netstack
Texas is freedom land
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User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
The Venn diagram between “thinks SJ is existentially dangerous” and “has given up on liberalism” is damn close to a circle. Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window. You can thank the Nazis and the Soviets and maybe the television for that cultural antibody.
No, game-theoretic excuses for genocide are limited to a really tiny subset of the conversation. The kind of subset that hangs around on Internet forums. I’d go as far as to suggest it’s mostly branding, signaling, a Molochian race to the bottom for viewers and clout. The Venn diagram between these people and actual capacity for violence is, thankfully, even smaller. Incentives work, and the liberal social order makes random violence deeply unappealing.
There is a much larger constituency which wouldn’t piss on their enemies if they were on fire. That’s not a response suited to an existential threat. It’s bog-standard tribalism, the sort that liberalism kind of sort of suborned.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I’d say suicide-by-Antarctica is a lot more trouble than suicide-at-home…but this is the UK we’re talking about.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Wikipedia says it was inspired by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but I’d believe that too.
I really need to read Homage to Catalonia.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Man, fascism used to be hip and happening.
Where can I read more about this? None of the related articles have anything to say on the subject.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Much like Moldbug’s “demotism,” that model sounds dramatic, but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The bits which resemble each other are not the ones with explanatory power.
If nothing else, the U.S. comes out way ahead on body count. We have a distinct lack of Holocaust or Holodomor or Great Leap Forward. Surely that reflects a difference in methodology.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
More than one, certainly.
I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily arrive, but I believe (allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive...[it is] a show...[of the] perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realisable in communism and fascism.
Dude hated the Soviet Union; he was also pretty unhappy with getting bombed for years.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I would argue that he has been doing this with remarkable consistency since his first term.
But perhaps that messaging is what it takes to win a contract?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
It’s incredible how Orwell wrote something which, no matter one’s political affiliation, candidly describes one’s outgroup.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I think you may have hit a new low for how “fun” your cases are.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Worried about? Ha. Ha ha.
Any plan which relies on our state Democrats is probably less effective than shooting myself. At least with that strategy, I’d reduce our share of the next census.
Gerrymandering every four years instead of every ten is obviously not the end of democracy. It’s just another thing made shittier to score a couple points in the here and now. You’d think I might be used to it by now.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Look, I’d absolutely prefer a norm of independent redistricting. Sweep away the decades of bullshit. Make everyone fight for their seats.
Divorcing redistricting from the census is going in the wrong direction. It is strictly worse to have the winners of each election clamoring to entrench their lead. But Trump and Newsom think they can score some points by mashing the big Defect button, so that’s what we get. It’s like calling a snap election. It’s chicanery.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Once you fire this spray of plutonium salts, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the throttle on this, you're ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime.
…now get to it.
What an awesome concept, though.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
To be clear, said legislatures are allowed to vest that power in an independent committee, right? Why was a ballot initiative even on the table?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?
From my perspective, gerrymandered districts are an insult to the idea of representative democracy. I hope CA fails in its shenanigans. I hope we Texans find a spine. Failing that, it would be nice if our leadership could pander to anyone other than Trump.
But I know how much those hopes are worth.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Is it because she didn’t carry the burden, or is it because the “divided court” somehow ruins a retrial? I don’t understand why that isn’t an option.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
…this can’t have been any easier than including a paragraph or two of your own commentary.
I will rule that it does clear the bar, but dang, I’d have preferred page numbers instead of block quotes.
What is currently keeping us from fusion torches? What’s the sticking point?
For power generation, I understand that we haven’t been able to get enough power out to pay for the containment fields. I’d naively expect that to be much easier if you don’t actually want to hold on to the reaction. Unless that just gives you an Orion drive instead of a torch…
Aww, heck. I didn’t even realize the ambiguity.
I was trying to say that it’s a very small circle. Almost no one treats SJ as an existential threat. Out of the handful that do, most of them are otherwise disillusioned with liberalism. Plans to quarantine/exile/execute SJWs are firmly in the lunatic fringe. They barely even make it into the alt-discourse.
Now, I was also thinking that there were almost no liberalism skeptics who got there without developing a distaste for SJ. @magic9mushroom pointed out the obvious counterexample. So I suppose the illiberalism circle should fully contain the existential-SJ circle, rather than perfectly overlap it.
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