crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Checks and balances does not mean that your political enemies don't get to do any of their agenda. Sometimes in a democracy things happen you don't like. The judiciary is the least democratic institution in the American republic, the least accountable. If the President defies the judiciary and Congress supports him then the President gets his way. That's the part of checks and balances you probably don't like, and that's probably how it's going to end.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
I have seen too many anthro german shepherds in suspicious outfits to say that he would not be in good company if he did make the change.
It's not that I wasn't sympathetic before. I too, was on the left. But that was fifteen years ago. I feel at this point that everyone persuadable has already decamped and we are in the last stages of Schmittian hyperwar. I can't imagine sharing common ground with those on the left who call TW a fascist. They live in their own partisan hyperreality and attempting to convert them is like being a Christian missionary to the Sentinelese.
I'm sorry. There is no way to survive. You have to pick your lane, or you end up like James Damore. If I have to make a choice between the twitter racists and the race communists, I'm siding with the former over the latter every time. It's not a great choice. But it's better than refusing to acknowledge that one has to make a choice at all.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
No. Obviously not.
Yes.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it: I feel that I have an infinitely easier and gladder task of convincing partisans of my ideological bent to come around to reason then TW does for theirs. Not everyone on my side is an honest truthteller. We have our share of witches and evil liars. But there's the kind of lies that make you feel the ick, and the kind of lies that make planes fall out of the sky. One is a more egregious imposition on reality than the other.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
The fact that TracingWoodgrains doesn't fully come over to the right because of this and doggedly is determined to stay in the principled center makes me completely unsympathetic. So as far as I'm concerned, they're stuck between the icky chuds like me who know it's a problem but have aesthetically unpleasant views and the other kind of people who stick their heads in the sand in the face of overwhelming evidence. People who will bald-facedly lie even when you bring the smoldering gun, the receipt, and a signed confession are bad people.
And despite all of this... they are more aligned with the latter kind of people then the former.
I will make a prediction now: TW will still be hacking at this ten years from now, doing their enlightened centrist gig, making no progress. Because the liberals they are trying to convince don't really exist: they are trying to persuade a species of extinct men who could be swayed by reason and good faith.
But how does this affect you personally? Think of it this way.
We are prairie dogs watching humans test atomic bombs. The kulturekampf is fundamentally the clash of inhuman worldviews, as impersonal and inscrutable as the forces binding subatomic particles together. As individuals, there is very little we can do to affect the outcome, unless we use our fifteen minutes in the right place at the right time.
But not all worldviews are created equally.
As distasteful and terrible the new regime may seem to be... it is closer to consensus-reality than its ideological opposite. It benefits you to live in a regime that believes in up and down and left and right. Men can't be women. There is no infinite money printer. The liberal world order is dead and gone and it's time to move on. It never benefits you to live under a regime that has delusional principles, even if makes your bellyfeel cozy.
It's easy to be cynical and just shrug it off as mere partisanry. But the left has been more dangerously deluded for a long time now. Sure, the right may be cruel in their revenge, but nothing they can do is worse than the shattering of the illusion of the end of history. That in of itself is a crime that will never be forgiven by the left, but the right was never obliged to participate in its perpetuation.
Is it cruel to tell someone they have to fight for everything they took for granted? Perhaps. But my side began that journey a decade ago. What can I say? You're not going to convince to stop anytime soon. I am full of hubris. I will die someday, but today is glory and triumph.
It is my opinion that the sowing should be followed up by the reaping.
Namely, if they knock down all the checks and balances, formal and informal, in the pursuit of what they believe is good: and then this house of cards they made falls into the hands of their enemies. How foolish they were! Those rules were not to protect their enemies, or to bar what was right. It was to protect themselves.
No, they don't get to stand on principles. Because in this moment, they are not lamenting the death of the republic. They are weeping because all the enemies they have made in their ascent are waiting for them at the bottom. Their only regret is that they didn't get away with it. If they didn't want to live in Schmittian friend-enemy world they should have lived up to the liberal principles they so callously abandoned.
What follows will not be happy, or even pleasant. But it will be indisputably just.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
All is right in the world. Everything has returned to normal. In this moment, there is no doom or ill will: one is given enough room to hope.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Okay, but can it be their side that does the virtuous losing and my side that does the vicious winning? I'm content with that state of affairs. They can win as many moral victories as they like and I can have the actual victories.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
It should be the goal and ambition of every man to have his grandchildren scorn him as a villain and imperialist, knowing that they live lives of supreme comfort and ease to feel guilt over the transcendent elevation over the unwashed masses of the global diversity.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Judith Butler is putting an unbounded demand for empathy as default and defining everything else as cruelty. You can't get it with me anymore. I can see the transparent attempt at manipulation. I didn't want to be a cruel person, but if I want anything for myself I have to be. Empathy requires reciprocal return. Why should I care for people who hate me and want to see me destroyed?
crushedoranges
5mo ago
I think there's a difference between performance and fidelity: that we, as humans, want to optimize towards human-like (because it closely matches our own subjective experience).
Emulators can upscale Super Mario 64 to HD resolutions, but the textures remain as they were. (I believe there are modpacks that fix the problem, but that's another thing.) Resolution probably isn't the best correlation to IQ, but I would argue that part of the subjective human experience is to be restricted within the general limit of human intelligence. Upscaling our minds to AGI-levels of processing power would probably not look great, or produce good results.
There's only so far you can go to alter software (the human mind, in our analogy) before it becomes, measurably, something else. Skyrim with large titty mods and HD horse anuses is not the same as the original base. There's only so much we can shim the human mind into the transcendant elements of the singularity. Eventually, the human race will have to make the transition the hard way.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Raw horsepower arguments are something I'm familiar with, as an emulation enthusiast. I would say that the human brain - for all its foibles - is difficult to truly digitize with current or even future technology. (No positronic brains coming up anytime soon.) In a way, it is similar to the use case of retrogaming - an analogy I will attempt to explain.
Take for example the Nintendo 64. No hardware that exists currently can emulate the machine better than itself, despite thirty years of technological progression. We've reached the 'good enough' phase for the majority of users but true fidelity remains out of reach without an excessive amount of tweaks and brute force. If you're a purist, the best way to play the games is on the original hardware.
And human brains are like that: unlike silicon, idiosyncratic in its own way. Gaming has far surpassed the earliest days of 3D, in a similar way AGIs will surpass human intellect. But there's many ways to extend the human experience that are not based on raw performance. The massive crash in the price of flash memory has created flash cartridges that hold the entire system's library on a single SD card. It is not so different from having a perfect memory, for instance. I wouldn't mind offloading my subjective experiences into a backup, and having the entire human skill set accessible with the right reconfiguration.
Even if new technology makes older forms obsolescent, I'm sure that AIs - if they are aligned with and have similar interests to us - will have some passing interest in such a thing, much as I have an interest in modding my Game Boy Color. Sure, it will never play Doom Eternal. But that's not the point. Preserving the qualia of the experience of limitations is in of itself worthwhile.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Yeah, that too. (My examples would be more on the Soviets.)
The overall point is that the architects of the post-war order did this: to question the righteousness of this cracks the very basis of our political morality. There's really no reason why, after expelling Germans for the holocaust, we can't expel the Palestinians.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Was the expulsion of the Volga and Prussian Germans from their lands a moral stain on Americans forever?
"Oh, it was different" - no, it wasn't. It was exactly the same case. No one can argue with the results. And the Germans don't have a violent blood feud with America in the present day. Ethnic cleansing is a tool in the toolkit. And it works.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Neither of those are elected bodies. If the demos can't overrule bureaucrats or judges, you don't live in a democracy. I would be more sympathetic to the rule of law argument if those said institutions hadn't been trampling over them with their own regulations and rulings - again, with no democratic input whatsoever.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Well, it seems like people like me - or people who think like me - can name a number: zero. Consider the epistemic sin of easily preventable deaths on the heads of people who refuse to name a number.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
But, and let me emphasise here: that you could come up with righteous explanations for every single bit of aid that the United States currently pays for, summed all together to be unlimited money to be given to foreigners. You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life. You could justify anything.
Can you name a limit? Can you name a terminus where the taxpayer money not going to a cause isn't a crime to humanity? Is there a cost to benefit ratio where an African life simply isn't worth saving? If you can't give a number, then we are merely engaged in moral epicycles.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Paying the tithe to the church or the zakat to the mosque or any of the many ways of religious giving is nowhere near the same as the modern nation-state piss pot of foreign aid. It isn't the same, and to equivocate it is such an astonishing rhetorical flourish that its sheer chutzpah must be admired. No, the American NGO industrial complex is not a moral agent of generosity like thousands of years of religious charity.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
No, Scott is dumb, and I've only realized it in the past few years: you can always find reasons to wring out more blood and treasure saving African lives, but left unsaid: are the lives of the modal African worth saving? In particular, the kind of African that grits his penis to tear bloody cuts into a woman's vagina?
It's odd that those who would condemn a man to the eternal pits of progressive damnation for the slightest of errors would support such a practice. You could say that they don't intend that, but that's the practical outcome of their efforts. The F-35 may be a boondoggle but it doesn't have the moral catastrophe of spreading AIDS.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Scott says something dumb about ordo amoris
Even knowing what he is talking about and his moral principles behind saying such a thing, he comes off as dumb. I've never agreed with Scott with everything (particularly his polyamorist leanings) but I think that this is the final breaking with SSC and myself. Rationalism is a train that I've ridden for ten years, and now I am finally getting off. Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
I'm not sure what use 'soft power' is if you can't do something as simple as returning a country's citizens back to their homeland.
That's what all the liberals are whining about on twitter and reddit, about American international standing.
Not like they already hold America in contempt, and blame them for all their problems. Dumb South American leftists.
It feels like international relations majors are jerking themselves off to the concept of a rules based international order.
When you govern for results instead of the approval of an international global elite, the difference in outcomes is obvious.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
The cartels are impressive in organization and sophistication. For Latin America. But no one outfucks the US military. No one out-economies the US stock market. They're not Islamist fanatics, and neither does the US need to do a long-term occupation. Removing the cartels from power may not be an viable option, but that isn't necessary. They just have to stay in Mexico. If they don't, they can get phone bombed like Hezbollah, and I don't think anyone will shed a tear.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
I know. I don't personally believe in that definition, which is why I steelmanned it.
But it's revealing that even this common deflection falls apart if you even spend a moment thinking about it. Adding allyship to this interaction includes those white knights.
The judiciary doesn't have any formal mechanism to enforce a ruling upon the executive branch other than by tradition and precedent. If he makes unlawful, unconstitutional orders, Congress has reason to impeach him. But if Congress doesn't want to impeach him, then he gets away with it. It really is that simple. What do you want the judiciary to do? Send in the US Marshals, start a civil war?
Now perhaps there's a constitutional argument to go against whatever the president is doing. Certainly you could make a case for anything. But the vesting clause is very clear that the President is endowed with the full powers of the office. The Supreme Court will not suddenly make a ruling that will formalize any sort of control on the executive branch.
Do you have an argument to bring to bear against the unitary executive? How is the presidency supposed to work? Is there a strong legal theory behind the ability of fifty state judges to have a veto over the President?
More options
Context Copy link