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
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
9mo ago
No.
Or rather, it doesn't matter if your baseline is of low intelligence so as long as you have a talented tenth that actually runs things. Sure, you wouldn't be able to get the results of higher SD nations, but you can get something like modern-day Rwanda or Ethiopia going. Not great, but certainly above the (admittedly low) norm.
What is far more impactful is the threat of pernicious ideomemes like communism. You can throw as much high-iq Asians and Slavic technocrats at it to no avail. Even the most degenerate of African states are paradises to say, Pol Pot's Cambodia. Communism, in terms of HBD, is equalivant to a primal reversion to humanity's primate ancestors, an intellect-shredding machine. Even if one must accept the premises of HBD, it gives one hope that the right ideomeme can produce results out of porportion of one's intellectual talents, but we haven't discovered the right solution yet.
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?
More of how drugs turn normal people into monsters that seek to replicate their misery. They superficially resemble the person they once were, but something new and horrible blossoms inside of them.
And yeah, you could try and cure it. But that only solves it on the individual level. The alien queen is still alive, and there are fools who advocate for her to get corporate citizenship. What's the point in spending half a million dollars trying to get a addict clean (and failing more than half the time) when a drug dealer can get a new victim hooked for the price of a happy meal?
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
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.
crushedoranges
16d ago
The very credibility of the LIO and the West in general is at stake. If Ukraine loses, then it's a green light to all with revanchist ambitions. Too much national honor has been put on the line by feckless politicians, who have entangled their political fates to this insignificant front. There's no room for pragmatism.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I just wanted to make the distinction that being a contrarian is merely being against the prevailing wisdom. It doesn't imply action, only disagreement.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's a slightly gamified version of D&D 5e. An accurate representation of the roleplaying game, but it diminishes how fun it is. (The lack of simulataneous turns is the real killer.)
crushedoranges
4mo ago
I can only comment on its aesthetic qualities but it very much feels like a raising, a visual bump in the text that is not as grating as italics or bold but still noticable. Kind of like braille.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I'd like to chime in from my lurker position and say that this is a good thing, in that this forum was obviously not for him - insomuch as he resolutely did not want to have his mind changed. Not knowing him personally, I'd say that my experience with him is that he resolutely held his ground and never conceded any point. Even if his opponent struck a point, he would ignore it.
And that's fine - if you have consequentialist priors. If you're convinced something is good and is the basis of your moral reality, then evidence and argumentation to the contrary will seem like sophistry. But he was made by his times. The simple fact is that it's been a decade since SSC first started going. His Bush-era anecodotes and rambles are very dated. Quite simply, he became old. Everything is postmodern to him because it is.
He was no longer 'with it'. As Simpsons says, it happened to him. It will happen to all of us.
And by God's grace, I hope I will carry myself with more dignity.
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
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
10mo ago
I actually do make things: I'm a writer, but the content I make is perhaps too spicy for here, being 4chan-adjacent. :P
crushedoranges
11mo ago
Union leadership has been captured by socialist activists and politicians as to be completely alienated from their working-class roots. There's a reason why unions are marginal parts of the leftist coalitions now - outside of regime-adjacent bodies like teachers and civil servants, blue color labor has little real power. If they did, you think that NAFTA would have ever flown?
crushedoranges
30d ago
Date two attractive people at the same time, then your life will get super exciting. I think part of the appeal of adultery is that the elaborate double life is thrilling. Since you've got more income, you can go on twice the dates! Repeat until you're a bog-standard rationalist polygamist.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
Others had already answered the question, so I felt that adding the historical content would be more helpful than digging up the old SSC post that introduced the concept to the rat sphere in the first place.
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.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
Mainstream media is picking it up: CNN, Telegraph, Washington Post. Even Russia Today has an article!
Oh baby, it's on!
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
7mo ago
But it is hypocrisy. What Marxists call attempting to resolve the contradictions of capitalism, and what fascists of every stripe call parasitism. And they are correct in their critique that it solves nothing: there is still inequality and no amount of welfarism will remove it.
Now, you can see this as necessary process of the churn of liberal democracy. That's a kind way to look at it. But, and correct me if I misrepresent you, the essence of your response (and what many liberals would also say) is that "I am okay with a permanently unequal society, so as long as it makes token efforts to make me more comfortable living in it."
Which is a... worldview.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
I honestly don't know. I admit that although I am anti-liberal, I am aware that being able to critique a system by no means gives you the expertise or authority to suggest a replacement. It may be indeed that liberalism is the best performant system human beings have come up so far while simultaneously incubating authoritarianism within its ideological framework because of its contradictions. If there's a formulation of liberalism that can square the circle, I would like to learn of it, because I like having liberal rights in general.
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.
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