Soteriologian
2d ago
Well, in this case it looks like that's exactly what isn't happening: the details don't look particularly bad, but the sentences are severe because the judge is trying to send a political message.
50 years in prison over some petty vandalism is completely ridiculous.
Soteriologian
2d ago
Discretionary sentencing should be with respect to the severity of the case details, not with respect to whether the judge feels like sending us all a message (and yes, the message is to us, not to the person sentenced to de facto their entire life in prison. One can only contend the deterrence message is to the offender if there's an expectation they'll be released and a participating member of society again).
Soteriologian
2d ago
The number one purpose of punishment is punishment? We really put our top wordcels on that lmao
Anyway, no, the issue isn't with criminal punishment as a deterrence: it's with with judicial discretion regarding deterrence. Despite all perception to the contrary, the law is not the judge's personal megaphone to blare his opinions on the rest of society.
Soteriologian
2d ago
I don't care about the incident one way or the other, but the notion that a judge can deliver harsh/light sentences "to send a message" is ridiculous.
Soteriologian
2d ago
This is an empty statement. Whether you're hanged as a traitor or celebrated as a founder is defined by whether you win or not. This is true regardless of whether the Constitution says so or not, so if this is what the Constitution is saying here, it's basically a rooster crowing to claim credit for the sunrise.
Soteriologian
4d ago
The reality is it's even stupider than this: the reason the American government is so brain-fried and obsessed with aliens is because it's full of Americans (heaven help us all).
Soteriologian
5d ago
Yeah, at least for violent aggression, I think it's a ridiculous case to make. Many Down's syndrome people are severely retarded, to the point that they indeed cannot be held fully accountable for things like theft. Even if they sorta understand money, it's more in the 4-year-old sense of "handing over some random green papers and coins is a ritual you do before you walk out of the store with stuff", rather than any understanding of monetary value and transaction. The level of understanding common in Congress, basically. Yet even among downies and Congresspeople, it is well-understood that you can't just maul random people on the street and walk off with their stuff. Even most animals that grow up around humans don't have trouble with this.
Soteriologian
5d ago
Nah, if someone put out a study showing J6'ers had below-average IQ, it would be enshrined in liturgical canon immediately.
Soteriologian
5d ago
The great awokening happened under the Tories and the UK is in many ways less woke now than when then tories left office.
None of this had anything to do with them or Starmer. The UK has no cultural sovereignty because it doesn't control the internet: the Americans do. To the extent wokeness has receded in the UK, it's because it's receded in the United States.
And I don't think it's actually receded: I think woke power centres are coyly biding their time while the right clowns itself in the most ridiculous ways imaginable. Never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.
Mark my words, next election, woke will return with a vengeance, and they will go Nuremberg on the right.
Soteriologian
5d ago
The progressive would never admit to being a scientific racists.
Like everything else, cognitive science is subject to The Movement and its ends: to the extent that it serves the purpose at hand, IQ is as rock-solid science as universal gravitation; to the extent that it doesn't, it's lies that must be quelled and suppressed.
Soteriologian
5d ago
Your narrative is rather... motivated, I'd say lol
Kings and gold are more tightly associated than Indians and the Ganges river, and there have been no shortage of kings throughout history who were extravagant spenders, e.g., Nero. Heck, even in the New Testament, the association between money and kings is abundantly clear: "Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar's." (Luke 20:24). And it's not like this is some story concocted by the Jews: coins did, in fact, have Caesar's image on them, and this is not a matter of any historical dispute.
Further, the association between knights and banking is also... well, not exactly a story the Jedi would tell you (my young apprentice). The Knights Templar were basically an international banking cabal, thriving on using religious pretense to dodge international commerce restrictions.
Soteriologian
7d ago
end up being largely about how subtly you can cheat
I wouldn't say that. There are distinct local optima that are not just bumping up against the arbitrary constraint blocking the way to the global optimum. In fact, this is arguably the definition of a good constraint: one that induces a non-trivial local optimum.
Soteriologian
16d ago
The classic "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Never short!
Traditionally, the way to handle this was to reallocate to stable assets, where "stable asset" meant gold and treasury bonds.
With the crash we're headed for, I think canned fruits and bullets are the stable assets of choice.
Soteriologian
16d ago
I agree with your presentation on kingship and the origin of its authority, and that Moldbug doesn’t really "get" it.
That said, you're still left with the age-old problem of "What happens when the sun sets on the sun-king?" Enlightenment philosophy was developed and trounced everything in its path for a reason! In the same sense that true kingship is ultimately grounded in conquest and social Darwinism, I point to the triumph of liberalism over older thought modalities and say, "Behold, your king."
Finally, there are a lot more problems with kingship today than there were in the Enlightenment era, because the nature of battle has changed. What is a knight in the face of an autonomous drone swarm, where each unit that can kill him and his brethren costs less than his monthly salary? What is a knight when his bank account can be frozen on the whims of a bureaucrat?
Whatever a knight is in 2026, it looks nothing like a knight from medieval Europe. And a true king surely more unrecognisable still.
But then again, I suppose a true king, by definition, would figure all this out.
"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel"
Soteriologian
16d ago
Well, whatever one may say of her politics in general, I don’t think that’s what this specific incident implies: she didn’t want to watch or control anything here, in the Zuckerberg sense. She didn’t start an email service and try to get a bunch of gullible people to use it; she just hosted her own mail server for herself.
It’s honestly incredibly based. Possibly the most tech-literate and clearheaded act of self-sovereignty I’ve ever witnessed from a politician (although admittedly the competition is nonexistent).
Soteriologian
17d ago
Perhaps we all long for, on some level, to be watched over and controlled
Well, Hillary Clinton doesn't. Perhaps she truly was the rightful heiress of the free world.
Soteriologian
17d ago
Pretty much.
What incenses me most about race-conscious rightoids is how incapable they are of sovereign thought, especially that of any relevance in 2026. The board is as you mention in your final paragraph: the digital surveillance state is wired up well enough that it's basically just "Draw a selection rectangle around the protest mob on Google Maps, right-click, 'Freeze bank accounts.'"
Even for something as fundamental as communication, rightoids just do it on the centralised, mass surveillance platforms run by the "idk, they trust me. dumb fucks" sort. Meanwhile, Hillary fricken' Clinton -- who was a woman in her 60s at the time -- was like "I should probably run my own email server on a box in my basement so I don't have to depend on a bunch of centralised surveillance slop like gmail."
Like come on, if grandma socialite over here is out-cyberpunking your ass, you are not a serious political actor.
Soteriologian
18d ago
I mean, if you want to define any insurrection against the established order as innately leftist, sure. From a monarchist viewpoint, there's little difference between 1776, 1789, and even 1917. But the Americans -- both now and then -- view their revolution as quite distinct from these others. Call me a liberal if you must, but I find their case compelling.
The problem with Monarchists is they have to answer for kings like, well, the current king of England, who is overseeing the replacement migration of his own people and outright celebrating it with foreign holidays. Is rebellion against this monarchy "leftist" or "liberal"? Who is the left and who is the right here? I think the terms just lose all meaning.
And it's not like "Oh, well this is an exceptional case, nobody historically could have imagined having an idiot monarch like Charles," because, yes they could. This happens all the time: finding yourself in the position of having an idiot as monarch is the problem with monarchy, and has been so for all of recorded human history.
Soteriologian
19d ago
Half? You can get a man to give up his entire kingdom!
"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" -Richard III
Soteriologian
19d ago
I'm saying women extracting ludicrous amounts of wealth from men simply by being hot is something that's been going on for millennia.
Soteriologian
19d ago
I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
Meanwhile, in the gospel of Mark:
And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.
And of course, long before that, in the book of Esther:
Then said the king unto her, What wilt thou, queen Esther? and what is thy request? it shall be even given thee to the half of the kingdom.
Soteriologian
20d ago
What is the scoop on SIDS? I heard some echoes from conspiritard circles that it's a euphemism for women killing their babies (by accident or not), but I don't have a high degree of faith in the source here, and I'm not an expert on baby health.
Soteriologian
22d ago
It's got that 2008 Cracked.com writing style.
Which is great the first time you see it. After the dozenth the time, eh.
Soteriologian
22d ago
I'd say your vibes are the exact opposite of what they should be, given that the Tornado cash devs were arrested by the government and the Zcash foundation is in McLean, Virginia (the spook capital of the world).
Well, Americans bringing guns to their celebration of *checks notes* shooting the government troops until they fled across an ocean sure seems out of character.
Hope they didn't throw any tea in the harbour.
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