JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Formerly "SandwichWarrior" and "The Upright Man", may or may not be feral, is most certainly quixotic.
User ID: 4009
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5mo ago
The left holds both power and legitimacy. Its dictates will be obeyed
Again, "says who?"
The left?
Did it really never occur to you that these people might have an agenda that they are trying to push?
I do not believe that "Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture" but i do believe that it sticks in a lot of people's minds as the last time that all the different tribes agreed with each other about something. And that makes it a milestone or inflection point of sorts, something that people will naturally think back to, and contrast against what we see now.
That said, as a fan of urban fantasy I am a bit enamored with the idea that "the seventh seal" would be a gorilla in a zoo somewhere.
Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs, but as I understand it a lot of the principals pioneered by AlphaGo ended up being used in the sort of autonomous targeting systems that are currently being used to kill Russians in the Donbass.
The left may hold "power" in Newark, but "power" is not "legitimacy" unless you are in fact endorsing the idea that "might makes right".
I would observe that whether the left is "a juggernaut" is completely orthogonal to whether they are "right" or "wrong" or whether they ought to be opposed or not. In the meantime you have yet to provide any evidence that right-wing victories outside of New Jersey are helping rather than harming the left-wing agenda nationwide.
the backlash for you winning any political power (whether you do anything with it or not) will allow them to take over, permanently, and erase your gains.
Says who?
What evidence do you have to back up this claim?
Unless you’re going to email the credentials to your bank account to every American, and see which ones are actually thieves, you are going to end up pre-judging them in one manner or another.
Are you saying that if a white man asked for your banking information you'd give it, but if a black man did you wouldn't?
What if the white man was filthy disheveled creature sitting on a street-corner, and the black man was a clean cut smartly dressed individual sitting behind a desk at said bank? Would that change your answer?
As the above example illustrates, the claim that we can't possibly have enough information to judge people individually in the moment is a blatant falsehood.
I acknowledge that it is a difficult problem, but I refuse to accept something being difficult as a reason not to try.
If you're a coward, that's ok. I genuinely respect the honesty and self-awareness it takes to recognize and admit that. and for what it is worth I sympathize. Courage is not the absence of fear (the word for that is "foolhardiness") courage is the ability to think and act clearly in spite of fear. It is an uncommon trait and that's why it is viewed as worthy of notice and commendation.
That said, what I do not respect is the so called "Kolmogorov Option" where someone claims to oppose X in their heart while actively supporting X in word and deed, and that's what I feel like so much of this is.
It's like that nuclear power meme...
- Person A: "We need strict economic controls to reduce carbon emissions."
- Person B: "We could reduce carbon emissions by embracing nuclear power."
- Person A: "But I don't want to reduce carbon emissions, I want strict economic controls."
...only in this case it's "I don't want to improve outcomes".
What we should have always been doing from the start, judging people by their individual actions and the content of their character not the color of their skin.
The whole point of the Jesus' parable about "the Good Samaritan" is that it is not blood nor proximity that makes a man a your kin or your neighbor, but rather how they comport themselves.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5mo ago
Im sorry but i just do not find the argument that we must allow the commons to be abused because if we dont the people who are currently abusing the commons might burn them down to be particularly compelling.
I would argue that it is better for all involved when abusers are punished, and someone tries to burn it all down because they didn't get thier way we'll punish them for that to.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5mo ago
I am not discussing what "we" should do; I am discussing what "we" can do.
Except that as men like Trump and Rubio, and states like Florida and Mississippi continue to demonstrate, we know how to create better outcomes and we can just do that.
As I have argued before, the values of "liquid modernity" and the liberal striver class are incompatible with building healthy relationships and by extension incompatible with human flourishing.
It is trivially true that eating healthy is less enjoyable than stuffing your face with junk.
It is trivially true that there are downsides to having kids.
It is trivially true that a life of responsibility is presents risks that a life of perpetual infancy does not.
At the end of the day good things justify themselves and that is why it is important to reject the values that might prevent you from embracing them.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5mo ago
Asking the real questions.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5mo ago
I agree that there is world of difference between sentiments like "Nobody is perfect" and "we all have the capacity for evil", and the sort of aggressive nihilism that seems to permeate a lot of these movements.
The argument that both you and @ThisIsSin are making would appear to endorse "the heckler's veto" and by extension the idea that "might makes right".
I reject this argument on the basis that each and everyone of us is (presumably at least) a human being with free will, and as such may choose to refuse their demands at any time.
Abel doesn't have to do anything.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5mo ago
Why should you (or anyone else for that matter) privilege the preferences of bigots and grifters over safe streets and teaching kids to read?
You can alternately show that you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so
Except you haven't shown that. As @FCfromSSC observes we, as society, know how to create better outcomes. The problem is that the required actions are not seen as politically acceptable because there are a lot of bigots and grifters who's egos and livelihoods depend on problems not getting solved.
I can't help but notice that the same people who say "you can't stop the black people who are committing crimes from doing so" are the same people who also lionize George Floyd, defend DeCarlos Brown as "a victim of circumstance", and make excuses for liberal AGs releasing violent schizophrenics back onto the street for the umpteenth time.
We can stop the trolly at any time but doing so would require the liberal striver class to admit that they fucked up.
At some point in the last 50 years or so it seems to have become acceptable to let students take classes like "Statistical Analysis" without having first demonstrated basic competence in Calculus and I would argue that this has had a disastrous effect on rates of numeracy across a multitude of disciplines.
How do you recognize an error in your estimate if you do not have a clear understanding of what that estimate represents?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5mo ago
No it is not.
They tell you what to do and them blame you if you don't do it right.
That is quite literally what a belief in individual responsibility and agency entails. If you fuck up you don't get to blame it on "society" or some "structural -ism", your fuck ups are on you.
Am I the only person who actually worked/learned something useful in college?
No you are not, but I have a lot of acquaintances (I hesitate to call them friends) who took @2rafa's approach. As I've mentioned before I went to a prestigious school and one of the biggest pieces of culture shock for me when I got there was just how endemic this sort of attitude was. I was actually told once by a TA that I was "hurting myself" by taking challenging classes and trying to do my classwork honestly instead of taking advantage of the "opportunities" presented to me.
It's interesting to look back years later and compare GPA to life-trajectory. They are not positively correlated.
These are all excellent points, but I want to push back a bit against fascism being "a Third Position" at least in the Anglo-American context.
As you yourself acknowledged, Anglo-American conservatism never really had anything to do with the Fascists. But this often obscured either through willful misrepresentation, (IE using "Fascism" as a generic label for anything leftists don't like regardless of content) or through conflation of vocabulary. People today see the word "Corporatism" and immediately think Wall Street, when the reality is that what men like Mussolini, Mosley, and Eco described as "Corporatism" or "Corporazioni" was a very different beast from the typical Anglo-American understanding of the word which is more about being beholden to corporate interests. and at the end of the day Fascism remains rooted in the same Marxian critique of Capitalism in particular and Western Civilization more generally as Communism.
I just find it deeply ironic that the same people who'll label anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders a Nazi have chosen a self-described revolutionary socialist with an SS tattoo to be their guy.
I feel like the fact that we are talking about a specific person and specific things they have said should obviate the "outgroup" portion of the "boo outgroup" rule. @seething_spendcel isn't booing Democrats, he's booing a specific person who happens to be a Democrat.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if, in the next ten years, Platner jumps ship and joins the GOP.
I would be surprised.
The left/right split in the US is increasingly about identitarianism and collectivism vs individualism. Some like David Friedman would argue that it always has been about this. Plattner seems to be solidly in the identitarian/collectivist camp, contrast this with folks like Fetterman and Gabbard who consistently backed the Democrats' economic policies but always seemed a bit uncomfortable with the id-pol stuff.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5mo ago
Left and right are not always the best words to describe these populations.
I think this is a product of a long-running psy-op to convince people that National Socialism was not a fundamentally left wing movement. There were a lot of left wing journalists and academics in the immediate post World War II period who suddenly found the need to "memory-hole" which horse they'd been backing prior to the allied victory in Europe.
The categories become much more relevant and legible if you accept the Milton and David Friedman model of Left and Right as being about collective vs individual responsibility and agency.
Steak no, but pot roast or ground beef? Those were staples for my family growing up, and we were not well-to-do.
Just looking at my own grocery bill, the prices of a lot of common staples like beans, eggs, rice, milk, flour, ground beef, etc... have all gone up 100-200% in the last 10 years and my gross income has not.
When my eldest was first starting to eat solid food a log of ground beef typically went for around $2.50/lb, today I feel lucky if I can find it for $6.
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