ccc
1mo ago
The CCC is not responsible for this behavior and to suggest otherwise is anticmitic.
ccc
4mo ago
Both tribes think the enemy is united while their own team is involved in constant internecine conflict. I think there is something to this, that both observations are half right, but that the apparent symmetry is merely a lack of distinction between where enforcement occurs, where the lines are drawn.
Trump demands absolute loyalty from his servants. His will is absolute. You may disagree, but nonetheless must carry out his commands. Even a whiff of disloyalty is punished swiftly with a removal from power. But people on the right are permitted to believe almost anything at all. There is no ideological coherence in the movement. Trump himself believes in almost nothing. Whore mongering pimps, psychopathic industrialists, and cultural Muslims will break bread with techno feudalists, orthodox Christians, and entho nationalists.
Democrats get absolutely no loyalty from their servants. Bernie Sanders can have his rally commandeered by random loud black women. Obama and Biden can be decried as war criminals for carrying out ordinary presidential duties. Biden can have his entire presidency undermined by professional staff who think they know better than him. He can have the entire blue team apparatus flagellate him for exercising the presidential pardon for his own son. But a New York Times journalist needs to put a five paragraph prostration that they totally don't hate trans people before an article suggesting that maybe the particular style of affirmative care currently used to treat dysphoria is causing patients some harm. A member in good standing on the left must believe all the right things and endorse them full-throatedly or they shall be forever removed from polite society.
The right demands submission of the will. The left demands submission of the self.
ccc
7mo ago
I don't think that changes anything. Neither the bigots in your example nor the people overusing the word "Nazi" are blameless. Just as well, in neither case is the subsequent action justified, only understandable. (Almost all behavior is understandable if one tries hard enough to understand it, but understanding does not preclude judgment.)
Ultimately, everyone must take responsibility for their own actions. Casting the blame outwards, as if our actions are mere cascading effects of the people with true agency, is to concede we have none. It's an intoxicating idea. It frees us of the burden of temperance and good judgment. But without that burden we are nothing but machines following a routine.
ccc
7mo ago
I view one losing faith in liberalism much like a good Christian views a fellow believer losing faith in God: understandable, yet nonetheless misguided.
The siren song of authoritarianism is strong, and it is foolish to listen to the devil's lies. But even still, many of us are fools. So it goes. How well they can be redeemed depends on how much they let those lies corrupt their soul. So there is in a sense both nothing and everything bad about believing anything at all. Our free will both condemns us to sin and allows us to forgive.
All to say, as a liberal I view all illiberalism as evil. And this view is to some degree a matter of faith. I could try writing words to rationalize it, but you would almost certainly be better off reading Mill or Scott or some other better writer. Ditto your request for definitions: I will defer to Wikipedia if you still want those. My apologies.
At best I can offer https://youtube.com/watch?v=xGeOEr6yFL4?si=klFr_r8Y2oPSaaju
The sin of dictatorship is that the people can push off failures of government to one man.
All illiberal societies converge into dictatorships, and/or they collapse or liberalize. There are no stable illiberal democracies.
I would rather die as Socrates did, a free man condemned by his own foolish people, than to prosper like a child under the rule of a benevolent King.
(Now, a God King is another thing entirely, but I am unfortunately an atheist.)
For the subject at hand, the people in this story are likely redeemable given proper guidance, and many are just victims of context collapse. Young men making crass jokes amongst themselves is normal behavior and nothing new.
ccc
7mo ago
your argument is basically 'no u' with a bit of effort
I was trying more for "bad things are bad"
You said it's okay for people to go from being regular conservatives to Nazis because people kept calling them Nazis. This is implied by you deflecting any attempt to put the blame on them, and by you putting all the blame on the people overusing the word.
It's actually still bad to be a Nazi (or fascist) even after being called one a whole lot, even if by very powerful institutions, even if over long periods of time.
It's also actually still bad to be a commie, even if it's the chic, avant-garde, fashionable thing that all your friends are into.
Anyway, I think you're onto something that shame is broken. It used to be an effective way to make people behave. Now, with the Internet, it's too effective. Only the shameless remain. Everyone else keeps their head down. That's why the inmates are running the asylum now.
So I guess this post may be as pointless as yours. Here I am, shaming you for shaming them for shaming others.
Can you be redeemed? or do I put you on a mental list forever of "partisan rightoid who blames the left for everything"
Can I be redeemed? or do I go on a mental list forever of "partisan leftoid who pretends not to know things"
ccc
7mo ago
Apply some symmetry to this.
It's your fault that the left is full of communists. To be specific, it's the right's fault to calling everyone they disagreed with a commie. They called Carter a commie. They called Clinton a commie. They called Obama a commie. They even called Biden a commie.
The very understandable reaction: "fuck it, you're calling me a commie, I might as well be one."
So Bernie and Mamdani and Mangione and Hasan and Chapo and CHAZ and the entire fifth columnist anti-American left is actually the right's fault for calling the left commies all the time.
This is ironically a very lefty type of argument. Blaming other people and systemic issues for personal failures.
ccc
8mo ago
Addressing your specific example:
- You probably aren't obliged to continue being friends, although this depends somewhat on the nature of the friendship. There may be some obligation to try and reconcile this difference, but if all such avenues are exhausted, then keeping your distance is sensible.
- Relaying these remarks to mutual friends is probably wrong, depending on the nature of the remarks. You almost certainly can't accurately relay their beliefs in a way that the friend will feel properly heard. You will be making assumptions. Communication is terribly difficult to do well, especially when it's things we feel strongly about. It would be arrogant and irresponsible to think you could do this well enough to excuse it as not being idle gossip.
ccc
8mo ago
Mother makes you feel safe, validates your feelings, takes care of your needs.
Father makes you feel weak, pushes you to become stronger, protects you from threats.
Neither are bad, both are required for a complete person. One could say that western culture has been overindexing on the motherly side lately. Personally I'd say both are lacking in the broader culture and so we have more broken people now than ever.
ccc
8mo ago
Debates have flaws that can be exploited, but so does every other manner of exchanging ideas. Writing off this style of debate enitrely just sounds like sour grapes.
How effective any particular debate tactic is depends on the audience. For mass appeal, sure, it's all theatrics. But convincing idiots is only useful for getting their votes or their money. They are memetic dead ends.
Politicians are optimized for this type of debating, because they're optimized for winning votes. When was the last time you heard any interesting arguments in a Presidential debate? It's not a flaw of the format, but the audience. When was last time a politician ever changed your mind? That's not their job.
Convincing intelligent people is trickier, but also a force multiplier on your ideas. Moldbug has a much smaller audience than Kirk did, but the former is more influential. Scott is even more influential. Hasan has a bigger audience than Destiny, but Destiny is more influential.
These people can't really roll over serious opposition. Look at how Rogan tried to handle Flint Dibble. Amongst Rogan's fans, Dibble was discredited. But outside that bubble, it was just another case of what everyone already knows: Rogan is a loud conspiracist with a loose grasp on reality.
People have poopooed Jubilee's surrounded format for being all theatrics, and it mostly is. But I've never seen a more metaphorical destruction than that kid telling Peterson "you're really quite nothing." The memetic power of that moment is hard to overstate. The stock of Peterson's brand of Christianity went into the toilet overnight.
The tactic of concern for me is cherry picking opponents. Kirk had been dodging Fuentes for months knowing full well a debate on Israel would leave him fumbling. Destiny has been eternally dodging debates on HBD knowing full well the subject collapses his world view. People like Tim Pool, Sam Seder, Crowder, F&F, etc. build their shows around the image of being all about open debate but only engage with opposition when they're screened as losers, i.e. mostly debate morons.
Kirk was at least holding open mic challenges in a real physical space. He could still control the frame to some degree, but much less than other formats. We'll see less of that now.
ccc
9mo ago
Why did the Trump admin officials continually claim there was a list that they were gonna be releasing beforehand?
Because he stoked the flames of this conspiracy while campaigning, and his government is a mixture of incompetent true believers and cynical yes men.
Why say he was never on Epstein's plane when we know he was on Epstein's plane?
Because Trump is a habitual liar and says whatever he thinks will benefit him.
Why are they lying about the "raw footage" that was clearly edited?
The demand for such footage outstripped supply, so they embellished what they had. The "clearly edited" parts I've seen are the missing minute and file metadata indicating editing software involved, both of which could be irrelevant technical details of how the security system works and how the file was produced. Neither are definitive evidence of tampering. Of course, tampering is still possible even in a "Epstein wasn't murdered" world if They are sufficiently worried about the mob.
ccc
11mo ago
You seem to be conflating the Tea Party and MAGA. They're not the same thing. Plenty of people were involved in both movements. That's just politics.
MAGA doesn't care about deficits. They're about to sign a $2.6T omnibus bill. Take a guess how much of that is going towards capacity for deportations.
ccc
11mo ago
The "don't tread on me" crowd is already dead and irrelevant, as if they weren't already 10 years ago.
Laws are tools for power. You don't just get one of them and say "ah, we're done, now let's just enforce it and call it a day." Did liberals stop once they got the Civil Rights Act of of 1957 passed? Civil Rights Act of 1960? Civil Rights Act of 1964? Did they call it a day then? No. Of course not. They packed courts with sympathetic judges and universities with sympathetic admins. They even got Republicans to sign off on amendments.
If you want to win, you keep passing more and more laws that get you more power until you get as much of what you want as you can get. You tear up as many enemy laws as possible. You do all of that and you do everything else you can too. Propaganda, persuasion, institutional capture. Enforcing laws you like, ignoring ones you don't. This is politics.
What you don't do is piss and shit yourself and then have a cry when that doesn't do anything.
If you want your state to do things, you need state capacity. That is reality. You might not want that, but the average MAGA voter has a laundry list of things they want their Daddy to do to their enemies.
ccc
11mo ago
They have all three branches of government and a favorable supreme court. Trump owns the party and can make all the senators and congressmen fall in line. It would be so easy to pass legislation to massively increase state capacity for audits, deportations, expedited court hearings, etc. Well, it would be easy, if the administration had any competency to work with.
But the purpose of this presidency is impotent lashing out at perceived enemies. It's all theatre and grievance politics. There's no intention of executing proper statecraft, of actually doing things. The best you can hope for is wonton destruction. That's what you get when you elect a conman.
So in one sense, no, it isn't necessary -- if they were comptent. But given they aren't, it's the only option they have.
ccc
11mo ago
This can't be overstated. Have a look at the questions she asks on Manifold. Almost all of them are about herself or about sex. Every time I hear about her it's one of those. It's so tiresome.
ccc
11mo ago
If she repents and changes her ways, I will forgive her.
Of course, this is meaningless. I am nobody. In the world of online microcelebrity culture, there is no institution that can make her this promise. Before the Internet, there were things like religious leaders that could meaningfully make this promise. Even the irreligious would usually have their censure limited to a well-defined social group with de facto leaders who could grant clemency. That's all gone now.
With the tools we have, there's only really two good options. Ignore her, or make an example out of her.
ccc
11mo ago
We should "cyberbully" celebrities more. They got into the business for attention. Well, you don't get to pick and choose what kind you get.
A celebrity has made themself an avatar, a role model for all their fans and haters. They are an object to be adored and criticized. Society learns and enforces norms by how celebrities are treated. You put your body and soul out to the world to be judged. So you shall be. Ever wonder why women are so much more interested in celebrity culture than men? Because women have always been the primary enforcers of morality.
Can't handle it? Pick another career. Go work a shitty office job like the rest of us.
Even this arrangement is unfair to the audience, because the celebrity gets to set the frame. See Taylor Swift annihilating her business rivals via social media to negotiate a better price on her master recordings. Her legion of haters are but a drop in the ocean for a celebrity with the wisdom to ignore it. They can't affect her.
What they can do, however, is affect the "discourse." They can inform and influence their friends and wider society about what the right and wrong things to do are. These are real stakes. While nerdy men will sit around and debate fruitlessly about the intricacies and nuances of books written by dead perverts, the people rebuking celebrities are out doing real, applied philosophy.
You're right from an individual's utility-maximizing perspective this makes no sense. It's irrational. It's wasted energy. So is voting. So are all manner of good deeds that will never be repaid in kind.
ccc
11mo ago
I don't know where you live that cyclists blow through red lights on the regular, but it sounds like the laws of physics should take care of that eventually. Unless you're talking about them doing it where there's clearly no traffic, in which case what's the problem? What's the danger? Are you just mad they get to and you don't?
The writer imposes the cost of attention on the reader, just as the barista imposes a cost of money onto the customer. These costs aren't the same but is not sufficient to brush that analogy off with, "Well, they are a paying customer!" There are more ways to pay than with money. There is still some level of duty a writer has not to defraud their reader, commensurate with this cost the writer imposes.
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