask you the same question. The downhill cavalry charge into the Ottoman flank that inspired both Tolkien and Sabaton is generally agreed by both sides to have happened on the morning of September 12th per the Georgian Calendar. Sure there are other calendars, but if the intent is to send a message you're going to use the one that is mutually intelligible.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
How'd that age in 10 years?
Pretty well I'd say. China still needs us more than we need them, Russia is in the process of commiting national suicide, and the US Government while corrupt, remains corrupt in relatively banal and predictable ways that aren't going to surprise anyone who was paying attention back in the 90s.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Is The Grand Inquisitor typically interpreted as being representative of Dostoevsky's views?
Not directly, no. But illustrative.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
I'd like to know as well. My impression is that it was rising steadily through the 90s, and while it lost a fair bit of steam in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 it didn't stay down for long.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
There is simply no chance that 44% of black gun owners have used their gun in self defense.
I don't know. Yes, it seems high but if we're counting incidents where a gun was drawn but not fired a 1/4th to a 1/3rd of gun owners having used their guns in self defense strikes me as fairly plausible given my own experience.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Have you ever had the occasion to sit down and actually talk to a Jihadi or Revivalist Sunni face-to-face? Not some westernized Muslim living in some big cosmopolitan center, or edgy teenager posting music videos to /r/combatfootage, but an honest to God Allah, chin-strapped, true believer.
I ask because you seem weirdly wound up about this topic. So much so that you appear to be grasping at straws. For instance, where the fuck is this idiotic nonsense about "nobody outside of a tiny number of scholars concerned with calendars" knowing the date coming from? The Gregorian Calendar, that is the Calendar in use today throughout the English and Romance language speaking world, was codified and adopted by the Catholic Church and by extension most of the major governments in Europe back in 1582, a full century before the Siege of Vienna. Yes the Ottomans continued to maintain their own separate Calendar up into the 20th century (as did Imperial Russia for that matter) but that doesn't mean they were unaware of the Gregorian Calendar or what date a given event happened on.
Likewise, you say you didn't find anything on the web. Well no shit. Wahhabis don't exactly maintain much of an online presence, something about the internet being a Satanic construct. What presence they do maintain is typically in Arabic rather than English.
You can demand "proof" from me, but your attitude is giving me the distinct impression that there is nothing I can provide that you would accept. So with that in mind, what is your alternative theory?
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Meanwhile, the US president has recently decreed that he believes most Republican voters to be 'threats to democracy' and 'national security threats'.
Which for anyone old enough to have clear memories of Clinton's first two years in office comes as no surprise. That's kind of my point.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Yes, the Inquisitor is logical and persuasive but that does not make him righteous or correct which is what I feel Dostoyevsky was actually trying to get at. Reason and rigor favor the Pharisees, not Christ.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Regarding your latter two paragraphs, I feel like this ties into a lot of the stuff I wrote for SSC and /r/theMotte about Hobbes vs Rousseau and fundamental differences in mindset.
What you and your friend both "got" was Hobbes' thesis about the the default state of man is "bellum omni contra omnes", that is everyone vs everyone, or as you put it "cruel and mercenary".
I hesitate to say that there was an expectation of being "in it together" because there often wasn't. The expectation was that the world, society, national policy etc... would be cruel and mercenary and that's precisely why it's important to look out for your own. No one else will. At the same time I feel like this is where the specification of a functional hierarchy is most important because I feel like a lot of people genuinely don't grasp the distinction and thus don't understand that they are playing with fire.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
As genuine fan of Heinlein, that is the grand irony...
For all the ire that progressives level at him I wish an adaptation would play it straight. Rico is supposed to be a Philopino, Zim is supposed to be a Maori, and Flores is supposed to be from Buenos Ares. Don't even get me started on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where in the US arresting the lunar ambassador for being in an interracial relationship, and the lunar government's subsequent decision to drop an asteroid on the Cheyenne Mountain Complex is a significant plot point.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Yes, it crossed my mind.
And my response is that killing Uday, Qusay, and Saddam Hussein al Tikritti was a service to the world. That the failure was in the state department believing that it was sufficient to knock down the existing power structures and not provide a replacement. Actually trying to improve the situation and give people a leg up would be imperialism, and we cant have that can we?
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
"No evidence for X" isn't a free parameter about the world that you can change while changing nothing else. Changing the world to "no evidence for X" also changes the likelihood that X is true.
This is incorrect. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I might sit at my desk all day without seeing a lobster or any evidence there of, but that doesn't change the likelihood of lobsters existing or one of my coworkers having had Surf-and-turf for lunch.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
I think that anything Hanania writes ought to be taken with an entire sack of salt. When I first encountered him I thought he was a parody account along the same lines of Titania McGrath, but now I think he's something more along the Moldbug. IE an edgy left-wing activist type who started out as a tankie only to realize that there was nothing "edgy" about being a tankie in places like Berkley or the University of Chicago.
Censorship in the name of public health and safety has been a component of the progressive platform going back to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The impression that this really only crystalized in 2016 is presumably a product of being too you to remember the 90s and Clinton's efforts to quash talk radio and the nascent internet coupled with revionionist histories by left leaning journalists. For the record it wasn't conservative republicans pushing the Comics Code in the 50s and 60s or trying to get D&D and violent video games banned in the 80s and 90s, it was people like Fredric Wertham, and Tipper Gore.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
This is an astute observation. I think there's a tendency amongst a lot of people from progressive backgrounds to equate opposition to the "woke agenda" with being right-wing, and are thus annoyed, and maybe feel a bit betrayed, when they find out that much of the wider "right" has their own priorities and isn't as concerned the controversy of the day as they are.
I joke about it but...
"I'm a gay polyamorist furry who works for apple and is very concerned about HBD and Demographic decline, please subscribe to my substack"
followed by...
"Conservatives need to do more to cater to the preferences of gay polyamorist furries"
really is becoming something of a cliche' at this point.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Tipper Gore is the reason my CD's had parental advisory stickers and the left is the reason tweets and podcasts and truthteller marks are all over everywhere telling us wrong facts.
Which is why the whole bit about how the left only embraced censorship in 2016 in response to Trump is so absurd.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
From a Bayseian point of view it absolutely is.
Then the Bayseian point of view is wrong.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
It's not that the republicans never "cared about corrupting content or public indecency", it's that legislative action seeking to silence it against it has always a been a distinctly progressive (think blue-tribe "Karen" archetype) phenomenon.
Remember that William Bennet was a Democrat when Reagan hired him and that your other central figures, Joe Liebermann, Tipper Gore, and Brian Williams, were not exactly "Red" by any stretch of the imagination.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
I believe it has something to do with what is politely termed HBD; a fear that the wrong sort of people (let's be charitable; uneducated) are reproducing and the right sort of people (let's be charitable: educated) aren't and thus the wrong genes will win.
Agreed and the fact that their idea of "right genes" and "wrong genes" maps so closely to the ingroup and outgroup of blue tribe academic types is how you can tell that all their claims about "IQ" and "evolutionary fitness" are merely rationalizations for prejudices they already held.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Yes, especially when the nature of the standards and alleged inconsistency are not clear.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
First I think you need to remember that I am an American writing to a predominantly American and English-speaking European audience. Using Hijri dates in my OP would've been pointless and the opposite of "speaking clearly". Second, I think you need to go back and reread the OP. I never claimed the the numbers 9/11 held special significance to Muslims. I claimed that the date, that is the anniversary of the siege, was significant. Speaking of which your dates are wrong. The date would not have been announced as Ramadan 19, it would have been the 22nd or 23rd of Jumada depending on your time zone. Likewise we're not talking about "pre-modern Muslims" either we're talking about Muslims in the 21st century.
As to your question of "What exactly gave you that impression?"
These sorts of weirdly specific assumptions/misreadings described above coupled with a generally confrontational attitude are what gave me that impression.
You ask me why I think a Wahhabi or some other flavor of Sunni Revivalist would care about the Seige of Vienna and that's how I can tell that you've never actually talked to one and that your alleged "web search" must have been half-assed or non-existant because when given the opportunity to talk about this stuff it seems like half of them wont shut up.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
The following is an adaptation/repost of something that I posted to /r/theMotte a few years back. I had intended to post it yesterday but real life intervened. It feels strange to think that it has since been 10 years.
For me, as I sit in an airport lobby writing this, it is around mid-day September 11th. In Mecca it is late evening, the Sun has gone down and in the eyes of the more conservative/orthodox clerics it is already the 12th. The 11th and 12th of September are auspicious dates in political Islam as they represent the Caliphate's "high water mark" and end of the Islamic golden age. While it has largely passed from conscious memory in the West, the day that King Sobieski of Poland broke the Siege of Vienna (September 12th 1683) is remembered by many in the Islamic world as a bloody and shameful anniversary, the day that Islam lost it's way.
It is poetic, and likely intended by the attack's perpetrators, that the date of September 11th is now remembered by many Americans in much the same way. The end of a perceived golden age, the day we lost our way. That said, while the the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon in 2001 have overshadowed it is the twelfth that comes to mind when I think "bloody and shameful anniversary", and that I find more personally significant.
As I mentioned in /u/mcjunker's 9/11 memory thread, September 11th 2001 is the day I "picked a side". The towers went down on a Tuesday and I was talking to a US Navy recruiter the following Monday. While my feelings about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are complicated I don't regret any of the choices I made. Solzhenitsyn said "Prosperity breeds idiots". I don't think that's right. What prosperity breeds is forgetfulness. To quote Lee Harris in the opening to Civilization and it's Enemies...
September 11th 2012 was also a Tuesday. When the attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi began at 9:40 PM local time I would have been eating lunch, maybe knocking out a last-minute homework assignment for my 2:00 PM class. As I said above it was on 9/11 that "I chose a side" but I don't think truly grokked or appreciated what that meant before those months leading up to the 2012 Election and September 12th 2012 in particular.
By this point I had already completed two enlistments where in I'd served as a rescue swimmer and combat medic, as well as the first of several shorter stints I would spend as a private military contractor for a large humanitarian NGO. I was, at this time, serving in the reserves as an instructor and range safety officer while going to college on the GI Bill. I was also the regional rep for a national-level veterans' organization and on a first name basis with my congressman. I'd gone into the Navy a pissed off 20-something looking for a fight, and come out almost a decade later still believing in the cause, but deeply pessimistic about the US in general and the current administration in particular's ability to see it through. It was clear to me that the sort of idealized liberal democracy that the administration seemed to have in mind wasn't going to work in Iraq. There just wasn't the sense of legitimacy or cultural background to support it.
It's a popular refrain that we all want the same things. To be warm and safe with full bellies and for our kids to have a better life than we did. To a degree this is true, I think it's fair to say that almost everyone wants these things. That said, different people will prioritize them differently. So even in discussing these fundamentals there is the potential for disagreement, and that is before we start talking about the best course of action to attain our fundamental wants. This is where the "disbelief in foreigners" comes in. Culture matters and it runs deep. Culture is not just about how one dresses or what they eat. It carries assumptions of language, social structures, flora, fauna, climate, and all sorts of unexamined axioms and assumptions about how the world works.
On Paper, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Rod Dhrer are much the same. They're both conservatives. They're both journalists. They're both Orthodox Catholics. They both lived in the American north-east. And they both made thier names writing about the crimes of Communism and the Soviet Union. That said Solzhenitsyn was Russian to his bones and Russians expect to get screwed. One of my favorite bits in Scott's Unsong was when Lake Baikal was revealed to be a portal to Hell and the Russian response is basically "whelp, that figures". That moment cracked me up because it really does figure. When viewed from ground level Russian history is basically a long string of things going wrong in new and revolutionary ways. When Jesus returns to Earth in The Grand Inquisitor he doesn't save the righteous or establish the kingdom of heaven, no Russian would've bought that, least of all Dostoevsky.
A sense of something akin to "the mandate of heaven" is baked into Iraqi culture the way "things go wrong" is baked into Russian culture. It's there in how they talk. "Inish Allah" literally "if God wills it", is used as a standard greeting/parting phrase, and at times almost like a punctuation mark. I'll see you again tomorrow if God wills it. Enjoy your lunch if God wills it. The train will arrive at 10:00 if God wills it. /u/HlynkaCG will share his stash of hot-sauce with us if God wills it. Emphasis on the If. Fact of the matter is that there is little in the Iraqis' history to suggest that they can trust a government to abide by it's word simply because it gave it's word. Yet we expected them to trust the government, and we expected a government comprised of Iraqis to be trustworthy. That was pretty stupid in hindsight, but understandable because we were thinking like Americans. People from a country that has had 200+ years of reasonably stable government that, even when it's corrupt, tends to be corrupt in fairly banal and predictable ways.
Coming back to 2012, my position gave me something of a front row seat to Romney's presidential bid and access to some of his advisors as well as state politicians. I had previously been aware of the Gell-mann Amnesia effect but hadn't really considered the implication of it. Namely that those who are supposed to be "in the know" often aren't. Having spent time in field some level of cluelessness and/or fecklessness on the part of politicians, pundits, and State Department weenies was assumed on my part. That said, I repeatedly found myself flummoxed by the ignorance and stupidity of highly intelligent people. Some corporate big-wig trying to get a pipeline built would be going on about how lazy the local workers were because they wouldn't work through the day. Meanwhile I'm thinking lets drop you in a place with 105 degree weather and no AC and see how much you feel like working. Someone else would be talking about backing some "moderate" Islamic group or another but then their rep would be a bearded Sunni man wearing a taqiyah and a black sash without a mustache. To translate this into a more familiar cultural equivalent here is a picture of some allegedly "moderate" American Jews. I used to joke about how HQ wanted me dead but the truth was in Hanlon's Razor. Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance and/or stupidity. This may come across as me complaining. Something to the effect of "If only they had listened, disaster could have been averted". That's not my intention, if anything listening to me would have fucked things up in a completely different way. Instead remember that you are ignorant.
I may have joked that my superiors wanted me dead, but there was also an understanding. It was right there on page 13 of my service jacket. I had formally volunteered for hazardous duty in exchange for additional pay. The numerology was not lost on me, and I suspect it was intentional. I would be asked to do something stupid and dangerous and I would do it, in return my Chain of Command would have my back. This is something that I feel like a lot of Americans, especially those who haven't been in the military or haven't worked a specifically dangerous job don't really grasp. There are two key elements to a functional hierarchy. The shit rolling down hill, and the fire climbing up it. Yes the guys at the bottom get shit on, so it goes. The Task forced commander tells a captain that observation post X needs item Y. That captain tells a lieutenant to make it so. That lieutenant talks to his Platoon Sgt and eventually the shit comes to a rest at the bottom of the hill when some Corporal tells some PFC "Hey, Abe I need I need you and Garcia to hump this heavy-ass box up the hill to OP X-ray". This aspect is well known as most people have some experience with being at the bottom of the pecking order if only from childhood. What gets less attention is the fire. If a PFC has a problem his team leader has a problem. If the team leader can't solve with it the resources he has on hand, his platoon/detachment leader has a problem, and so on up the chain till the fire reaches the appropriate level and the officer responsible drops a new load of shit.
To be continued...
edit: fixed broken link.
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