crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
16d ago
At this point, I don't even think that there is a geopolitical goal in supporting Ukraine, but a reflexive conservatism regarding the liberal project. Putin violated the post-Cold War consensus, eroded the Liberal International Order, and he Must Be Punished (even if it would be against the national interest.) The Europeans had 25 years to keep peace on the continent and failed. They failed in the Yugoslav wars and they're failing in Ukraine now.
Even if you accept the claim that respecting the sovereignity and territorial integrity of states is an end in of itself, the time to do that was in 2008, with Georgia, and 2014, with Crimea. Or heck, 1998, with Kosovo. The Russians have never forgiven NATO for supporting a seperatist state within their sphereling, and is happy to pay them the wages of hypocrisy.
But even with all this, I am still pro-West, because Putin is not a realist actor, but a map-painter, who justifies atrocities with dusty history books. He's not pushing back against NATO's expansion in his sphere, but reclaiming historical clays. Motivations are important in geopolitics, and irrational actors shouldn't be tolerated.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
This is an unfair argument.
Take Kiwi Farms, for example. You could extend your argument you make, smugly saying: 'make your own payment processor, make your own DNS, make your own web-host.' The left extends controls over previously neutral institutions and you say 'why not make your own?' Why not make your own laws, your own bank, your own country? Your own autonomous sovereignty, right-wingers?
Imagine my face: it is a chiseled, manly expression, saying YES.
All culture war issues are essentially coup-complete ones now because of the left's influence over the government and the media. If you want to keep the globohomo out of your Battletech: you must first overthrow the US government.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
The woke live in the paradoxical confluence of complete confidence in the state's power to bring about their wishes while living in constant culture struggle against its enforcers. It's like being a sovereign citizen, but sometimes saying the right gibberish does make things happen. Just because in the West authority has become completely abstracted from force doesn't mean that the authority's power no longer requires it. The demos has great power that yet sleeps, yet.
If laws are passed that make people criminal, perhaps more people should be criminals: if you're the kind of person who wants to possess a gun you're already an enemy of the state: the bureaucracy just hasn't caught up with you yet.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
In my opinion - as a writer myself - is that right now, AI is approximately at the level of your average competently-written fanfiction, which is a big problem for Hollywood because they write below that level.
As we've seen in recent years, so-called professional scriptwriters have been putting out utter shit on the big screen and prestige TV that fans of the work would often (and do!) write superior takes for free, on the internet. The only thing that separates the two are gatekeeping and connections in the notoriously nepotistic and corrupt Hollywood system.
SAG and SAW fundamentally rely on the studio system for their collective bargaining to make any sense. As soon as photorealistic 3D generative animation gets off the ground, there will be no corporate giants for them to leech off. They see a future where automated scabs run them out of business, and I can't blame them. The mediocre products they produce can in no way compete.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
You are being uncharitable, and what is more, you are incredulous. The number, of course, is 57%*
*on the high end. 31% is the lower bound.
and that is the first link I found for 'women rape fantasy percentage'. Do you... not look up public studies on the internet for things you would like to know, or do you prefer to remain blissfully unaware?
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Watership Down. Or, if they have a higher tolerance for reading, Dune. (Those who are already playing Warhammer 40k can read Starship Troopers.) If they're more of a nonfiction type Machieveli's The Prince is concise and relevant. Art of War and On War are good for leadership.
crushedoranges
30d ago
What has always frustrated me about Freddie is that he gets it, he really does, but at the last possible moment he crimestops himself and reaffirms his loyalty to the progressive agenda. It's never the fault of progressivism that it fails in practice: it's the no-good grifters who corrupt it away from Real Communism.
crushedoranges
5d ago
But, seeing as it is functionally a non-universal principle that must be adjudicated based on arbitrary definitions of oppressed and oppressor, isn't it just post-hoc rationalization? (Adolf Hitler, great advocate of social justice: taking from the Jewish bourgoise oppressors and giving to the German proletariat.)
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Your point would be better if Yud was a prophet in the wilderness, but instead, he's an influential idiot who has influence in the development of LLMs (and whatever AGIs emerge from their development.) It would be like having a board member on Intel who wants to make their chips hotter and slower. He's past the point of contrarianism: he's a Yuddite.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
If you don't want to be called the L-word you must turn in the janitor badge. Anyone based enough to have cool opinions would never consider the job of internet moderator.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
I disagree!
Although the Declaration of Independence is not a document with any legal force nowadays, I deem it a good marker of what the best Enlightenment thinking of the time was going for. They really did believe that God made man equal. But God has evaporated from the public commons, and we're left with the equality.
I have met many liberals who say that if we only committed more national resources to welfarism, we'd emerge in the promised land. Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary? Is that the 'huge effort' you refer to? If not, then how much money exactly should go into patching up the liberal project, into perpetuity?
crushedoranges
8d ago
If drug addiction is closer to alien chestburster syndrome then the common cold then that enables a wide variety of policy proscriptions considered too draconian in the west today.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
Ibn Kaldun was an Arab sociologist (the first of his field) and, exceptionally for a man of his time, did not accept the 'god willed it' explanation for why the Rashidun Caliphate collapsed. He came up with a term to describe the social cohesiveness and trust of society that degraded over time (of which I would call social capital).
It serves as a warning to elites who assume a high-trust society is a given: that abusing one's legitimacy by acting in arbitrary ways will lead to the decline and decay of one's empire, no matter how divinely guided. A bourgeoise state is reliant on high societal trust for contract enforcement and stability for business. It is the exceptional malefactor that would burn this trust for a temporary boost to quarterly figures.
crushedoranges
3d ago
In one hundred years your shitposts will be taken seriously by the intellectuals of the time.
crushedoranges
14d ago
I don't know who Rufo is, and I'm deep, as it were, in the shit.
Something new you learn every day.
I am puzzled that you believe natural selection is an all-encompassing concept that includes human efforts at selective breeding. It is not a prescriptive term. Humans are not predisposed to select favorable traits from flora and fauna: in fact, it is a social technology that arose from cultural, not biological origins. Insomuch as the word 'natural' is used, it is to distinguish from human and non-human effect on selection pressure. If you object to the anthropocentric viewpoint that puts humanity above nature as a privileged observer, then say so. But that doesn't make natural selection any less valid. It is not a just so explanation that you may have encountered in the softer social sciences, like evo psych. It is also backed by voluminous research and math and hundreds of thousands of papers (literally, the entire field of modern biology.)
If you believe that natural selection is tautological because it is obvious, then you work against history. It was not obvious to the ancients (although parts of it were certainly guessed independently from agricultural folkways) and even in modern times it was denied for ideological reasons (creationism, lysenkoism.) No one is in love with Darwin, as you claim. Of all the theories on the diversity and variety of biological life, it has proved to be the most useful and applicable to science and industry.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I'm not a libertarian, personally, but I don't think libertarians have the goal of society of driving humanity forward or progressivism of any sort. Some of them do, but that is adjacent to libertarianism. They just want a government that can defend property rights from outsiders and arbitrate disputes between insiders. You can't make a critique of liberal morality to libertarianism because they consider it in the domain of the individual and not the government.
A libertarian will tell you if you want to change the world, become an angel investor, or if you lack the means, purchase stock in the most forward-thinking companies. Or even better, start your own. Not demand the government to do so. And this is entirely consistent within their world view. Just because you don't like it or clutch your pearls about the second order consequences doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to a libertarian.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's a classic, but it's also wrong, and I'm tired of seeing it repeated as an aphorism.
Take Einstein, who is good at physics but bad at designing refrigerators and being President of Israel. If you care about keeping your food cold and being an effective advocate for Israeli interests, he'd seem pretty stupid to you. If you judged a doctor on his handwriting or a parapalegic on his ability to run, they'd seem stupid, too.
Outside of partisan politics, it is indeed possible for someone to be incredibly stupid in something and incredibly smart in another. Linus Pauling recommending superdoses of vitamin C. Noam Chomsky in anything that has to do with politics. Ben Carson in literally every category but neurosurgery. We know that these contradictions exist in real life, that these nuances do happen, not just with people, but with groups.
But then the quippy liberal says 'fascists blah blah, weak and strong', as if it means anything, if it isn't just them quoting something trite and banal and passing it off as wisdom if you don't think about it for more than a minute.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's why I believe that Trump isn't a blathering moron and is, at worst, a clever amateur who is intelligent enough to see the end result of policy that its own proponents have cleverly ducked around. If abortion is murder, then why not arrest the mother? We arrest infanticides and infant abandoners, don't we? That it is politically unpalatable and bad optics is one thing, but perhaps it is a natural consequence of unpopular policy.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
From what my admittedly lacking research tells me is that there was an initial, 'strong' version of the constitution that did enshrine them as rights, but the finance department took one look at the figures for such a welfare program and said 'no way, we can't afford it.'
So they were degraded into nonbinding 'directive principles', so it has the weight and pomp of one's Amazon wish list. But still, it is a relic of the strong Catholicism that was once strong in Ireland, which the government is now desperately trying to remove.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It requires a certain mindset that is obsessed about map-painting and an interest in history.
If you read those books and then proceed to completely ignore their lessons and substitute a vague Fukuyamist neoconservatism, of course you wouldn't learn anything. I would say that the American political establishment have a desire for both lengthy wars and wars of ideological vagueness and impossible aims (what does spreading democracy even mean, in an ethnically divided country?) that both books warn against.
If, on the net, reading those books turns you into someone who disagrees with the ghouls in the State Department, then it's a net win.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Alberta is the standout but Saskatchewan and Manitoba are no slouches either: as global warming progresses the US agricultural zones slowly creep northward. All of our Ukrainians have historically lived there, as well.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
'legitimate victimhood?'
Are you like, the edgy version of the Republican boomer that says 'Democrats are the real racists?' 'Wokes are the real oppressors?'
If you define wokeness by that parameter it means on some level you've functionally accepted the priors of critical theory and therefore are not particularly based in any aspect. Cringe indeed.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
Well, of course. It is implicit.
But bringing up this fact ignores the past thousand years of political development, namely, that we live in the era that states have monopolies on force. It brings to mind the sort of self-representing lawsuit maker who smugly brings up the Magna Carta at his trial for tax evasion. Yes, we understand the principle, but it's not very useful for our purposes.
Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder. And through this lense we extend this sense of self to the material (private property) and the abstract (autonomy of action.) Unless you are so radical that you say you have the right to kill anyone you please.
Which, of course, is fine. But then I'd have to report you for strange notions.
Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.
The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.
A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.
B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.
C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.
But...
A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore
B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...
C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.
This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.
The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.
The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.
A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.
Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.
Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?
I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.
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