FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14hr ago
Nor should he be. When the Senate assassinates Caeser, it's bad news all around. When the Senate fails to assassinate Caeser...
But I think it's also good to minimize governing by the elastic clause as much as possible.
I'd agree with that. But suppose we want to allow people to respond to warnings, even to push back on them and explain why they think they're in the right, but we don't want people to outright defy warnings.
"respond", "pushback", and "defy" are all subjective terms. If we nail down a definition for them, we can just recapitulate this conversation again, about whether or not people were "defiant", or merely "pushing back".
If a mod says "you are breaking the rules, stop it," and the reply is "You aren't the boss of me, I'm gonna keep doing it", I don't think most people are surprised if the response is "okay, we'll cut to the chase and just give you a ban then." That doesn't seem to require a lot of elasticity. We give warnings because we want people to modify their behavior without having to ban them. We give limited-duration bans because we want people to modify their behavior without perma-banning them. If someone straight-up tells us that they aren't modifying their behavior based on the current response, escalation seems like a reasonable alternative.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Another way to engage with it might be, "if SpaceX fails in the future, where do we expect 'overregulation' to rank on the scale of expected causes?"
I would rank it pretty high.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
"Don't be egregiously obnoxious" covers both, I think.
No matter how careful we are, someone's going to come up with a way to be annoying, in a way that technically follows the rules. If we were to write a rule saying "don't do this thing", they would bend the rule to be as broad as possible, then complain that we're not enforcing it properly.
The goal of this community is not, however, slavish adherence to rules. It's discussion. And if this means we need to use our human judgement to make calls, then that's exactly what we will do.
There are people who think that every rule should be absolutely objective, to the point where our job could be done by a robot. I will point out that no legal system in history has ever worked this way and that if you think we can do better than the entire human race working on it for five thousand years, then I invite you to submit a proposal on how it will work.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Why is that certain?
Nothing is certain, but I'd say it's a very good bet. I'm pretty sure getting the public to comply with a draft requires more social trust than, in the words of the economist, "getting credit cards to work".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
That would be my rough assessment as well.
Blue Tribe excels at soft control, but that does not translate into hard control. They win when they can isolate a situation and then drown it in "process". You can't isolate a draft; it's everywhere and all at once. Likewise for firearms confiscation, or even firearms registration for that matter, or arresting state governors.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
There was the draft, in a previous society posessed of a great deal of social cohesion. That society no longer exists.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Weren't they Gnostics? Gnosticism definately still exists.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Back in the Freedom Fries era, we occasionally saw someone attacking a swarthy individual wearing a turban while shouting something derogatory to Arabs, and then it turned out the victim was actually Sikh. My understanding is that these cases were generally chalked up to Islamophobia, even though the victim wasn't a Muslim, because the attacker's motivation was hatred of Muslims.
This situation seems analogous. I guess it's reasonable to ask whether the hatred is toward Catholics in particular, or Christians generally, but it's pretty clearly a wave of hate crimes aimed at a coherent target. It's especially notable since there's zero evidence the inciting incident actually happened.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
you would ban someone who showed up saying "nobody is trying to take your guns, you stupid paranoid hicks. Why do you want school shootings so much?"
"nobody is trying" is kinda consensus-building, but probably fine. "you stupid paranoid hicks" is an immediate ban because it's needlessly inflammatory.
If, on the other hand, someone comes in and posts "The gun control debate seems pretty absurd to me at this point. I see no evidence that anyone actually wants to confiscate all the guns or shoot all gun owners or whatever, and claims to the contrary seem totally unsupportable. This looks to me like another case where the Red Tribe bought into their own spin so much that they've lost all touch with reality."
...They are totally allowed to do that. I and Gattsuru and about a dozen other people will then bury them under an avalanche of quotes and citations, but we'll have to be civil about it as well. Even when you know the person is arguing in bad faith, even you can't remember when they've argued in good faith, you still have to keep it civil or just stay out of it. This does allow some people to get away with bad behavior long-term, but it makes them work very, very hard for it, and they evidently don't enjoy it much, so that's probably the best we can ask for.
Your way, we're stuck trying to judge who is lying, and that opens up a whole other can of worms. Are they lying if they don't believe in Climate Change? If they don't believe trans women are women? If They think the president is doing a good job?
[EDIT] - The paper you linked is a much, much more persuasive argument than an expression of your emotional state. Just link a couple paragraphs and compare and contrast to the people acting like it isn't happening. That is super-effective rhetoric right there.
I am going to die when leftist looters burn my family alive FC.
I have come across pictures like this, and contemplate that some day in the not-to-distant future, they could very well be my wife and children. But you are claiming certainty. Okay. What are the intermediate steps? What happens, specifically, between here and there? Make your predictions, and we can see how it goes step by step. If it doesn't go the way you're thinking, you can hopefully recognize that you are being irrational. And if it doesn't go the way I'm thinking, I can recognize that I've underestimated the threat. Either would be a positive result, no?
In the meantime... Do you live in a Blue area? If so, you should move. Do you own guns? If not, you should get them, not because they're particularly useful in a fighting-the-blues sense, but because you should have the means to protect your family. More than that you should be building skills and cultivating social networks. I worry about my family being burned alive, but not by looters, because I don't live near potential looter populations, the local authorities look favorably on armed self-defense, I have a strong social network, and my wife and I have plans to improve our position over the next few years.
Any opportunity to win and then mulch them first is worth taking, no matter how bad the odds are (I'm assuming "ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force" means no effective resistance to mop-up mulching after victory, since a random 5% is far too low to include that part)
Why? I hate Blues so much it often keeps me awake at night. But you are claiming you think they're going to kill a significant portion of the US population, and so you need to do it to them "first". Okay, how are they going to do that? What's the sequence of steps? Because we're talking about the power and water going out and the trains stopping, and also incidentally dozens of millions of your friends and neighbors dead. That means you get real poor real fast. that means crime goes through the roof and probably stays there. That means everyone's life gets fucked for the foreseeable future. If you're certain something bad enough to be worth all that is coming, you should necessarily be certain about how we get from here to there. So, how?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
You've already called me a liar and and stated that I should not be listened to. Why are you still trying to talk to me?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
If violence is your last resort, you're not prepared to use it at all.
And that's why the only possible response to someone cursing you out is a mag-dump.
You don't need to be frothing at the mouth and shooting every minute of every day, but it needs to be the goal you base all your other plans around reaching or it will never happen, just like writing a novel.
Salami slicing is an actual problem. Coordination is an actual problem, a very serious one.
Let's say a man with a pencil mustache and a dapper black suit hands you a button. You press this button, and a randomly-selected two to five percent of the US population is abruptly mulched, the trains stop running and the power and water goes out for the indefinite future. There's also a 75% chance that the American Blue Tribe ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force, and a 25% chance that the Red Tribe ceases to exist.
Do you pressing that button right now is a good idea?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
...A quote from a recent conversation seems relevant.
I am pretty confident that people can't do much better with a torture regime than we've seen them do in the past. That is to say, I think the problem is pretty well bounded by irreducible limits on human agency and capacity, and I do not expect this to change in the forseeable future.
The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree. I don't think the Enlightenment revolutions of the 1800s - 1900s are repeatable, and I think the social systems that produce similar regimes are observably dying. That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia. It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society. Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.
For a long time, castles were the defining paradigm of force. When gunpowder arrived, one might argue that it should benefit castles, since it allowed faster mining and quarrying of stone with which to build them. One would be wrong.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
But why did you ignore the other two sentences I quoted?
Because they were prefatory, and the sentence I quoted appears to be the conclusion that follows from them.
Why do you think these sentences say "we know how to solve all our problems"?
Because he doesn't seem to see that statement as an obstacle to attempting solutions to all our problems. He says institutions can never resolve all the conflicts, that Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos. And then he concludes that the Revolution should proceed anyway, endlessly, and that this is a good thing. Doesn't he?
"Limits" stop things. This "limit" stops nothing, instead it "drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom", and he seems to consider this a feature, not a bug: "it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced". "Revolution" is commonly understood to mean the seizure and exercise of power. He claims that "revolution" will never end, and that this will plausibly deliver benefits indefinitely.
I do not see how this statement cashes out in a practical limit to socialist ambition. To the extent that it proposes a limit, the limit is entirely theoretical, and it appears to explicitly claim that such a theoretical limit will and should be ignored.
That's my understanding at least; am I misinterpreting him? What am I missing?
If you want to argue linguistic precision, I'd say this falls under "problems we can't solve aren't actually problems". I don't see anything here equivalent to "we can't solve some problems, and we need to accept that and not try."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Why isn't that fear enough?
Because, in my assessment, it's not rational. It appears that others agree with me, Abbott and DeSantis among them, among a number of other leaders and their supporters. Defiance of Federal authority is observably being coordinated, right out in the open where you can watch it happen.
You can believe that such defiance is inevitably doomed to fail, but I disagree, and it appears others disagree as well. Very well: we've made our predictions, and the outcomes will be as they will be.
What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.
It doesn't seem to me that they're getting it, and the trend seems to be that they're getting less of it over time.
Because you will be punished if you don't?
It seems to me that their capacity for punishment is declining, and that well-chosen actions can force it further into decline.
Trump is certainly being punished. He has survived so far, and is plausibly going to win the election. If he does, they will stonewall him and continue their efforts to destroy him, and the result that matters is that the system will continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. If he does not win the election, or if they succeed in destroying him, the system will likewise continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. I do not see a route by which the establishment arm of the GOP regain authority over and support from their base, which has been in open rebellion for some years now. Abbott has not yet been punished, and neither has DeSantis. Even if Trump is destroyed, and Abbott is destroyed, and DeSantis is destroyed, someone else will step up to take their respective places, and the process will continue.
This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.
Abbott has done so before, and Biden backed down. Abbott is doing so again, and Biden is very likely to back down this time too.
There is more defiance to Federal authority now than there was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. It does not seem to me that the trend supports your interpretations or predictions.
...As for the rest, I maintain that the ultima ration is preferable to an uncontested blue tribe win, and that it favors Red Tribe. I also maintain that it would be a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale, think it should be our last resort, and do not believe that discussing it in detail is a good idea, especially in this forum. I continue to decline discussion of the ultima ratio beyond these points, and continue to be comfortable with your assumption and assertion that this means there is no substance to my argument. I invite you to dispense with the questions and simply proceed to state that I offer no explanation and thus should not be listened to. Others are free to draw their own conclusions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I'm trad and generally supportive of MAGA-Style socio-populism. What am I, Left?
The AuthLeft and AuthRight are defined by a belief in the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint - all members of the AuthLeft and AuthRight believe this, and furthermore members of other political ideologies don't believe it, and This belief is the most salient factor in determining identity among political ideologies
Why would any other feature of an ideology be more salient than a belief that "we have the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint"? What does it matter what you call it, or what theory you use to justify it, if that is where it cashes out?
Further, you seem to be implying that this is about labels, that Libertarians or Christians don't suffer this problem because they're Libertarians and Christians, as though it is the label that provides the immunity. People can absolutely hold this belief while calling themselves Libertarian or Christian. I can point to a lot of Libertarians and Christians that don't hold this belief, and I can point to core axioms of the two ideologies that directly contradict this belief, and thus plausibly provide some immunity from its contagion. But the question is whether or not it is present, and the labels applied are entirely superfluous to that question. Libertarians do not have a long history of governance to examine, but people who called themselves Christian have in the past and do in the present absolutely hold this belief. That is something I would dearly like to help solve, by providing strong arguments as to why they shouldn't.
You're using these idiosyncratic concepts "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight" whose applicability to broader political discussions is questionable.
I'd be interested to drill down on why you think it's questionable.
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Do you reject the idea as incoherent in and of itself?
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Do you grant that it's coherent, but don't see the connection to the examples I've provided?
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Do you see the connection in those examples, but think I'm overstating it?
The space of possible political positions is much broader than you give it credit for. I would encourage you to read some of the original works by any of the thinkers we've been discussing lately - Zizek, Lacan, Marcuse, Derrida, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and see if there's anything in there that surprises you.
I look at the history of the modern world, and I see a lot of mistakes made. I notice patterns in these mistakes, a correlation, a commonality between apparently disparate theories and ideologies, that seems to explain things that are otherwise mysterious. Why is this a bad idea?
Which makes more sense: Using the theory to understand the practice, or using the practice to understand the theory? The point of philosophy is to teach, to shape the minds of other humans, individually and collectively. The shape of the minds at the end of this process is the best measure there is of the quality of the theory, is it not? What those minds say and do is the best measure of how they have been shaped, is it not? We have three hundred years of history available to us. Why appeal straight to the sacred texts? Is that how you treat ideologies you don't have a personal sympathy for?
...Let's suppose I'm wrong. Let's suppose that I should be looking at the text. Here's a sentence out of that paragraph:
Here is the limit which drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom : it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced.
...Nothing here is surprising me. Nothing in the rest of the paragraph is surprising me. I've gone and read the chapter it's from, and I'll freely admit that I'm not confident that I understood it all, but what I think I grasped didn't surprise me. I'm entirely open to the idea that I'm totally missing his point, or that I'm falling into confirmation bias, but he seems to be advocating permanent revolution, with an assurance that This Time It Will Be Different. Am I wrong? What am I missing? How is this incompatible with "we know how to solve all our problems"?
So, who is identical with who? And who's the odd man out here?
If #2 actually is as you seem to be intending him, then #1 is the odd man out, because #2 does not actually believe the axiom that "we know how to solve all our problems is shorthand for. Free market democratic capitalism observably doesn't solve all our problems, ASIs don't exist in the present tense, and wouldn't be "we" even if they did. As you seem to intend him, #2 doesn't claim that we have the tools at hand to solve, say, racism and poverty, or indeed any other problem, doesn't claim authority to use those tools, and doesn't blame people for getting in the way of the fixes he doesn't have. All of these contradict the description I laid out.
On the other hand, if #2 is a "Libertarian" who believes nothing matters as much as solving the alignment problem, or is scheming about "pivotal acts", or believes that we should export "free market democratic capitalism" to the rest of the world at gunpoint so as to make the ASI arrive sooner and thus shorten and minimize the death-agonies of our non-utopian existence, then there's a fair argument he actually does believe that "we know how to solve all our problems", and #3 is the odd man out.
If someone actually believes the axiom I'm summarizing as "we know how to solve all our problems", they can be a lot of different things, but whatever they are is flatly incompatible with both Libertarianism and Christianity, at least as far as I understand the two concepts. The axiom is a claim that one has the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint. It is not a subtle thing.
I don't actually care whether the plan is Marxist revolution or Pivotal Acts purportedly aimed at preventing unaligned AGI; either is inimical to my values, and for the same reasons.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Forceful arguments tend to generate forceful responses.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
What profits a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his soul?
If you are already willing to embrace annihilation, I can't see why you should fear the future. Either things are going to be generally okay, or opportunities for abrupt death will only grow more plentiful.
If we try and you're wrong, then we win. If we try and you're right, then this creates common knowledge of the problem, which is useful for coordinating further escalation, which creates opportunities for an eventual win.
What's the alternative? If we don't fight, we definately lose. What's the argument that fighting and losing leads to worse outcomes than not fighting and losing? What's the outcome you're actually attempting to avoid, and how do your prescriptions actually lead to avoiding it?
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