author:fcfromssc concentration
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
You:
I have to admit- I just think everyone deserves support and I suspect the fight will keep going forever or until conservatives kill all the abnormal people or stop trying to bully people who want to surgically alter themselves into giant spiders out of existence.
Also You:
Morality? Everyone has one. Get yours now. 50% off. If you don't like having a conscience get rid of it. Don't worry. I won't get rid of mine. If you hurt someone I'll just kill you.
You say you want to tear down restrictions without end. I point out that some of those restrictions are load-bearing, that they're there for very good reasons. You say it's fine, because you're only going to tear down unnecessary restrictions, and of course are totally fine with coercive punishment of bad behavior in all the usual ways, so long as you get to be in charge of judging which restrictions are unnecessary, and which behaviors are bad and deserve suppression through force. You offer zero grounding for those judgements other than your personal aesthetic preferences. You indicate that your judgements are entirely relative and change over time, such that the arguments you make and accept now will not be the arguments you make and accept next month or next year, so any agreement we arrive at is simply a temporary respite between aggressive renegotiations. You appear to be incapable of good-faith agreement, of reaching a solution and then sticking with it long-term. Your positions cannot be reliably predicted in advance, even by yourself, because they do not derive from an axiomatic structure, but rather a meta-structure where the only constant is change.
Skulls? I have seen millennia of skulls. Skulls of the strange and the outliers. Skulls of the weird slaughtered in the name of conformity to make sure food could be grown.
Those skulls were produced as an apparently-irreducible byproduct of stable, prosperous civilization. The skulls people like you produce come in much larger volumes on much shorter time-scales, and the byproduct they produce is failed states and large-scale immiseration. People arguing that we should ditch the old structures and just figure it out through reason and the scientific method killed somewhere between 100 and 200 million humans in a mere century, and ruined the lives of many hundreds of millions more. They created what was arguably the greatest concentration of misery and injustice the world has ever seen, based explicitly on the logic that you are preaching.
What I want... I want people to have... reasons beyond inertia or precedent for why things are bad.
We have reasons beyond inertia and precedent for why we think things are bad. Do you have reasons beyond aesthetic reaction? If so, you have failed to describe them.
If the suppression of trans people and enforcement of gender norms hadn't been so coercive, if conservatives could have made some compromises and set firm expectations for what trans people have to do before they're allowed to remove that fence-
...Then we'd be right back here regardless, with you arguing that we did it wrong and the fence has to come down anyway, because your only standard for when the fence comes down is whether you can imagine a different solution working better. Between cold fact and your imagination, imagination will always win, and so you will always vote to gut what we've built to chase your dreams of a brighter world, and to hell with the consequences.
I’ll agree that brain modification could lead to some nasty outcomes, but overall I think the benefits outweigh the risks as with most technologies. I trust us to use it at least relatively wisely.
What's your conception of the consequences if, in fact, we do not use it responsibly?
From the previous link:
The million dollar question is really one of what happens once that shared neurophysiology begins to fragment, and sharing imperatives becomes a matter of coincidence. It has to be madness, one that will creep upon us by technological degrees.
Why does it have to be madness? Because we define madness according what our brains normally do. Once we begin personalizing our brains, ‘normally do’ will become less and less meaningful. ‘Insanity’ will simply be what one tribe calls another, and from our antiquated perspective, it will all look like insanity.
It’s hard to imagine, I admit, but you have to look at all the biologically fixed aspects of your conscious experience like distinct paints on a palette. Once the human brain falls into our manipulative purview, anything becomes possible. Certain colours, like suffering and fear, will likely be wiped away. Other colours, like carnal pleasure or epiphany, will be smeared across everything. And this is just the easy stuff: willing might be mixed with hearing, so that everytime a dog barks, you have the senstation of willing all creation into existence. Love might be mutated, pressed in experiential directions we cannot fathom, until it becomes something indistinguishable from cruelty. Reason could be married to vision, so that everything you see resounds with Truth. The combinatorial possibilities are as infinite as are the possibilities for creating some genuinely new…
And where does the slow and static ‘human’ fit into all this? Nowhere I can see.
And why should any human want to embrace this, when they are the ladder that will be kicked away? How could reasons be offered, when rationality finds itself on the chopping block with everything else. How do you argue for madness?
Perhaps our only recourse will be some kind of return to State coercion, this time with a toybox filled with new tools for omnipresent surveillance and utter oppression. A world where a given neurophysiology is the State Religion, and super-intelligent tweakers are hunted like animals in the streets.
Maybe that should be my next standalone: a novel called Semantica… I could set it up as a standard freedom-fighter tale, then let the sideways norms slowly trickle in, until the reader begins rooting for totalitarian oppression.
Every method of conflict resolution other than naked, merciless force is founded on the idea that the core nature of Us and Them is in fact fundamentally similar, that at some point we find common ground in our values. You are talking here about technology that could very easily render this idea empirically false. Merely calling this assumption into question in the last century caused a drastic increase in the concentration and intensity of human misery. It is hard to imagine how definitively falsifying it would work out better.
Because governments are powerful, and have the legal authority to cage you and kill you sometimes.
People are powerful, and can coordinate your death or caging in a variety of ways, only one of which is Government as such. Government does what some specific group of people want it to do. If you have a problem with what the Government is doing, you have a problem with the people wielding it.
Here's a handy example I just came across.. Here we have a government official advocating a completely insane law. Yet I maintain that this is a cultural problem, not a Government problem. Leave the population the same, and no system you devise will prevent this woman from doing some approximate analog to what she's doing, because all she's doing is executing the coordinated meanness of her ingroup through the channels available to her. It hardly even matters if her plan succeeds, because if it is blocked procedurally the meanness will simply be routed through some other channel. If the harm she's threatening is halted, it will be because some other population coordinated meanness better, not because the system "works". The coordinated meanness holds all the explanatory power; systemic analysis is the pursuit of epiphenomena.
Speech is a coordination mechanism. Speech is the coordination mechanism. What we should be concerned with is what's being coordinated. How it's being coordinated seems to me to be largely a question of immediate practicalities. Speech can, by itself, destroy government and law, norms, whole societies. It can destroy everything you know and love and plunge you and everyone you care about into a lifetime of horror and immiseration. It has done this repeatedly in the last century alone, and unless the viruses or the AIs get us first it will without question do so again.
If that regrettable eventuality is to be forestalled, we are going to have to suppress bad speech. Such suppression is going to need to be effective, and Government can be effective in at least some cases.
Examining government action in this context seems like a reasonable per se (bad no matter what) demarcation line, but I'm open to considering similar concerns if they're a result of some another mechanism.
I disagree that partisan Government action in this context is bad per se. I submit that politics as a whole cannot be separated into public and private spheres in any meaningful sense. The personal is not necessarily political, but once it becomes so, unilateral disarmament is neither an effective response nor a reasonable ask. Further, the phrase "private", in the context of one of the largest, richest, most influential concentrations of raw power on the planet, does not seem to me to contain meaningful information. They are a nakedly political actor in a culture war that is well past any semblance of restraint. They openly support criminalizing my community. They do not give the slightest fuck about my rights. I do not see how caring about theirs while they are actively trampling on mine will contribute to better outcomes.
If Disney helps coordinate political changes that destroy our society by, for example, successfully communicating to Reds that literal warfare is their best remaining hope for the future, the bullets and bombs don't hurt less because it was a putatively "private" entity that got the avalanche rolling. Conversely, if punishing Disney's political actions through political actions of my own is effective, it might prevent the bullets and bombs.
I think it's bad when governments punish speech that disagrees with government values no matter who runs the government. There's no need to refute positions of mine you've made up.
I do not wish to assign to you positions you do not actually hold. It seems to me that you see Red Tribe culture warring is relatively more dangerous and destructive than Blue Tribe culture warring, given your choice of engagement points. This impression forms from watching your (highly effective, and genuinely admirable, IMO) critique of some of the more prominent Red Tribe foibles, a perceived absence of similar criticisms of Blue Tribe foibles, and a general attitude of, if you'll forgive the paraphrase, "aren't these things I'm pointing out reprehensible? Aren't we better than this?" This is effective rhetoric, but I think it is both dead-wrong and deceptive, to others or at least to oneself.
You carry yourself as a mistake theorist. Probably you are a mistake theorist! I disagree with mistake theory, and so I disagree with you. No, it is not reprehensible. It's war, and this is quite mild for a war. No, we aren't better than this. I'm not, and I do not and will not concede that you or any other of the politically-engaged moderates are either. The conflict contains all politics. If your are politically active, you are already a combatant.
Suppose there's a rule you care about. You don't care who breaks the rule, you just don't want it broken and want people who break it punished. Two groups are engaged in a struggle, and break the rule in their fighting. Side A breaks the rule ten times. Side B breaks the rule once. For various reasons, it's a lot easier to enforce the rule against B than against A. What to do? One way of looking at things would be that more enforcement is better than less enforcement, so you should enforce against side B, and hope that successful enforcement helps establish a durable norm. Another way of looking at things would be that you should put your enforcement effort into the side breaking the rule most frequently.
In my view, both answers are foolish. The rule is being broken because of the struggle. Attempting enforcement in such a context doesn't uphold the rule, it only contributes to the struggle. Intervening is indistinguishable to both parties to picking a side. If you are willing to pick a side, you should pick the side more likely to implement your rules once the conflict is concluded. If you are not willing to pick a side, you should look for ways to broker a peace, or figure out how the struggle started and how to prevent it in the future. What you should not do is intervene from behind a pretense of neutrality, on the expectation that the people you intervene against will understand that it's just the principle of the thing. Even if it really is the principle of the thing to you, it isn't to them, and insisting that it should be so, or worse simply assuming that it is so, is a waste of everyone's time.
I think you're referring to burning down Minneapolis police precinct building? Yes, I support lawless violence against the government whenever it abdicates using its authority in a responsible manner.
To be clear, I do not criticize you for supporting lawless violence in a context you deem appropriate. It seems abundantly evident that almost everyone does, myself certainly included. It's just that most people seem determined to lie about it, to themselves most of all. I too admire candor, genuinely and deeply.
But in the first place, the government is people. In the second place, the violence so unleashed did not confine itself to Government people or property. It metastasized out of all control, nationwide and without restraint. It laid down hatreds and sorrows that will in all likelihood outlive us both.
In the third place, when the easily predictable and repeatedly predicted massive, nationwide increase in murder and other forms of violent crime asserted itself, you argued that it was the fault of cops not doing their jobs right. I think the ideas you espoused, ideas based on a lie, made effective policing impossible in large swathes of the country, and the result has been thousands of extra dead people and thousands more maimed and brutalized, yearly, for the indefinite future. I think the ideology you subscribe to is directly responsible for all that carnage, a small but significant portion of which was directly and explicitly aimed at people like me, with the support of both the culture and the government. I think you are willing to cheer on the destruction of an order you despise, but take zero responsibility for the worse horrors that replace it. And perhaps I'm wrong, but I think you'll do it again, because you've learned nothing from the exercise. Real people, thousands of them, will be dying every year for the foreseeable future, because of something you personally spoke in favor of. The world will be measurably worse in significant ways because of something you personally spoke in favor for. I've had that experience before. I spent a lot of time and effort chewing on my tongue over the last two years, trying (with limited success) not to have it again.
Yes, I support lawless violence against the government whenever it abdicates using its authority in a responsible manner. Although I'm not sure what you mean by "people very like me", are you the government?
It was the cops versus the mob. You (individually and Blue Tribe generally) backed the mob, and they won. And once they won, they came for people like me, over and over again. They pointed guns at people like me. They threatened people like me, beat people like me, humiliated and victimized people like me. A couple times they murdered people like me, and a couple more times they viciously persecuted those who declined to be victimized or murdered. One could say that none of that was your fault; you just made some abstract arguments about destruction of property. On the other hand, one could say that much is learned about a tribe by looking at what reasonable individuals are willing to accept and argue for. It seems we share this view, given your comments upthread.
2/2
The evidence I've seen is that the "opioid epidemic" is a distinct social problem from other forms of narcotics use, that it involves different drugs, different users, different dealers, and a different culture overall with minimal attendant violent crime. My understanding is that one of the differences is racial, where the "opioid epidemic" mostly involves rural whites and very few blacks, while traditional drug and gang culture features very heavy (but by no means exclusive) black involvement, and a whole lot more violent crime. Your original claim appeared to be that such differences didn't exist or were incidental. I think the above goes a fair way to establishing that this is not the case.
I'm far from an expert, but Google trends shows that discussion about the opioid epidemic really took off around 2016 when fentanyl started flooding the market; this tracks pretty well with figures 2, 3 and 5 that I linked you previously. It seems like overdoses caused by prescription opioids don't elicit much discussion, but they also don't contribute much to the overall toll of overdoses in the US, so...maybe that makes sense?
Where are you getting the conclusion that they didn't contribute much to the overall toll? The orange line in fig 2 appears to diverge rapidly and significantly, and between '99 and '07 the OD rates roughly double. "Significant" is a nebulous term, but unless I'm reading the charts wrong, it looks like by 2009 prescription opioids are killing more people than all other drugs combined. Am I missing something?
Of course this ignores regional trends in overdoses, socially erosive drug habits that didn't end in overdoses until fentanyl hit the scene, etc etc but it seems to me that you've overfitted on 'nobody cares about white people problems.'
I'm looking at a chart that appears to show that (predominantly white, based on the previous links) people ODing on prescription meds came to dominate total drug fatalities, total fatalities doubled, and no one cared. I'm not particularly dedicated to phrasing this as "nobody cares about white people problems", but neither am I willing to accede to your original accusations of bias. Black drug problems come with a heap of violence, and get massive social interventions. Peculiarly white drug problems do not involve similar levels of violence, and were in fact ignored for more than a decade, even as they came to dominate an issue that is never far from the public eye.
If I'm reading the charts wrong, please let me know.
The feds spent $3.3B and $7.4B on the opioid crisis in 2017 and 2018 respectively (table 2). It disproportionately went to red states (Figure 5 and 6) outside of Vermont, NH and Maine for some reason.
Probably because those are the states hardest hit by this specific drug problem, which by 2017 had gone parabolic. We're coming up on a fivefold increase in the OD rate over the last two decades, and almost all of that increase appears to be prescription opioids before the transition into into fentanyl. One imagines it might have been a good idea to try and get a handle on things before the fent arrived in quantity, but our leaders apparently had other priorities.
It's confusing to me why the south was ignored, and I'm too lazy to try and overlay it with overdoses per capita to see if it matches the funding levels.
From a look at the counties by OD rate, it's because the south, and particularly the deep south, didn't have as much of this specific problem. Again, this isn't generic war on drugs stuff, it's a fairly unique pattern, albeit a quite large one.
I can't find data on how much the government spends on crack cocaine which makes me think it isn't much. The majority of federal spending seems to go towards dealing with the health consequences of drug abuse. Untangling whether there's bias in that system towards black people at the expense of rural whites is, I think, a bit beyond what I can be expected to do.
I do not think it is proper to attempt to sum this up through the lens of federal spending on crack in particular. We care as much as we do about crack because it hits black Americans unusually hard, and we care about black Americans quite a bit. A huge percentage of the war on drugs has been aimed at Black communities, often at the explicit request of those communities, in an attempt to protect them from the harmful effects of drugs and the violent gangs dealing them. Education, housing systems, both projects and section 8, affirmative action... the list goes on at some length. I'll readily concede that much of this quickly escapes the bounds of the present discussion, though.
They did want police and prisons back in the 80s and 90s, no? The law and order approach didn't seem to work out that great either.
The law and order approach got the murder rate back under some semblance of control, at great cost and through grueling effort, with bipartisan cooperation being a necessity. The term "superpredator", explicitly in reference to Black criminals, was of course coined by none other than Bill Clinton. This effort never succeeded in closing the racial gaps, but it did manage to bring the overall murder rate down for blacks and whites both. It was the best we could do, and now it appears to have been undone.
Poverty rates have more or less steadily improved since the 1960s and throughout the civil rights era.
The gap in poverty in particular went from 30% to 20% in forty years. This actually is surprising to me, as I'm used to a very consistent narrative that these gaps simply aren't closing. On the one hand, this indicates that closing the gap completely might in fact be possible, perhaps even in less than a century. On the other hand, Blacks and Blues don't seem to see this as acceptable progress, and are evidently willing to flip the table if a better deal is not offered.
But what do you mean, nothing reds can do will help them?
I mean that I have no hope that any practically-achievable intervention I can imagine will actually close these gaps within the foreseeable future. That is to say, I have no hope that armistice is possible on the racial front of the culture war, even if my side had enough social and political dominance to enforce our policy preferences, at least under anything like present conditions. I don't think we have the tools necessary to fix this problem, so it's just going to get worse. We do not actually know how to eliminate poverty or its effects. We don't know how to educate black kids so they get the same outcomes as white kids, much less Asians. We don't know how to prevent black people from committing disproportionate amounts of crime, or using drugs at disproportionate rates. I'm highly confident that Blues can't solve these problems either, not even with total dominance, but they have shown that they can effectively scapegoat Reds for them, and that Blacks will play along even at the cost of their own futures.
Your best argument is that local government is the most important for combating poverty, which is an argument of the gaps that you failed to proactively provide evidence for, and is incongruent with conventionally blue states having lower poverty rates.
That isn't my argument; I have no idea where you're even getting it from. I have no idea how to solve poverty, and I certainly don't think that local government can do so unilaterally. I am, in general, skeptical that the problems that face us can be solved under anything approaching current conditions. My wife spent a good chunk of time living in a midwest state with a predominantly white population and a fairly red-dominant political system. She worked six part-time jobs trying to make a living, before moving away because there simply wasn't any work. Detroit collapsed, despite all efforts to the contrary. Offshoring our industrial capacity seems to have been a bad move, but even there I can't refute the economists, other than to note their predictions and try to judge the outcomes.
This argument of Dems as neo-plantation owners is largely bullshit.
I disagree. Blacks have bad outcomes. Blues occasionally make those outcomes significantly worse; the legalization of no-fault divorce, along with the rest of the sexual revolution, seems to be one of those cases, and BLM is another. Neither Blues nor Reds have much power to make them significantly better, and most of the largest concentrations of black misery exist in the seats of blue power. That drill video you linked, those unfortunate souls have been living in deep-blue country for generations, roaches and piss-soaked elevators and multiple friends murdered and all. The people who speak for them blame Reds for their misfortunes, and those among them who can vote reliably vote blue. The misfortunes don't change, the resentments don't change, and the political allegiances don't change. How are these facts "largely bullshit"?
2/2
If the French Revolution is indeed the more Enlightened of the two, then why should we presume that individual rights are, in fact, a core element of the Enlightenment's legacy?
From the post above:
How do we actually go about answering a question like that? It seems to me that we can start with four types of evidence, in ascending order of reliability:
If I claimed that deep Christian faith was a core element of Enlightenment ideology, you would laugh. If I pointed to Kant's profound faith in Christianity, you would continue to laugh, and you would be right to do so. Kant's Christian faith may have been the core of his personal philosophy, but it did manifestly failed to propagate into the ideology as a whole. What did propagate are the ideas we see in the French Revolution: absolute, unshakable confidence in the primacy and sufficiency of human reason and rationality, militant hostility to traditional religion, enthusiastic secularism and atheism, and honestly not a whole lot else. Individual liberties get a lot of lip-service, but their actual record is a whole lot worse than the ancein regime's, from what I've seen.
I wrote this post to highlight what I see as the fundamental dishonesty of the consensus discourse regarding the Enlightenment. When people talk about the Enlightenment's results, they talk about outcomes in America or Britain, the two distant outliers of the entire Enlightenment project. When they talk about Enlightenment values, they go straight to Revolutionary France. They ignore the fact that the best results came from the societies that maintained strong Christian social integration and placed absolutely minimal trust in the products of human reason, and the worst came from the countries that embraced Enlightenment principles whole and without restraint.
Several of the most prominent among them were indeed probably not too far in beliefs from Robespierre. And yet, the sum of their peers and society was such that they kept their opinions mostly to themselves, and often spoke even to each other of Divine Providence in contradiction to their own avowed beliefs. Meanwhile, in France...
The point of this comparison is not to argue that Christianity is awesome. It's to point out that Christianity is very clearly not part of the Enlightenment, and so the revolution that embraces the Christian faith of its populace is not a very Enlightened revolution.
Your point eludes me. The revolutionaries themselves, and their subsequent progeny, seemed to find both despotism and religious persecution both innovative and eminently desirable. Here's Mark Twain offering apologia for mass slaughter a century or so later:
The mendacity of that passage galls. Leave aside the absurdity of the cited numbers; grant them for the sake of argument. He minimizes the crimes of his favored ideology by comparing them to all harms and misfortunes, natural or manmade, for a thousand years previously. In doing so, he demonstrates both the founding principle of the Enlightenment, as well as its first corollary:
You can't claim that the pathological hubris and maniacal bloodlust were tangential to the spirit of the movement, when the movements' own champions consistently affirm that that they were necessary and justified.
And what sort of societies gave birth to such principles? Was it France, with its radical egalitarianism and staunch secularism and obsession with "scientific" progress? Or Britain and America, deeply Christian, cautious, skeptical of revolutionary change?
One would.
I don't think the Enlightenment has any claim to creating our prosperity at all. It did not end the religious wars; the religions and secular authorities did that jointly before its birth, and once it got rolling it caused some of the worst wars we've ever seen. It did not establish universal literacy; the Protestants did that, with the able assistance of Guttenburg. It arrived after science was already organizing itself, and so cannot claim credit for establishing it. It cannot claim credit for the subsequent industrial and scientific revolutions, because its focus was always social science and the theories it promoted were uniformly garbage, and because the nations that drove those revolutions the hardest were not very Enlightened. It cannot claim credit for individual rights and liberties, because it systematically trampled those rights and liberties wherever its ideology was allowed free action. What it did do, quite reliably, was produce vast, pitch-black concentrations of human misery, the historical record of which our current consensus steadfastly refuses to seriously grapple with.
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