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crushedoranges


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 04 19:35:13 UTC

				

User ID: 111

crushedoranges


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:35:13 UTC

					

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User ID: 111

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.