domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
Throwaway05
7hr ago
You know it's funny what makes connections in your brain and gives you the eureka moment.
Here I am taking my morning shit, reading this, and my instant response to the conversation here is:
"Oh yeah of course people don't care if this one is 'the story' it just captures the emotions just right, exactly like BLM..."
Oh.
OHHHHHHHHHHH.
Obviously I know intellectually that BLM is an emotional movement about frustration in response to perceived injustice. But I've never really felt it. Until now.
Good reminder that most of us are reasonably good at being objective and decoupling, but those things have vulnerabilities and have chasm sized holes with respect to predicting populations and people.
Celestial-body-NOS
Supra tumulum tuum, astra nobis.
7hr ago
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
-Rudyard Kipling
No - this is my brain on utilitarianism.
Not really, you can justify either policy with utilitarianism. Your argument works only with the assumptions added by managerialism.
The decline in crime isn't just a KPI - it is the whole point of what Bukele is doing. If more prison isn't reducing crime at the margin, then it is just hurting people for funsies.
You are literally telling me it's not just a KPI doing managerialism, while telling me nothing useful is achieved until it shows up on the Key Performance Indicator called a "crime rate".
Which you appear to find funny because the people being hurt are outgroup. I don't.
I find the idea that this happened hilariously absurd.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
7hr ago
No - this is my brain on utilitarianism. Sending 40,000 people, many of whom are innocent and none of whom are bad enough to make the list of the first 50,000 gangbangers you rounded up, to a torture-prison is a big deal, and needs some more-than-speculative benefit to be morally justified.
The decline in crime isn't just a KPI - it is the whole point of what Bukele is doing. If more prison isn't reducing crime at the margin, then it is just hurting people for funsies. Which you appear to find funny because the people being hurt are outgroup. I don't.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7hr ago
your edgelord position
Okay, yeah, I'll cop to "wait for my domestic opponents to literally die in a fire" being edge-flavoured. It's not like I'm the one causing the fire, though, and I have tried my best to pull some of them out of the fire with my advocacy for civil defence, so I don't think there's a less edgy position for someone who predicts a high chance of WWIII and has Noticed that SJ is very urban.
RococoBasilica
Actually a Quality Retribution
7hr ago
In game theoretical terms, playing tit-for-tat, or wanting to destroy defectbot, does not take away from my conviction that cooperate-cooperate is the most beneficial outcome for everyone. The actions described above are simply strategies to align incentives in such a way that C-C becomes more likely.
Now, what I just said ALSO acts as a justification for counter-defectbots to hide behind. Alas.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7hr ago
This is why I opened with the question I did--if God himself were to tell you your definition of him is wrong, would you believe him? Or does your definition take precedence over his own words?
I think we have fundamental differences here but I am going to try my best to explain it.
I fully expect that my understanding of God is limited, inaccurate in some ways, etc. My current theological opinion of Divine Middle Knowledge, for example, and its implications on Free Will and creating souls destined for Hell, is currently permitted. But I wouldn't be particularly surprised if it was wrong and eventually declared heretical. If God through His Catholic Church forbade my current theological opinion, I would swiftly change course.
But if Jesus were to show up to me, prove to me that he's Jesus, then say something like, "Actually, what you call "God" in the Bible isn't transcendental at all. We're pretty powerful, but don't actually have the ability to create matter out of nothing, we are not actively sustaining your being, the Ten Commandments were really our best guess at moral laws but we are not really the basis for goodness. The universe has always existed and we never figured out why. We're just playing around in it. I'm offering you a good afterlife, at great personal cost to myself, so you should do what I say..."
That sounds really sketchy and dissatisfying. What would be the difference between this God and a powerful alien? If your conception of God is one that a sufficiently bored and long-lived alien species could imitate, then I really don't understand what the appeal of religion is to you.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
The Zizians didn't bother with these two particular people. Neither did the group that opened fire on ICE. Nor the bloke that tried shooting Republican congressmen playing baseball.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
7hr ago
If SJWs were into murdering people, which as of 2025 they mostly are not, I think they would cheerfully murder Clarence Thomas, or even Candace Owens.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
The use of emergency powers to detain gang suspects is harmful at the margin (incarceration has risen from about 1.3% at the end of 2023 to about 2% now, with negligible decrease in gang activity)
This is your brain on managerialism. The point of mopping them up is to ensure they don't recover after laying low for a while, this isn't going to show up on your KPI's.
If you think it's so undeniable, liberal human rights enjoyers should be able to implement their solutions in whatever is the current murder capital of the world and show us how it's done.
wemptronics
8hr ago
Fair enough I was talking out of my ass. At least now know I where to go for my horoscopes. I don't exactly trust Russell, but I don't exactly not trust him either.
I mean, you even said "stable orbit" in the post above.
The "coming down" part is actually optional, and most of ships so far have been working without it, that's why reusability is such hype - you make them come back. Even Falcon 9 leaves it's upper stage up there.
OTOH, reaching orbit is mandatory. If you want to launch a satellite, you first have your ship reach the desired orbit, then you deploy the satellite. If you don't do it like that, they'll just come back crashing down. Only then do you start thinking about making the ship come back.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure they could reach orbit if the wanted to. Keeping the engines alight, after you get as far as they did, is the easy part. If my bet was with Elon Musk himself, he'd probably put one in orbit just to prove a point, but luckily for me they probably won't attempt it until they're reasonably sure they got everything right. Which means that you might be sweating for a while yet, and if you win, it might be a lot closer than you expected.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
8hr ago
in particular they claim the reduction in crime precedes his throwing gang members en masse into CECOT.
Which it unquestionably does. CECOT opened in January 2023 as part of the gang crackdown that began at the end of March 2022. The official homicide rate for El Salvador (not counting killings inside CECOT or killings by police, which look like they would increase the 2023-4 numbers by an order of magnitude) was 106.3/100k at the peak in 2015, 53.1 in 2018 (last full year before Bukele took office), 18.1 in 2021 (last full year before the crackdown), 2.4 in 2023, and 1.9 in 2024.
So it is simultaneously true that:
- Most of the murder decline under Bukele happened before the state of emergency.
- The use of emergency powers to detain gang suspects has led to a dramatic further drop in the murder rate.
- The use of emergency powers to detain gang suspects is harmful at the margin (incarceration has risen from about 1.3% at the end of 2023 to about 2% now, with negligible decrease in gang activity)
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
Much of SJ is in the latter but not the former.
While SJP certainly has an illiberal strain, I do not think they have the stomach to do what is required to stamp out competing memes. This is a good thing, because unlike your edgelord position, they are numerous.
Their world is a world where people get cancelled if they do a racism on social media, with the definition of racism steadily expanding. However, they do not have a ideological underpinning of violent totalitarianism. I do not see them actually running gulags.
A Nazi would have been willing to murder an "Aryan" German if he was a communist. Cutting out the ideological rot from the people's body and all that bullshit. A SJW will not murder a black lesbian, because his ideology teaches that black lesbians are sacrosanct. This makes it a bad ideology to enforce its own purity, which is a good thing for fans of liberalism.
Mantergeistmann
8hr ago
using small provoaction in order to garner "disproportionate" attention that can be then captured and used for propaganda.
That's also pretty much the classic Palestine-Israel conflict at play.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8hr ago
It's not clear that Harris would have done better had she taken a more pro-Palestinian line. Certainly, a lot of Muslims stayed home (which is still only half as bad from the Dem perspective as actually flipping), but AIUI this wasn't true of non-Muslim SJers, and had she taken such a line she'd have been up against AIPAC and gotten called a baby-beheader.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
8hr ago
Ahh ok clearly I am confused on what orbit means. So you want a stable orbit? Idk I don't think spaceships would ever try to get in a completely stable orbit since they're coming down, no?
ETA: Happy to pay the bet if I'm just wrong here, of course.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8hr ago
You seem to be under the impression that accusing your interlocutor of being a socialist is some kind of I-win button and super-embarrassing.
I feel you should be aware that outside the 'States - and your interlocutor just said he is - this isn't really all that true. Australia's and the UK's Labour Parties are both former members of Socialist International and still take red - as in, Communist red - as their party colour. Die Linke is a significant party in German politics, and it's literally the East German Communist party with a new name. France's National Assembly is over a quarter declared socialists.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
In case you haven't worked it out by now, some people think of SJ as an existentially-dangerous meme via undermining law and order. The analogy's not perfect - social justice warriors are far better at scheming than the rabid, and believing SJ is not always permanent - but you get the point.
This is the worst analogy I have read on the net all week.
First, we have a rabies vaccine. In the real world, inoculating the healthy (and just-infected) would be our main weapon against super-rabies, rather than gunning down the diseased.
Second, memes are importantly different from viruses. Memes are easily transmitted through time and space. However, they are also unlikely to infect 100% of the people exposed to them. They also do not kill their hosts, generally. While they can dominate virtually unchanged for thousands of years, they tend to last much shorter in periods of rapid technological progress. So a meme becoming dominant is not the end of the world.
Third, killing the carriers is not very effective to combat memes. The carriers of Christianity were regularly murdered in ancient Rome, and yet this did not prevent the spreading. I will grant you that communist memes did very badly in Nazi Germany, so you might say that Nero's failure to root out Christianity was simply a skill issue. Personally, I dislike societies which murder fractions of their population.
Fourth, why would social justice progressivism be a uniquely dangerous meme complex? Western civilization has survived the spread of Christianity, enlightenment, atheism, communism, fascism, liberalism, hippies, punks, enviromentalism and so on. Granted, some of these meme complexes were really bad and killed a lot of people in the name of stopping competing memes or for other reasons.
Personally, while I intensely dislike SJP, I also do not consider it as dangerous a communism was in its time. I also like liberalism a lot. Any society where you just shoot the carriers of a hostile meme is very illiberal. Typically, it will target not only the carriers of one hostile meme complex, but the carriers of all meme complexes perceived hostile. I also think that SJP is already over its zenith. In 2010, it was the hot new thing for youth looking to rebel against the establishment. Eventually, the kind of older women who would have reported young people who received visits from opposed-gender people to their landlords in the 1950s will be the main enforcers of SJ norms, and that will paint these norms as 'cringe'.
TL;DR: The battlefield to defeat SJP is the marketplace of ideas.
JTarrou
8hr ago
And you interpreted that to mean if an international entertainment company ever produced a show aimed at boys, then what I said was falsified?
You guys are slaying that straw.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
8hr ago
I agree with your general point, but Milo's problem in particular was that he alienated his base with his comments about homosexuality age-gap
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
8hr ago
Rude.
I'm not about to check whether the numerical market situation of Disney products in 90s Germany lines up with my memory of that time and place. You can have the win if you like. Here, if it please you: Disney is purely and entirely a girls' thing. Have a nice day.
FistfullOfCrows
8hr ago
Why does everything in the UK seem to revolve around underage girls, if they aren't being trafficked to a crown prince by foreign intel agents, they are being gang groomed or assaulted by immigrants, or leading crusades, now they are wielding skyrim tier bladed weapons. Will the UK soon have a squad of teenage girls in uniforms battling in the streets for their country's freedoms?
I kind of doubt that's the main reason, actually.
I'd guess its the same reason why a lot of lower-class Americans walk around with a gun tucked in their waistband (and I do mean that, not holstered, just jammed in there). They're worried about self-defense, but mainly from each other.
We have young girls that like to knife fight too, after all.
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