domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
Throwaway05
1m ago
Yes "gun culture" is more American, but my point is that the access to guns is there in most countries should you wish. Most gun control advocates don't realize this though.
I'm aware that isn't you but might have been OP.
Corvos
3m ago
You can do that of course. The big worry has always been people taking advantage - involuntary sending off to an asylum is a staple threat in Victorian literature for a reason.
Shrike
5m ago
You do if you know where to look.
Things will get worse on this front as the technology and expertise necessary to operate it (which is low, but there is an entry barrier) percolates through society.
Corvos
5m ago
I might just be falling for toxoplasma, true.
I've personally used an AR-pattern rifle to shoot predators in defense of livestock.
Very cool, care to tell more? The closest I’ve got is a friend using a BB rifle to fend off monkeys, which can get very vicious.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10m ago
Perhaps the buried lede is that Egypt wants to do it themselves but don’t currently have the technical chops or funding to pull it off - especially if it would require pumping out water without making the whole thing collapse?
Shrike
11m ago
I’ve never seen posters here advocate for gun ownership to protect from wild animals
Worth noting that this is a very common use-case IRL, although the self-defense question is of course much more interesting and gets more "air time." I've personally used an AR-pattern rifle to shoot predators in defense of livestock.
Defending oneself against predators is very rare but it's enough of a problem in bear territory in North America that ammunition sellers will advertise ammunition as being relevant against bears. Mountain lions (and maybe wolves) are also a potential threat that might warrant a handgun in some places, but don't pose the same challenges that killing a bear does.
2rafa
11m ago
A big part of the problem with Western modernity is universal human rights, not in a “some people shouldn’t have rights hahahaha” shitposting way, but in the sense that some people struggle to function in modernity and must, for their benefit and the benefit of wider society, live with a lesser amount of both liberty and responsibility.
We understand this in some cases, people with down’s, late stage dementia, low-functioning autism. But those one or two cognitive steps above them have been granted, by the courts, almost absolute freedom. This was the second components of the emptying of the asylums.
Modernity is complex and confusing, I think Moldbug makes the point that plenty of people who would have been quite capable in historical situations struggle to function in their interactions with the modern state, modern employment market, modern social customs, subtext.
These people don’t deserve to be slaves. They have value as people, and in our materially abundant and prosperous society they should be supported in finding their happiness. But, in their interests and those of wider society, they shouldn’t be as free as us either.
There must be a stage between liberty and being a total ward of the state. A half- freedom.
07mk
11m ago
Goodhart's Law becomes an issue here, though. It's been common knowledge for at least a decade that leftists have been adding more and more letters to the whole "rainbow coalition in a way that appears absurd to the outsiders in the more and more fine granularity with which it divides minorities and also groups disparate minorities together. As such, anyone motivated to appear as a leftist would know to use the proper absurdly-long acronyms for this, and so this signals a desire to appear leftist, rather than leftism itself.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
13m ago
If it's equivalent why don't I hear of drone gang wars, or drone robberies, or drone school shootings?
Shrike
18m ago
Yeah Gun rights are a peculiar American psychosis where, if guns were to come into existence today, the current status quo would just have a 0% chance of being the way they entered 2025 American Society.
This isn't true, and we know it's not true because we've had a chance to test it: the modern equivalent of guns (in terms of a destructive individual technology) is the small drone, and you can buy them from Walmart (or whatever your Australian equivalent is) with no background check of any sort the last time I checked and only very minimal and nominal regulations on their use.
Yes, certainly. But I don’t think that ‘some farmers have a rifle in the barn’ is what we’re talking about here. A Hassan wouldn’t be able to get a hunting rifle, and certainly wouldn’t be allowed to carry it into town or anything. There is essentially no probability that someone you meet is ‘packing’.
I made a post way back saying that lots of countries and England in particular are fine with sporting/hunting guns to some degree, but are absolutely rock-solid on forbidding personal weapons (with some unavoidable fuzziness in between).
My understanding of American gun rights supporters is that it’s the opposite: they feel it’s existentially important for their civilisation to allow people access to personal weapons specifically.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
27m ago
As a classic liberal, any kind of intolerance with an outgroup is very offensive to me.
And yet, divisions and categories exist, and are both useful and necessary.
It’s trying to make an entire group of people an outgroup, just as the illiberal left is trying to demonize Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian.
The illiberal left demonized Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian, sure. They considered him and Christians generally to be enemies. Christians do not generally consider Mormons to be enemies in this way, any more than they consider Jews to be enemies. Religious differences can exist without holy war.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28m ago
Of course it's worth bearing in mind that Heroditus was called "the father of lies" since he's not the most reliable source
My impression is that description is unfair, and that he's been vindicated on many of his most outlandish-seeming claims
naraburns
nihil supernum
33m ago
Great writeup, thanks for sharing. As I have asked in the past,
How much of the history of "government" is the history of developing increasingly sophisticated methods for obfuscating the nature and extent of the bondage imposed on the "mass of men," not only for their own ultimate benefit, but for the benefit of all? And--to what extent might we as a people be slowly forgetting that, as we seek to "liberate" those masses, by continuing to give them the resources of life, while withdrawing (or declining to enforce) any guidance?
This is a very old problem. In Plato's Republic, he speaks occasionally of the lower castes in his ideal system, but the great bulk of the work is an obsessively detailed examination of the proper upbringing of the ruling class. Aristotle calls him out on this, suggesting that Plato's vision fails to adequately capture the breadth of human experience. Today, rather than frankly acknowledge the mental incapacity of the masses, we push free compulsory public education (substantially modeled on Plato's prescription!) as a way of supposedly "leveling the playing field," bringing everyone up to some minimum level of functioning (and insisting despite the evidence that everyone has basically the same potential to achieve and succeed).
Occasionally I meet people who are spending their retirement years caring for dependent adult children. Sometimes that responsibility falls to siblings instead, or even more distant relations. The ability and willingness to be a conservator for an adult of diminished capacity is not the stuff of romantic Hollywood aspiration (Love Actually notwithstanding!). Of course we talk about prisons and mental institutions and the government curtailing of important individual rights--because there's nothing any of us can do to fix the damage that liberal individualism has done to the institution of the family. There are all sorts of reasons why strong tribal ties might be undesirable, particularly in a Western liberal democracy, but as Thomas Sowell says--there are no solutions, only trade offs. The same forces that liberate some of us from the oppression of a tyrannical tribal chieftan also liberate the Hassans of the world from the moderating influence of tribal support.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
40m ago
It's also worth noting that there's a small chance that he was previously on medication, but desisted. The drugs don't always work, and an unfortunate number of patients quit them either due to a lack of efficacy or the side effects becoming unbearable.
Tenaz
42m ago
A core LDS belief is that we should strive to grow, repent, increase in knowledge and accountability, and become more perfect through God's grace.
We believe in three kingdoms of heaven. Salvation gets you into the lowest. Higher kingdoms follow higher laws, and exaltation (the highest division of the highest kingdom) requires moral perfection, something which can only be attained through faith, repentance, and a covenant relationship with Christ that starts with baptism. The purpose of the LDS church is to facilitate that process of moral growth, and enable that covenant relationship.
Among many other things, living under covenants means living under a higher law, being more accountable for your actions and growing faster. If you fail to make these covenants, particularly if you know (or should know) that you should be making them, you won't have the same opportunity for growth in mortality; an opportunity which will never be repeated. In the end, since everyone will get access to those covenants, your literal membership in the LDS church (divorced from all other details related to that membership) is pretty irrelevant, but your moral virtue/capacity to keep those covenants determines which kingdom you end up in and which law you abide by forever.
In short, we won't be drinking coffee in heaven, and those who do so now may find themselves unable to quit later, after the opportunities of mortality are through. (Of course, coffee itself will probably be allowed there.)
Throwaway05
43m ago
Most countries allow for hunting rifles and such, no?
Throwaway05
43m ago
I mean I'm even thinking street buys - by definition not responsible (more or less). Even those guys are going get the ick from someone decompensated like that.
Usually people like this have negative symptoms that an average person can clue onto even if they are not sure what it is and that's not counting anything directly weird the dude might say.
BahRamYou
44m ago
Is there any way to have known, back in medieval times, that there were two massive continents across the Atlantic ocean?
I was just thinking about the popular image of Columbus. How he was this irrational madman, who believed in almost his own totally wrong calculations about the size of the Earth, when everyone already knew the true size and that he had no hope of making it all the way to India by sailing west. By pure dumb luck, he stumbled upon the New World and the rest is history. What a lucksack. Although some will admit that he was an excellent sailor, who had read widely in the astronomy and geography of his era, and carefully planned his route to use the trade winds.
If that continent didn't exist, it seems like it would substantially alter the Earth's climate. There would be nothing to stop the wind and tides from going all across the Pacific and Atlantic, so you'd have much stronger winds and storms. East Asia and West Africa would be absolutely rocked by massive storms. Instead of a useful express route, the trade winds might be way too strong to be used by ships of the time. Earth would wobble more, with it's mass much more uneven, causing a larger seasonal change. Whales could freely migrate from East Asia to Western Europe, but not much else could cross the distance. But maybe some artifacts like float all the way across by chance.
I don't know, I haven't really thought this through seriously. It's just fun to think about how that would affect the Earth's climate, and if it's possible for a gifted navigator of that time to actually realize that there must be something out there. Apparently the polynesians could find islands by looking for birds or clouds in the sky from long distances, so people really were interested in this sort of long distance exploration.
birb_cromble
48m ago
First they came for the crazy people
It may not be part of the quote, but it sure was part of the process.
In 19th century America, being a slave who did not want to be enslaved was considered to be a mental disorder called drapetomania. In modern society, this would mean that a desire to be a human and not property would cost you your right to bear arms.
Fast forward to the Soviet era, where disagreement with communist politics would lead to being diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia, because no sane person would object to the Glorious Dialectic. In modern society, having misgivings about liquidating the kulaks would cost you your right to bear arms.
As late as the 1960s, police arrested Clennon King for having the audacity to try and attend college while black and confined him to a mental institution. In modern society, this would have cost him his right to bear arms.
Where do you think the line is? Do you find any of those acceptable? If not, how do you prevent those abuses under the framework that you espouse above?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
48m ago
Your link is for 10% is broken.
Since there’s significant debate over the threshold for “mass shooting”, is it possible that statistic is using a pretty low minimum? I would expect the percentage involving psychosis to go up a lot with casualty count.
I also think there’s a categorical difference between spontaneous violence and ideological shootings.
MayorofOysterville
53m ago
It's not just the form but the content as well. Praying to Jesus drawing lessons from the gospels, putting up nativity scenes.
More like I think people who drink excessively (i.e. drink to get drunk), use drugs, and engage in promiscuous sex are engaging in a lifestyle which leaves them feeling very empty and lifeless. My issue with the illiberal radical Left is that they not only enable but encourage that kind of behavior.
Right -- they're your outgroup. If they started to describe themselves as "classical liberals", you'd balk: you've just called them the "illiberal radical Left", which contains just as much condemnation and othering as "Mormons aren't Christians!"
I agree with @Corvos's take: my view on what you've written is that religious distinctions aren't very important to you, and you don't believe a person's choice either way on the matter makes much difference to the outcomes of their lifestyle. So long as they avoid drinking excessively, using drugs, or engaging in promiscuous sex, of course.
But Nicene Christians of the sort who would say "Mormons aren't Christians" disagree with you: they believe that following the LDS faith to its endpoint leads to eternal conscious torment, or in other words is a lifestyle that "leaves them feeling very empty and lifeless." You can disagree with their point of view on this, and perhaps you should, but that's their point of view which motivates their feeling.
You're frustrated that people are writing online articles encouraging women to have promiscious sex, and see that as harmful... well, the LDS literally sends its young men to go door to door actively encouraging people to become Mormon! If you believe that's a harmful path to go down, as many Protestants do, you would feel the same level of concern about it. They'd argue that abstaining from promiscuous sex, drinking, and drugs does you no good, if you don't have the right set of beliefs. You disagree, and invert the importance, but that's not their view.
Furthermore, plenty of people disagree that excessive drinking, using drugs, or promiscious sex leads inevitably to lifelessness and emptiness. To make that determination, you have to actually take a step back and look at evidence, listen to anecdotes, read statistics, as I'm sure you've done. But because the truth claims of the LDS and Nicene Christianity are cosmic, we can't use the same kind of empiricism on them, and so people who believe these things are important rely on their own epistemological standards for what's cosmically true: sacred texts, ancient creeds, community consensus, personal testimony -- all of which are vitally important both for Nicene Christians and the LDS. When people say, "Mormons aren't Christians", they're making the exact same claim as "the radical left is illiberal," applying personal values and epistemology to a category problem.
Classical liberalism did not emerge out of a sudden singing of kumbaya, and many of the world's most fruitful democracies have histories as twisted and bloody as the religious wars that led to religious tolerance. You can handwave away that similarity, and say that of course the democratic revolutions in France or America or the English Civil War or the revolutions of Latin America was violence that led to good things, but the people who killed the Huguenots and the Calvinists who stripped altars in grand riots believed they were doing the very same thing: eliminating pathways that lead to feelings of emptiness and lifelessness in the long run. You can believe they were horribly mistaken about this, and many people do, but simply saying "these feelings historically led to violence, therefore I am revolted by them," seems to miss the point that the classical, classical liberal archetypally holds a musket pointed at the head of an aristocrat.
I think the important thing isn't to refuse to draw category distinctions or recognize outgroups, but consists of how you treat them. Even in the moral teachings of Jesus, he presupposes that one will have enemies -- "a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household" -- but that one should love them and pray for them and do right by them. I don't agree that refusing to do the former automatically achieves the latter.
MayorofOysterville
54m ago
Yes but it's more than vibes. The same prayers the same hymns, the eucharist, and drawing lessons from the Bible and gospels. It's the content too not just the forms.
Drones as sold aren’t destructive, surely? They need a gun or explosive to be attached to them, both of which are banned for being destructive.
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