crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
22d 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
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
16d ago
Let me voice the reactionary opinion: strength is good, actually.
Valuing traits that are signs of personal character - virtue, integrity, honor, personal fitness, stoicism - leads to strong individuals who lead strong societies. There is no shame in being weak: because no one is born perfect. But giving up on self-improvement, selfishly wallowing in one's own incapacity, that should be shamed, and those who make their identity of being weak should not be valued or praised.
A society that values strength will produce people of merit. A society that values weakness will produce people of no worth. People respond to material and social incentives. A middling society that attempts to equivocate between the two will only create confusion: pretending that strength is equally as valid as weakness is obviously degenerate. I'd much rather have a paternal society which encourages fortitude than a maternal one which coddles the thin-skinned. If liberals say that it's dystopian and cruel, I'll tell them to touch grass.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
But the entire point is that there is no argument being made (because even having a debate would be a concession of the nature of the topic as up for questioning.) The overall cultural milleu of the present day means that many leftists try and bludgeon their political opponents through authority, not argumentation. If a evangelical Christian showed up to a university and cited the King James Bible as an authoritative we'd all laugh at him but that happens all the time in spaces like these.
When left-wingers make grandiose claims of moral and cultural authority, they get greatly offended when I tell them that I don't accept their expertise. They don't want to get down in the weeds and fight it out because that would give the right a platform and validity, as if our positions were equal to theirs. Their counterparts on the right have to fight for every inch of ground to even be heard and they don't even want to step out of their ivory-tower citadels to engage with opinions they don't aesthetically like!
So I don't care what they think, to be perfectly honest. They can wring their hands and whinge behind my back on how mean we are all they'd like. Chekists deserve only contempt.
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
10mo ago
The comparison is in scope, not in kind. The reason there isn't a conservative Battletech is the same reason why there isn't a conservative credit-card. If the left is going to turn every conceivable facet of human existence into culture-war, things as diverse as crochet, miniature-painting, hiking, whatever - it is a total war.
Innocence (or a complete lack of relevance to politics) is no defense: they're going to come for your little comfy niche hobby eventually and cover it with rainbow paint. And unless you're willing to fight as hard as the Kiwis you'll be shoved out and marginalized and kicked out of your own communities. You can't flee. You can't abandon the high ground to the woke. You have to fight.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
From what I can tell it is so undeniably woke in that it effectively sets up a reverse caste system, enshrined into the law.
And since South America lacks the advanced institutions of the cathedral to implement this outside of the viewpoint of the majority, the Chileans have to write it into constitutional law - and exposed to the light of democracy, it withers and dies like a vampire.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
So as far as I can tell, Russia is losing this war, as it is almost a year later and they have failed to complete their objectives in forcing Ukraine back into their sphere of influence or secured territorial integrity. All observers assumed Russia would swiftly win this war, but their armies and industry are in such a shambles that they are unable to defeat the Ukrainians in the field and are reduced to terror bombing with artillery and missiles.
Against an inferior foe which they (according to Serge) have destroyed multiple times over. How could you not have great gains against a numerically and qualitatively inferior foe?
Does this sound like the strength of a great power to you?
The 'attritional strategy', so as far as I know, is a cope. There was no grand plan to grind the Ukranian resolve to fight through manpower and material because that would be planning for defeat, and even worse, planning for defeat against an inferior power. Now Russia is isolated and scraping the bottom of the barrel for allies while the entirety of the Western military-industrial complex is pumping every available resource into the country.
The Soviets, with their empire, couldn't match the American spend on military, much less all of NATO. How can the Russian Federation - a faded, declining power in comparison - hope to match a richer, larger version of the alliance? So as long as the Ukrainians want to fight, they will have the latest and greatest in NATO arms. The only hope for the Russians was to win early and decisively. If Serge's narrative is for a long war then there really is no hope of victory left - one that is worth throwing away the last of the Russian youth and prosperity.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
The fundamental bargain of neoliberal capitalism is that you'll forgo radicalism, tribalism, and religiosity in exchange for bourgeoise prosperity. It worked, until the gains of industrializing the world ran out.
The internet didn't cause the problem, it just makes it obvious that A) everyone is getting poorer and B) your elites still expect deference for riches they no longer provide.
So why care for a system that no longer works for you? Why care for global prosperity when you're getting none of it? When you bear the burden of upholding the order?
Populism will prevail, and the world will burn while the Americans prosper off the chaos.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
I think the attitude of 'everything is idpol except for this one particular issue which I've pulled out of the Dirty Bourgie Left and is sacred above all others' is the most annoying part. If he was a doctrinaire orthodox Marxist-Leninist who scorned it as false consciousness it would be still annoying but it would be logically consistent.
But instead he twists himself into a loop trying to justify it. Has anyone asked him, given the choice between transgender rights and utopic Communism, which would he choose? I think he'd twist in the wind in pure agony.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
California is a petri dish as to why progressive policy is incredibly stupid and counter-intuitive. In short, there is an entire class of activist rent-seekers whose job is to extract concessions from any new development, no matter how ruinous or stupid it may be. It is a kafkaesque gong show which even the schlerotic Soviet bureaucracy would compare well to. Imagine that in order to improve or change anything in California, you have a librum veto of which anyone can cancel the whole project. But instead of a congress of corrupt noblemen, you have a collection of junkies, homeless people, and rich white liberals - all of which despise each other but unified in hatred of you, who has the audacity to attempt to turn a decrepit coin laundry into an apartment block.
It is a miracle, frankly, that anything in California is built at all.
To take a unorthodox (and decidedly un-feminist) perspective on the matter: elite men.
Feminism is a product of industrial civilization. It is inherently bourgeoise in origin: look up the lists of suffragettes and their ranks are plucked mostly from the emerging middle-class. In this general atmosphere of awakening political consciousness, a small group of women desired to have the political rights of rich men. Keep in mind that universal male suffrage was in the process of rolling out around the world: female suffrage was only a natural evolution of this if you subscribe to Whig history!
The anti-suffragettes (cut out of the historical narrative) correctly saw this as dividing the vote of a household, of fragmenting the family unit, and bringing politics into the realm of the home. And the first legislative policy that could be said to laid at the feet of these suffragette organizations in America? Prohibition.
There are always those who scheme of changing the nature of the electorate to accomplish their policy goals - rather than convincing the existing demos of the necessity for change. The further a woman is 'liberated' from structures of faith, tribe, and family, the more energy can be devoted to political endeavors. A politician could hardly care that his female constituents are unhappy or are childless - in the atomized, liberal worldview, she is only as valuable as her vote, and as a foot soldier for the causes of the day. The women who would form the base of community and social life are instead cannibalized into the great Molochian machine of modernity, a bonfire of social capital.
It is ultimately a project to alienate woman from loving their families, their neighbors, the people they live with. And for what? To throw them into a cosmic conflict against a perverse scapegoat of the hated masculine - a struggle that is eternal as it is unwinnable. And it is supported in the west because it creates a potent voting bloc to hammer plebian men into submission. It is not elite women who are living lives of independence from men: they get married as quickly as possible and raise their children with all the resources that they can bring to bear. By supporting ever further Hobbesian freedom into insanity, elite men gain a patina of virtue. They promulgate values that they do not personally practice: in addition to gaining a harem of strivers from the middle-class of which he can casually discard at a whim.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
There was an article in the constitution that had a provision for a separate system (justice, medical, schooling) for the Mapuche people - which, at best, would be Jim Crow. At worst, it would be the effective division of the country on ethnic grounds.
And that's not even the worst of it, really. The whole thing reads like a wish list of the globalist progressive left, and what's even worse is that it's 178 pages long with 378 articles. Such a byzantine constitution would be contested at every turn, and give way too much pressure on the weak legal institutions to adjudicate well... everything. The Economist does a pretty [good] (https://archive.ph/wbzDZ) write up on it.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
A very well done write up.
I only say that judging by what I've heard, the Finns and Sami have had historically amicable relations and the imposition of brain-rot anti-colonialist narratives has created a granularity of identity which previously did not exist. (How many Finns went off into the wilderness over the centuries? How many Sami settled and became identical to their neighbors over the generations?)
Isn't this a fairer, more egalitarian way of things? Bothering with blood quantums, with ancient lists? Why impose a progressive view on race where the historical arrangement was of no controversy whatsover? Are we supposed to enforce a strict separation of ethnicities, that people cannot pass from one group to another by marriage and blood? Is that not racist?
They are neighbors of linguistically similar language isolates: they have literally been kissing cousins for thousands - if not tens of thousands - of years. The Sami are not Amerindians! It's stupid. It's very stupid.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
It is my impression that in the vague direction of the general left people are not in favor of things like climate change, and the driving of cars that encourages such processes. If people don't feel safe taking public transit because of addicts and dealers, is that not a problem? Is it not an injury to the public to have one's public spaces smelling of urine and strewn with stray needles?
The new urbanist movement is attempting to shame people into using public transit, at the same time it refuses to make it usable and safe. Revealed preferences shows that it is a bipartisan consensus that one should not expose one's children to schizophrenic lunatics and drug dealers, and women prefer not to go home late at night around the urban lumpenproles.
And somehow they cling to the notion that it's a 'car-centric culture', when it is so clearly a output of clear material incentive. How could so many smart people be so stupid?
Authoritarianism is not 'whenever the state uses force'. If the government is not going to solve these social cancers with its monopoly on force it is weak and ineffectual and the people are not bootlickers or Hitlerites for wanting it fixed. Imprisoning addicts and killing the dealers is preferable to the status quo of letting them do whatever they want, and as populists in other countries have proven: if liberal governments don't solve the problem and just waffle in useless progressive policy a strongman will eventually come along and do it for them.
The frustration is reaching a boiling point: it is a warning to people of progressive, libertarian ideals: you are running out of time to implement policy, and you do not have infinite time or public resources to waste. Sadly, I doubt anyone in power will heed it.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
They're writing political screeds on obscure political forums out of the sight of the eye of Sauron.
Do you have something to tell the class?
crushedoranges
1yr ago
There's a psychic cost that urbanists miss: namely, that public transit replaces the labor of driving with a lack of agency. Aside from the obvious downside of longer trips: whether you get there or not is out of your control. The wariness of being in a public space, of watching your possessions, of keeping your eye out for the urban lumpenproletariat - it's stressful in its own way.
Once again we return to the revealed preference of most people: when given the choice between the public commons and paying money and labor for a private space, they elect for the latter.
Oh, boy, it's time for the annual political spin and deflection season!
I'm going to dispense with any poll-tracking or statistic-tealeaf-reading and go with my gut here. I think the Republicans will gain the senate while Dems squeak by in the house, making no one happy and reverting the system back to the 2nd-term Obama status quo. This is good for dramacoin. Nothing makes Americans more politically engaged when their legislature starts throwing DNS errors. The imperial presidency grinds on...
'22 is only significant, in my mind, as the pre-season for Trump Strikes Back '24. Fetterman and Oz is a preview of a greater contest, between a mental invalid and a scruple-less grifter. As much as my little accelerationist heart quivers at the idea of the VP debating Trump, it's most likely that we are witnessing the Last of the Boomer Civic Nationalists fight it out. The last of the people who value a liberal rules-based international order will croak in the next eight years.
God help us all.
Who will gain control of America's imperial hegemonic power? The right-populists, or the left-populists? Will the civil war be averted for another generation, or will it happen in my lifetime? The fate of the nation may very well be decided on which geriatric old man has a fatal stroke first. What you see today in politics - the insanity, the terror - this is not the nadir of the republic's fortunes: it is merely the threshold unto the abyss.
In time, we will look upon the misfortunes of our day as a golden age lost to time and tragedy.
But perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps electing corpses is the future of American politics. We have the technology to continue the life of brain-dead patients indefinitely. In the Oval Office, there is a mighty chair beneath the Resolute Desk, a Golden Throne, that will sustain the president's life for as long as it needs to be. A thousand infants are sacrificed each year to feed the device's need for adenochrome, perpetuating the beacon of boomer power from Washington, DC forever.
Anything to avoid electing someone from Gen X.
crushedoranges
6mo ago
Seconded. This seems important enough to get a megathread for - if the Rittenhouse and Floyd 'events' were noteworthy enough to partition, this seems surely equal to that bar.
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
1yr ago
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Sagan
All arguments in this vein are fallacious, insomuch that every problem can be obfuscated into higher-order abstractions. It's a favorite argument of progressive liberals because it dovetails nicely into an intersectional viewpoint of the world. This is how every conceivable problem is the fault of the current structure of society and why a revolution is necessary before a single iota of progress can be done. Yes, we're hard at work at the revolution. We can't solve the murder problem until Every. Last. White. Male. is brought to account. But until then you'll have to deal with the scent of urine in the cities and the free-range drug addicts.
...but to be more serious, I don't believe anyone who says this. I don't believe that people who can't solve the murder problem to be capable of solving the societal inequity problem. Anyone who tells you that society needs to do better before the incredibly basic functions of a state can be resolved thinks you are a credulous moron to be exorted of social capital. They are the same people who will tell you, with the same logic, that you can't solve the lunch problem until you solve world hunger.
No thank you, I will go to the fast food court and buy a meal while the great minds slowly starve to death: perhaps when all of the social reformers have passed away we can solve our own problems.
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
10mo 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
1yr ago
Don't give them too much credit.
The attention once given to family and children has been re-invested into politics and labor. That's the logic of bourgeoise democracy: every possible constituency must be broken up and dissolved into its smallest parts, so that they may be set against each other in the war of all versus all.
Women are just such a potent bloc that it is impossible to leave them politically inactive. As the largest part of a potential demos that can be activated, elites around the world came to the same conclusion independently: it was expedient to support feminism in support of their aims.
But it is a gamble that has increasingly diminishing returns. You can say that every wave of feminism is an attempt to increase the radicalization of women and increase their engagement with politics and the work force. But there is only so much you can socially engineer - and so much consciousness you can dump into an overloaded mind - before the birth rates plummet for good.
Because of political expediency, women were not so much freed from the home as pushed out of it, and now it is impossible for blue and white collar women to start a family with any sort of timeliness. It was not to their benefit, or to society's benefit: and the same geniuses behind these sociological schemes now seek to outsource birthing to the third world to make up for their own injuries to women as a sex.
It will not end well.
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.
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