FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
My understanding, admittedly second-hand, is that more than one of the female jurors have admitted on camera to arguing their position based on their own "expert opinion", ie based on evidence that was not actually admitted in the trial proper, and that this is in fact serious misconduct. Can anyone else shed more light on this aspect?
Pretty sure it's one of either Muggeridge or Menken, the anecdote being mentioned in Scott's review of their autobiography.
[edit] - It's Muggeridge.
Yeah, that's basically my thesis. Greater social cohesion means the effect of cultural trends is significantly magnified, and the Progressive cultural trend was extremely strong even in our world, where social division was strong and deep. I guess our point of disagreement is that I see Communism as an obvious continuation of the Progressive project right back to the Enlightenment itself, so if you strengthen the Progressive push, you strengthen the Communist push as well, and I think beating back Communism was a near-run thing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9hr ago
My understanding is that the US provided a very large amount of the anti-communist energy throughout the Cold War. Canada I think is too close to the US to disambiguate. Australia I don't know much about. My understanding is that England was profoundly compromised by Communists top-to-bottom, and that's in the real world where the US is working as hard as possible to drag them back.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19hr ago
Without the history of slavery, probably there's a lot less conflict in American history. Most likely the Civil War doesn't happen, and the country is much more cohesive rolling into the 1900s. You have no bitter division to pre-seed conflict with modernism as it rolls out; in our actual timeline, a large proportion of elites went hard for socialism/communism around the turn of the century, through the 20s and into the 30s, and the south generated much of the serious resistance to Communism in the 40s, 50s and 60s. How much of that resistance is catalyzed by the acrimony of the civil war, reconstruction and the Jim Crow years?
No articles or references, just a lot of reading about modernism and its leading lights.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
No, it's a Russell conjugation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
My read of the historical evidence is that, in this scenario, we probably would have gone Communist in the 20s-30s, and things might well have been considerably worse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Conspiracy theories are typically things that allege multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public.
...Not convoluting the definition, but leaving it to obviously include most of the examples given while simply asserting that it does not fit them is also a strategy, I suppose.
"Trump is a Russian Asset" alleges that Trump and many members of his staff are working for the Russian government, their cooperation being secured through some combination of kompromat, bribes and ideological alignment. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". This is your reminder that this particular conspiracy theory was a paid op by Hillary Clinton, that Obama appears to have been at minimum aware of it and declined to intervene, that Obama's senior officials were directly involved in its implementation, and that it was pushed to the hilt by every major media organization in the country for multiple years, with devastating political consequences and zero accountability.
"The police routinely kill unarmed, innocent black men" claims that police routinely cooperate to murder innocent black men and then to cover up these murders as legitimate police actions, aided and abetted by other elements of the criminal justice system such as judges, prosecutors, etc. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". Engagement with this conspiracy theory is universal within Blue Tribe, and conformity is policed viciously.
"The wage gap is a real measure of sexist discrimination" claims that business owners secretly coordinate to violate black-letter federal anti-discrimination law, artificially depressing wages for women by 30% economy-wide and with sufficient cunning that they never, ever get caught doing it, because they hate women and want to exploit them. There is no way you can spin this claim where it does constitute a highly central example of "multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes". Less prevalent that the racialized conspiracy theories at the moment, Feminism peaked early and largely exhausted itself, but we could tack on "Rape Culture/Believe All Women/Justice Kavanaugh is a rapist" as further examples as well.
"Billionaires control the government" claims that Billionaires have secretly subverted democracy through various legal, quasi-legal and illegal actions to put themselves beyond the reach of law and bend the government to their will. It universally involves claims that multiple actors are secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public. How could you possibly argue otherwise?
"Appropriating Billionaire wealth could pay for all/most/any significant number at all of good things people want." This one does not fit your definition of conspiracy.
"High health care costs are a conspiracy by greedy capitalists." "Conspiracy by greedy capitalists" is literally in the belief-statement, and is by no means a straw-man. Millions of people observably believe this, and are willing to endorse murder as a plausible solution.
"Capitalism is at fault for [insert social problem here]" likewise observably involves claims of malign coordination by rich villains in a large and highly central proportion of real-world instances.
"Trump is a Russian asset."
"The police routinely kill unarmed, innocent black men."
"The wage gap is a real measure of sexist discrimination."
"Billionaires control the government."
"Billionaires got their money by stealing it from ordinary people."
"Appropriating Billionaire wealth could pay for all/most/any significant number at all of good things people want."
"High health care costs are a conspiracy by greedy capitalists."
"Capitalism is at fault for [insert social problem here]."
Or is it time to convolute the borders of "conspiracy theory"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
What's your understanding of the "pentagon situation"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Though I'll save any attempted lectures (which take too much finesse for me to ever deliver convincingly) for those who seem to be honestly pained by their beliefs I think are mistaken, rather than wheeling one out for OP who is always just looking for a new 'republican bad' angle.
For the record, I'll hear you out. MMT seems crazy to me, but I'm policy-starved, and politics runs on hope. If we're going to be acting as though MMT is true, I'd like to at least hear the optimistic case.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
If FC's particular brand of doomerism is not controlling (and it might be), then perhaps the most suitable tool in our Constitutional Republic for the task would be a Constitutional amendment.
Perhaps you could write it such that "balanced budgets shall not be infringed." That ought to keep things in-line.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
It seems to me that if one makes a statement for which a reasonable response is "War exists", it might be time to contemplate one's choices.
"Hottentot Morality" describes a lack of reciprocity. Through specific choices, humans can arrive in a state where reciprocity breaks down. If we in America are not in that state, we are pretty close to it, and getting closer over time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The Republican party also gained quite a lot of political capital from their stances during this time. They were even able to effectively box Bill Clinton in and get him to balance the budget somewhat. These were popular measures that helped win Republicans elections, since there were enough voters who valued these things relative to other priorities to make it so.
The Republican party gained a lot of political capital through those stances... and then failed to fix the issue in any meaningful way, and then Bush blew the budget out on ruinous foreign wars, and Obama blew the budget out in the usual progressive ways, and now the stance itself is no longer credible. 2nd-term Obama was the point at which I personally committed to never caring about the issue again; fiscal responsibility sounds good, but you just straight-up cannot get there from here, and scarce political capital needs to be allocated where it might plausibly do some good.
Again, the idea that balanced budgets are political poison akin to cooperating in a defector's game is an overwhelmingly modern phenomenon based on how the electorate moved. The problem is the modern electorate.
How did the modern electorate get to be the modern electorate? Did 85 years of massive redistribution have anything to do with it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
It is frustrating that you're such a good writer because over years and years of reading you I've realized that all your beliefs amount to Hottentot morality in so many words.
"Hottentot Morality" seems underspecified.
I refuse to pretend that rules or norms constrain us all equally when in fact they obviously do not. Why should I? What works that way? What positive outcome is secured by such a method? Further, if stability or peace or the current maintenance of plenty requires obvious, systematic injustice, why would you think this maintainable long-term? Why is pretending it can be sustained useful? What is gained? A pleasant aesthetic ambiance between now and the inevitable shattering crash?
Democrats celebrate crime and brutality?
Whoa now, you can't just sneak that in there, that seems pretty uncharitable! Most of the Blues remaining here certainly wouldn't agree that Democrats do anything of the sort, even when you quote examples of they themselves doing so!
Which is to say, you are willing to make this accusation to me, who is speaking the truth plainly, and decline to make it to those who have actually acted on it but are willing to lie. And even then, they burned our cities; have we burned theirs? Are we running gangs of masked men to kick people's teeth in for saying things we don't like? Are we murdering their political champions? If you're going to draw an equivalence, you really ought to back it up.
...But allow me to skip much tedious listing and harangue.
The difference that you don't seem to recognize is that I'm willing to agree that these things are, in fact, actual problems, and they are, in fact, going to lead to a bad end, provided my opposite is willing to engage with the facts in good faith. Absent that good faith, I'm not really sure what you or others expect. My side lost, and was trampled down. Can you resurrect us? If you cannot, why curse me for failing to do so? I say that the culture war is a serious problem driven by fundamentally-incompatible values across broad, coherent populations, that this locks us into an escalation spiral that is very obviously going to break things we can't fix, and I'm told that I'm being a silly-billy, that this is all a distraction or an algorithm bubble, and then the next day I'm presented with a conversation like this one, where it's awful that my side is doing the thing the other side built their entire party around doing, and has consistently claimed my side is bad for trying to stop, all the way up to five seconds ago.
If you think vote-buying is bad, explain what ought to be done about eighty-five fucking years of ceaseless vote-buying. Explain what should be done about the trillions of dollars in vote-buying that is definitely going to happen this year alone. Explain how the ideals you're espousing have even the slightest connection to the world I have to live in, or how precisely they extend even two inches beyond this specific, entirely-bespoke Russell-conjugation.
Things can be destroyed that cannot be repaired nor replaced, and recognizing this fact does not in and of itself bring them back. Pretending harder doesn't change this. Cursing people who point out that you are pretending also does not change this.
In 2023, the Peronist government of Argentina tried to buy votes with total tax relief for "the working class" and free bus rides. I've been impressed by Argentinians when they didn't take the bait and still voted Milei, who reversed the law.
The wheel carried them down, now it carries them up. The wheel carried us up, now it carries us down. We probably have a Milei, somewhere; it's a big country. What we lack is a population willing to accept a Milei. We are too fat and comfortable, too deluded to accept that hard decisions need to be made, and so those who argue correctly that hard decisions are needed to forestall serious disaster simply lose. And so those of us who can recognize that hard decisions are needed to forestall disaster recognize, correctly, that the hard decisions can't be coordinated, and accept that the disaster is going to happen, and attempt to prepare as best we're able.
There's been a lot of concern about Brazilification of the US. I think it's way past that. The US is a South American society, maybe Middle Eastern. Just wrong skin color by accident.
I honestly suspect that you have no idea. And yet, you frequently speak about inevitable US victory and our impending dominance of the light-cone. I think that's unlikely. I think things go badly for us and probably for a lot of other people in the not-too-distant future, as the Belle Epoque collapses.
So it goes.
The culture war is a war, and increasingly so year by year.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Which is understandable, but ignoble behavior.
There is no durable consensus that we are circling Charybdis. The ask here is that people like me continue to act as though we are circling Charybdis and exhaust ourselves rowing away from that apparent danger, while Blue Tribe laughs at our absurd concerns and forces us to serve them the wine we're too busy rowing to drink.
To the extent that Charybdis does not exist, we should also drink wine. To the extent that Charybdis does exist, this is not an acceptable plan to avoid it. It does not seem to me that nobility comes into it one way or the other; if you require people to enslave themselves in lifelong, futile misery to secure your approval, do not be surprised when they shrug and turn their back to you.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
FDR was elected in 1932. Trump was elected in 2016. That is an 84-year gap, during which Democrats accrued massive political capital via the public purse, and Republicans expended vast amounts of political capital trying (and failing) to restrain them.
What was the point of that effort? Why should it be continued? Obviously the democrats have not and will not agree that there is any need for restraint, and obviously a large portion of America sees nothing wrong with this attitude. Are they mistaken? If so, can you persuade them of this fact to a degree that will result in them changing their behavior?
Shit, where's the modern monetary theorists up ins? Aren't we due for a lecture about how the deficit isn't actually a problem, how the National budget isn't actually like a household budget, how debt isn't real?
As I spoke earlier about the plan to pay parents to stay at home, it's another highlight of how modern "conservativism" just doesn't give a shit about money anymore.
Nor should it. There is no economic, political, nor social benefit available to pursuit of fiscal conservativism in any shape or form. It achieves nothing, can achieve nothing, will achieve nothing. If America needs a party of higher taxes, spending cuts and austerity, I nominate the Democrats take up this noble burden upon their broad shoulders and wish them well of it.
As I spoke earlier about the plan to pay parents to stay at home, it's another highlight of how modern "conservativism" just doesn't give a shit about money anymore.
You probably ought to take a break from slathering on the emotives and supply a specific argument as to why they should, which will be difficult because no coherent argument for such action exists.
Likewise, there's not even an attempt to hide the corruption anymore. I can not even imagine how much more blatant he could get that this is attempted bribery. People can play the whataboutism game of former admins if they want, but at least those had the shame to hide it behind closed doors a bit.
If you are going to call the Trump Administration corrupt, I think you should detail who in the Administration has been convicted of corruption in a court of law. I have lost count of the times you have argued that the procedural outcomes of the criminal justice system settle a matter: well, this also is one of those procedural outcomes, yet here you seem to believe that your own judgement takes precedence in a way that you have never and will never accept from your opposites.
In any case, if Trump and his administration were corrupt, it seems to me that since you were comfortable looking the other way for his predecessors, what justification other than tribal animus could lead you to argue for doing otherwise now? We are not even at the part where the FBI coordinates cover-ups with every major media outlet and platform in the country that involve mass-violations of freedom of speech and the press. You did not care then, why should we care now, or indeed ever again? Where do you get off pretending that there are rules being broken here?
It's not just fiscal responsibility that is a joke, the entire idea of government funding has become one.
Sure. Just not merely as much of a joke as your shabby pretense that this moment, now is when it became one.
Fiscal responsibility is a joke, redistribution from the rich to the poor in bribes is based, trade is evil and companies should be owned by the government.
Do the words "Stimulus", or "Bailout" mean anything to you? "Entitlements?" No? How delightful it must be, to be each morning born anew, unburdened by what has been.
We have been discussing the precariat for more than a decade at this point. Economic stress is driving radicalization nation-wide. What you so callously describe as "bribes" to "leeches" is necessary economic assistance to Americans who both need and deserve the help. But by all means, continue framing the issue this way, and I can only hope that the Democrats follow your appalling example.
The truth, as I see it, is that you are angry that Republicans have figured out that we also can distribute largesse from the public purse. We can probably even do it without inculcating massive ethnic fraud machines! How unfair of us! Everyone knows the democrats are supposed to be the party that buys votes with tax dollars, and the Republicans are supposed to be the party that loses votes by implementing austerity. How dare we refuse to play the role assigned to us!?
And what political coalition now exists to point out the obvious and say this isn't smart?
There isn't one, and you know it. And when the consequences come due, as they must, it must be a great relief to you to know that your side will grimly tighten their belts and set to work picking up the pieces in a measured and responsible manner, foregoing extremism and finger-pointing and blame-games, and through reason and persuasion patiently persuade the public the necessity of taking responsibility and accountability for the mistakes made and the many hard years of sacrifice ahead. Honestly, I'm hopeful that you'll personally be one of them, given your evident honesty and dedication to plain-speaking truth. I hope I get to watch you make that pitch someday, perhaps on TV.
But most importantly, what does this say about politics now where promising $1.35 trillion in direct payments to voters is presented as the conservative campaign message.
It says that Conservativism is dead. The Progressive coalition successfully strangled it to death, and its last, brightest glimmer of hope was squandered in a cross-tribe coalition effort at nation-building in the Middle East. For all your performative disgust, you know that Social Security is insolvent, that entitlement spending has been obviously unsustainable for decades, and that the Democrats have worked ceaselessly to make these problems worse for at least the last fifty years. What point is there for Republicans to continue to exercise restraint? Whatever we save, you will squander, loot, spend or redistribute. And this presumes that we even can coordinate savings, which we have historically not been able to do, and which further attempts at doing directly trade off on our other political objectives.
This ends badly, obviously. Equally obviously, that bad ending was locked in quite some time ago, and I for one decline to be scapegoated for it.
How much further into the slop can we possibly descend, and how we can ever pull ourselves out of it? Maybe the Dems can just promise 5,001 dollars or something.
Sure, go for it! Counter-offer: we offer 5,002, and a plan to pay for it by nationalizing the endowments! The destination is fixed, does it actually matter if we get there fast or slow?
It is not clear to me that your model of "alienating the normies" is accurate. Certainly what alienates normies does not follow any sort of rational model, or that there is a way to take effective action sufficient to the situation that we can know in advance will "alienate normies" less. It is now established to a high degree of probability that Blues ran an illegal project to engineer novel plagues in secret, leaked their work-product, caused a global pandemic, killed thirty-two million people, wrecked the global economy and significantly and pointlessly reduced the quality of life of, to a first approximation, every human being on the planet. All of this is now strongly indicated by publicly available evidence, and somehow none of it has "alienated the normies" to any significant degree. If you are going to claim that normie-alienation is an important part of your model, I'd be interested in how your model accounts for that sequence of events.
It appears to me that Normies are alienated by, essentially, hostile propaganda, and the biggest gains we've made in reducing normie alienation are by direct conflict with the Blue knowledge-production apparatus, not by allowing it an uncontested veto. This is not to say that my side cannot make mistakes or be genuinely unpopular, but rather to note that most of the mechanisms offering granular control over what is popular are controlled by enemies, and to the extent that this is less true over time, it has become less true through an open-ended acceptance of conflict and escalation in the face of highly effective propaganda.
One way to never lose an election again would be to vote for Blues exclusively. Unfortunately, the point of elections is to secure power to coordinate the pursuit of good things; if the choice is between pursuing good things at the risk of "alienating the normies" or accepting bad things indefinitely with the approval of normies, the former is clearly preferable. Any level of immigration restriction beyond de facto open borders would not be a viable policy without "alienating the normies". Having police is not a viable policy without "alienating the normies".
We will definitely make mistakes, and we will definitely lose elections. When this happens, the proper course of action is to escalate. Procedural outcomes exist to be manipulated, and it is my side that should be manipulating them to secure positive outcomes. The hope is that we will be able to secure those outcomes before the escalation becomes uncontrollably self-sustaining, but the alternative is also acceptable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
What benefit is derived from believing in ghosts?
Alternatively: "no, you see, the Europeans just have a different understanding of Free Speech."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
This is going to shift the pendulum back towards "trusted" "publishers" and stuff, where there is some sort of quality gate. Most of this flood of games is going to be games that nobody wants to play.
This implies that the publishers themselves are trusted and that the trust people place in them is being maintained. That is not the market I observe from the inside. AAA gaming seems like a dumpster fire at the moment, having arrived at a place similar to the film industry where they're actively generating anti-fandoms collectively rooting for their failure, but without the film industry's institutional moat and diversification to protect them from the consequences. There have been a lot of bombs lately, and studios, even major studios, often don't survive them. Major publishers are frequently loathed by the player-base. The studios and publishers with considerable good will are generally in the indie space or increasingly lonely titans like Rockstar, which is so lonely because those titans can and do die: Blizzard and Bungie, two of the most successful companies the space has ever seen, are arguably toast at this point. Most AAA studios appear incapable of controlling costs to anything resembling a reasonable level, so one bomb kills most of them and a second bomb kills most of the rest. Further, both workers and leadership are, from my perspective, pathologically averse to solutions to any of these problems. They'd rather unionize, blame the audience, virtue signal ideology, retreat into a bubble of toxic positivity, anything other than engage with the fact that their whole segment of the industry is a horror show at the moment.
It seems to me that the success stories follow a pattern: keeping costs low, teams small, find an audience and engage with them heavily, make the game they want as simply and quickly and responsively as possible. Alternatively, make something simple and coherent with a very small team and hope to get lucky, offsetting the risk of the gamble with pure passion. I think this latter class is already pretty large and is just going to keep growing as barriers to entry vanish. I think they're going to saturate the market, and that's going to have cascading effects on the far more leveraged-up end of the industry. Quality will rise to the top, and at some point there's so much of it that the audience dilutes and fragments, and the old business patterns become unsustainable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I am not very good at code. I have a project I've been working on for a couple weeks or months at a time every year or so; I really wanted to make this game, but going head down on it has always been exhausting, I end up burning two weeks or so tackling some stupid code problem, and then drop the project again when I just can't handle trying to tackle the next obstacle.
I've made more progress in the last two weeks than I have since I started the project, by a wide margin. There are no significant obstacles in sight. Things that would have been completely impractical pipe-dreams are reduced to easy lifts of an evening or so. I'm not sure it will stay like this, perhaps I'll run up against some more significant wall that AI can't handle, but where I'm at now is that I was probably never going to ship this game, and now it certainly looks like I am.
I am one of the dormant creatives you're claiming doesn't exist. I can directly observe the difference in effort. I might be wrong, but I would be very, very surprised.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
What does “dead” mean? Lots of artists still employed at video game and animation studios, lots of artists still taking commissions on patreon and the like, etc.
Re: video games, I think you're probably going to see a mass die-off in the next year or two. I predict with strong confidence that within the next year, Steam will see an order of magnitude increase in the number of games released. I would be very surprised if the current industry business model survives the flood.
Making predictions is always scary, as it should be, but if I'm wrong on this one by all means quote back at me. I'm currently running AI five or six hours a night, trying to make hay while the sun shines; we'll see how it goes.
I assumed it was this.
I used to be a pretty big 9/11 truther, and suppose I still am in a fairly limited form. I dove deep on the pentagon evidence back in the day, and concluded that there was nothing to it. The usual claim was that what actually hit the Pentagon was a tomahawk missile; supporting evidence presented was the absence of large airliner engines in the wreckage, the presence of a much smaller turbofan engine, and arguments about the shape of the hole in the pentagon itself.
From memory, I've seen strong arguments that the main engines are absent because when a large jet engine running at full-speed hits thick reinforced concrete, it tends to shatter/explode. The small engine found was likely the airliner's APU, a small jet engine located in the back top of the fuselage under the tail, used for generating power for in-flight systems. Its positioning would give it the maximum protection from the impact due to the structures ahead of it crumpling. Other evidence included a shipping container in the area that had been clipped by the plane's wing on the way in. I'm pretty sure it was a plane.
For me, a lot of "9/11 truth" became less plausible not due to the accrual of physical evidence, "evidence" in cases like this being something of a loaded term for a variety of reasons, but because the expected consequences that most of those theories predicted did not come to pass. Bush did not suspend elections nor make himself president-for-life. Institutions rolled on much as they had previously. If 9/11 involved a layer beneath the "official story", (and it pretty clearly did, see the stock trades for an example of where it seems inarguable that we aren't getting the full story), I think it's pretty clear that the hidden part of the story did not represent a significant discontinuity with the way our system in general worked before or after.
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