FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15hr ago
If I'm right, it might not be too late to arrest the process or at least mitigate the damage, or in the final extremity to see it coming and bypass doom. But arresting the process would mean building some sort of durable norm, and I think you would agree this isn't that. If the idea was that we bury the idea of stochastic terrorism and group accountability for all imaginable consequences of hostility to the other and actually restored an iron law of free speech maximalism from this day forth, that would be one thing. But it seems to me that anyone who doesn't realize that this will wrench back the other way the moment the shoe is on the other foot is lying to themselves. This is a conversation we can have in advance, and it seems to me that we should have it in advance, if for no other reason that preparing to exploit that inevitable flip to the maximal extent possible is absolutely, obviously in my Tribe's interest, and any counter-argument to pursuing that interest zealously is never going to have a better chance of succeeding than it has right now.
Since this was decision by arbitration over violation of a union CBA, the question of whether saying something stupid and offensive qualifies as "gross misconduct" seems to depend on how their contract was written...
This appears to be an appeal to formal rule-based systems. I'm comfortable arguing that neither this system nor any system like it has ever or will ever protect people like me in a situation like this one. If I'm correct in that argument, people like me have no interest in accepting the output of this system, nor in maintaining or preserving systems of this sort generally.
That being said, you're looking for context, and that's a reasonable thing to do in my view. Even if a system is biased, there's still something to be said for consistency over time, even intratribal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
Blaming “the left” is about as solid as hand-wringing about stochastic terrorism. I believe in individual responsibility.
We handwrung about stochastic terrorism for the better part of a decade. Federal and national corporate policies covering vast swathes of our lives were set, and large amounts of meanness coordinated, based on arguments fairly summarized as "handwringing over stochastic terrorism". "Hostile environment" law and policy was and is given force of law based on arguments significantly weaker than "handwringing over stochastic terrorism."
I believe that you believe in individual responsibility. But you could not actually coordinate a consensus around "individual responsibility" before, and to the extent that "individual responsibility" carries the day in the current circumstance, it will be because that is the argument of maximal convenience to Blue Tribe at this moment. This will have consequences, and those consequences will be profoundly degenerate in obviously-foreseeable ways, chief among them that you, personally, are in this moment losing the ability to ever argue the contrary position persuasively ever again, regardless of future circumstances.
I mostly don't write effort posts lately, I've been too busy working on art and raising kiddoes. But one of the ones that languishes in my drafts folder is "Arguments we can have in advance", situations where it is extremely easy to model how the current conversation will evolve given likely future events. This is one of the big conversations we can have in advance. It seems to me that people really ought to give it a try, while there is still the present amount of unburned charity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
I imagine you'll point towards the two attempted Trump assassinations and Charlie Kirk, but I'm unconvinced this is out of the ordinary for a particularly controversial political figure.
I would also point to the popular reaction to the murder of Kirk and the attempts to murder Trump within Blue Tribe, and how these reactions compare to Blue Tribe's previous positions on how speech should be policed. I'll point to the endemic calls for the assassination of Musk, the organized vandalism and arson campaigns against Tesla dealerships and even (IIRC) individuals' personally-owned vehicles, and how major national politicians winked and nodded along rather than taking a stand against their mob. I'll point to Mangione's killing of the United Health CEO, and the obscene public reaction to the killing from grassroots Blues generally. I'll point to the continued Anti-ICE rioting and intimidation campaign, culminating in the shooting deaths of Good and Pretti, and how the discourse rolled out of those two shootings. I'll point to the evident entrenched denial of basic civil rights in Blue strongholds in the Pacific Northwest, where organized gangs of thugs abuse disfavored religious and political minorities while the authorities pointedly refuse to intervene unless it is to protect those thugs from reprisal. I would point to the Kamloops graves scam and the subsequent rash of church arsons. I'd point to church invasions being pushed as a "protest" tactic, and the apparent reluctance to enforce black-letter federal law against such tactics. I'll point to the ascendence of the DSA types within the Democrat Party, and the complicity of their leaders and influencers in all of these problems and many more besides.
I'll also point out that the arguments made in an attempt to keep a lid on these things are deployed when convenient, but cannot be undeployed when desired. We're Wrenching, here: it was very important that we address "right wing extremism" when a campaign ad put a crosshair on a congressperson's district and then she was publicly shot, or when it was obviously necessary to purge Red Tribers from every major social media platform, and we debated those ideas here at length. Now it's very important that we remember that sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me, and the very idea of policing public expressions of murderous pseudo-ethnic hatred is beyond the pale because muh freeze peach. Maybe some people still take these arguments seriously; there's a sucker born every minute, after all. For those who have more memory than a goldfish, though, it seems to me that the ability of these arguments to moderate conflict simply goes away and never comes back. Certainly it ought to.
You all predicted riots and burning and political violence after the Roe V. Wade repeal, after the 2024 elections, after pretty much every red tribe victory.
I am not a plurality, and I'm pretty sure I didn't predict riots and political violence specifically after Roe V. Wade appeal, much less a 1,000 year Christian Reich. I have predicted that the violence is going to get worse, and it seems to me that it is getting worse. You can admit it or not, but there is now a faction inside the Overton window that is explicitly endorsing murder as a viable political tactic, not in some hypothetical, abstract future but specifically in reference to actual murders and attempted murders that have actually happened. You can, as some here do, pretend that this is not a serious problem, right up until it's your champions catching bullets. And when that happens, what will you say when Blues here discuss how grassroots political extremism and popular support for murder as a political solution is a problem, actually, and I reply exclusively with @magicalkittycat quotes?
I first read you predicting catastrophic political violence and the disintegration of American society 6 years ago on reddit, and I'm still here in 2026 reading it after none of these things have come to pass.
There's a lot of ruin in a nation, but it appears to me that the trend is consistent, and as noted above, you appear to be ignoring a whole lot of the stuff you argue isn't happening. Conflict resolution mechanisms continue to degrade, conflict continues to escalate. Race relations are much worse now than they were ten years ago, in ways that appear to me strongly resistant to the standard liberal arguments for comity and toleration. Tribal relations are much worse now than they were ten years ago, again in ways that liberalism has no real answer for. The Democratic party is now entering its own political civil war between a corrupt relatively-centrist establishment and grassroots ideological extremists, which will be actualized in the upcoming elections and in the policy consequences of those elections. I do not think that this will result in an increased likelihood of peace and prosperity for all, but I'm ready to stand corrected.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20hr ago
Do you think this is a just outcome for this incident?
If you think this is a just outcome, are you comfortable with people generalizing the logic behind this outcome into a set of rules you will then accept living under?
If this is an example of what Unions can achieve, I am even less interested in allowing unions to continue existing than I was previously.
My predictions were logged long ago that I think violence is going to increase. When it does, I intend to quote this post and the context it references back to you, to the letter.
Not necessarily. There could be other thieves, like the other billionaires and so on.
I would have purchased twitter and more if he hadn't stolen that money from me.
You said Musk specifically stole the money used to purchase Twitter from you. He did not do that, because you never had the money to buy Twitter, nor any plausible route to the money to buy Twitter.
Now you are claiming that there "could be other thieves, like the other billionaires and so on". But no individual billionaire and no group of billionaires have stolen the purchase price of Twitter from you, because again, there is no plausible alternate story by which you ever might have possessed value equal to the purchase price of Twitter.
You said
Obviously not what I meant. There is no point unless you engage with what I meant.
We have no way of knowing "what you meant" other than the words you post, and there is no path from the words you are posting to anything resembling a coherent argument. You are not lost in the sauce of some labyrinthine argument here; I routinely write single paragraphs longer than your collective contributions to this thread. You appear to be blathering, and then getting performatively offended when people point out that your statements are rediculous.
Why not? Am I dumber than Elon Musk?
That seems likely to me, yes.
My arguments are coherent. I think you're struggling for one with the socially constructed nature of money. Anyone can be a billionaire. It's an argument as to who should be.
I reiterate: no individual billionaire and no group of billionaires have stolen the purchase price of Twitter from you, because again, there is no plausible alternate story by which you ever might have possessed value equal to the purchase price of Twitter.
Note the word value there. It's entirely possible for you to be a multi-trillionaire, provided you're a multi-trillionaire in Zimbabwean dollars or some equivalent. I do not believe there is a plausible path by which you might have had discretionary access to even a small fraction of the exchangeable value Musk possesses. "anyone" cannot be a "billionaire" in the sense you appear to intend here, because while we all could coordinate to arbitrarily provide massive amounts of exchange value to a random person, we won't, and don't, and haven't.
You have no plausible argument why you should be a billionaire, ie, have massively-elevated resources relative to almost all other living humans.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22hr ago
I would have purchased twitter and more if he hadn't stolen that money from me.
Obviously not what I meant. There is no point unless you engage with what I meant.
The premise is if I did have that money. Otherwise we ought to talk about the making of money and not the buying things with it.
The premise was that you would have had the money if Musk hadn't stolen it from you. Those are are the specific words you chose to present.
Musk did not steal the purchase price of Twitter from you. You have never possessed the purchase price of Twitter, and there is no plausible sequence of events by which you might have possessed the money to purchase Twitter. Please dedicate more effort to constructing your arguments in a coherent fashion.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
23hr ago
I'm pretty sure the through-the-scope shot was supposed to be done with his standard rifle, not the .50. particularly because, at least the way I heard it, the shot happened while the two shooters were stalking each other in the wild, and that's not really possible to do with a tripod-mounted Browning Machine Gun.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I generally think of myself as fairly crusty and well-armored against base emotional currents, but due to some personal events lately, sampling the discourse on this hit me really hard the other night. I'm very, very glad my wife is a sane woman of good sense.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Hedging the thing about with “inmyopinion's” and “itseemstome's” and “asIseeit's” and “atleastfrommypointofview's” gains you nothing.
What it gains you is an explicit admission that your opinion is an opinion, not an immutable fact of the universe. This is actually very helpful for keeping a clear head during the heat of disputations.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
This is a very tedious line of questioning. @The_Nybbler and @CapitolRoom think Blues have an insurmountable monopoly on force, that the police and military will reliably follow orders, and that Red Tribe itself is incapable of significant lawless violence. Whenever I mention that serious violence is a potential future, one or both of them pipes up to state the above. It's annoying, but such is life.
Suppose the democrats win the next election or two pretty decisively, and then legalize and grant voting rights to a few dozen million illegal immigrants.
Do you think this is an unlikely thing for the Democrats to do, given the statements and revealed preferences of their base, leadership and elite class?
Likely or not, Do you think that this is a valid policy option within the scope of what we ought to consider business-as-usual politics? What do you think the consequences would be on subsequent elections? What do you think the consequences would be in terms of America as a going sociopolitical concern over the next ten or twenty years?
If Trump had been killed in Butler, an event all evidence indicates was avoided by a very small margin and on pure chance, what do you think the likely consequences would have been?
If Red Tribe begins deploying lawless violence as a deliberate political strategy, what do you think the likely consequences will be?
Or are we totally in a post-moral political hellscape where might makes right and morals are dead?
That's certainly my position. Appeals to morality in the field of politics under current conditions are an obscenity.
I actually don't think any of the tactics that people use to shut down free speech these days come anywhere close to being that bad.
Killing people who say things you don't like is a tactic that people use to shut down free speech these days.
...Come to think of it, there were significant efforts to "destroy the printing press" of people whose speech was disfavored as well. Deplatforming, IDing as a "hate group" and debanking... is there a meaningful distinction you're pointing to here?
That ruleset is fantastic only if it is truly the case that God or the moral arc of history is on your side, since you can guarantee that that ruleset will win out.
It's also fantastic if you don't believe rulesets exist in any meaningful way. That is, "ruleset" implies and assumes that good outcomes can arrive by some mechanistic process outside one's own direct control, that one can meaningfully win not only through enforcing one's own will, but by "the rules" declaring one a winner, and that this will be respected by all parties involved.
"I win and you lose" is the default of the ingroup fighting the outgroup, always has been and always will be, because that's how human minds work. If you have sufficient cohesion that I (or we) covers a supermajority of the population, then you can prop a dinky NASCAR-commemorative-china ruleset on top and pretend it's running the show. Then the level of cohesion drops and the china set totters off and hits the concrete floor and shatters into a million irreparable pieces.
None of this is about rules. Rules are not going to solve any of these problems.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Fascism - No, Fascism is distinctly trying to return to pre-Christian Germanic pagan morality
But it absolutely and very explicitly emerged from Christian society, by people who were in all likelihood influenced in their core by Christian ideology. If "distinctly trying" to get somewhere outside the Christian frame is good enough to separate an ideology from Christianity, then Communism, Libertarianism, Wokeism and probably Republicanism (depending on definition) should likewise be recognized as distinct intellectual movements.
My view is that Progressivism as an ideology is the source of Communism, Fascism, Libertarianism, anti-fascism and wokeism. All of these start with the assumption that God does not exist and Christianity is, at best, an irrelevant distraction from the obvious work of reorganizing human society to better meet human ends.
Either everything that emerges later is just an offshoot of what came before, in which case all western ideologies are Christian and Christianity itself is just variant Paganism, making the argument fully general, or else new ideologies are possible, in which case Progressivism and its offshoots are markedly distinct from the Christianity they emerged from and specifically rejected.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Suppose there are a hundred people from a variety of backgrounds. Which is better:
- fifty people randomly selected don't get to speak
- the largest common-background group gets to pick twenty people who don't get to speak
- twenty people get to each pick a person who doesn't get to speak, and those silenced in this way each get to pick one other person who doesn't get to speak?
A guy in my small group recommended Biblical Monsters, which is both short and quite surprising to me in its excellence, and is one of the better first-contact stories I've ever read.
What proportion of the "highly educated" population is "highly educated" in the ways actually needed to run our society? Why is this system specifically necessary to educate them?
The salient characteristic of "wokeness" that right-wingers had a legitimate case against - the thing that needed, needs, to be wiped out - is cancel culture.
Then someone should probably have figured out a way to wipe it out. But they haven't, and the best defense available depends entirely on mirroring its tactics. There simply is not support for any other form of response, and people are never, ever going to accept "heads we cancel you, tails you tolerate us" as a stable equilibrium. And yet, in values-incoherent environments, that is precisely the deal on offer from all sides.
1990s-style maximal-free-speech norms were an unsustainable confluence of one-off factors, and they are gone now and are not going to come back. They have no constituency, and Free Speech ideology itself is variously either wildly unpopular or wildly hypocritical (CP? Revenge Porn? Malicious code? Copyright? Deepfake porn? The N-word, or slurs generally?). People, speaking generally, do not actually want Free Speech. They want "Free Speech" for speech within a standard deviation of what they consider good and normal, and speech outside that island of tolerance they do not want to see or to know about or for it to exist at all. This is all they have ever wanted or ever will want, and impressions to the contrary are artifacts of large-scale, coordinated, and evidently unsustainable lies. One of the most popular lies you're cutting across in your comment: "you shouldn't censor, because if you violate the taboo on censorship then others will turn around and censor you." But this only makes sense if they actually will turn around and censor you; if "free speech" goes dormant when you censor, it can either stay dormant forever, prove the maxim correct and render free speech to the past-tense, or it can wake up, at which point the argument is falsified and your initial censorship was the correct choice after all. Neither horn of the dilemma results in durable free-speech norms; the argument was never anything more than a feel-good deepity.
It's the equivalent of non-murderous German nationalists, who do not deserve to automatically be tarred with the Nazi brush just because they pursue similar aims to those that the Nazis committed horrific crimes in pursuit of.
But they are tarred with the Nazi brush, observably, in the real world we actually live in. At some point, "deserve" is just a word you've made up to describe things that aren't going to happen. People notice this, and they stop playing along or pretending otherwise.
People want more good things and less bad things. Speech is a thing. The math is pretty simple.
I guess my read is that the incineration/large-scale shooting parts totally eclipse the parliamentary maneuvers parts. At that point, if some SJ partisan found a genie and wished for total control of congress and the judiciary, I don't think it would make a difference. The system's inertia would be gone, people are not going to listen to laws or judges they don't like any more, there's not even relative peace and plenty to keep people complacent. I'm quite sure there would be very radical things happening in whatever ad-hoc legislature the continuity of government machinery spat out, but I'm skeptical the outputs would matter much.
I'm skeptical that laws and courts, as such, actually mean that much. They are valuable because they are coordination mechanisms, but the point is the coordination, not the mechanism, and people observably can coordinate in a lot of other ways. In a serious disruption of the existing social order, I think all this stuff just goes away, as it's too misaligned with the interests of people acting in crisis mode, regardless of tribal affiliation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
...is your argument that in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, SJ would be in trouble because non-SJ would have access to Constitutional Amendments and impeachment?
Another such victory and we are undone.
Further elaboration really deserves its own post, focused on a specific topic in depth rather than my usual scattershot bluster. Soon, hopefully.
Why depend on the law for your own safety's sake? Why not cut down every law in England to get after the Devil, and then if he turns round on you, just prop them back up again to hide behind? What, specifically, keeps them down?
This is a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer.
[EDIT] Let me make the point more explicitly. You are making the argument to me that if one disregards the laws, then the laws will not be there to help one when they are needed. My argument is that my opponents have disregarded the laws, and so should not be able to appeal to them. If I am right that they have disregarded the laws, but you insist I should still give them benefit of them, then I ought likewise to be able to disregard the law and still receive the benefit of them, so disregarding their appeal to the laws is the correct position to take. If your argument is that once disregarded, the laws cannot be appealed to, then my opponents' previous disregard means I should reject their appeals now, and disregarding their appeal to the laws is likewise the correct position to take.
If your argument is that they should be able to disregard the law an unlimited amount of times and yet still appeal to the law, and if I reject such appeals I will be denied the benefit of the law in my hour of need, I will point out that this is a needlessly convoluted way of declaring oneself an enemy.
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