FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15hr ago
Obama condemned Ayers in his 2008 run and the connections between them are pretty sparse.
I went and looked, and it seems to me that the available evidence indicates that you are straightforwardly correct. My apologies, and thank you for the correction. @Iconochasm is correct that Obama launched his career in Ayers' living room and invited him to the opening of his presidential library, but that is not enough to sustain, as I've heard repeatedly over the years and believed, that Ayers was Obama's mentor, or to use, as I did here, Ayers as an example of a Maoist that Obama embraced.
It's hard to really do this without it turning into some point by point relitigation of individual things that read as tit for tat partisan nonsense. I'll put forward many of the politics around BLM and the Trump Tariff fiasco as the kinds of fruits I see populism yielding. I'm not very interested in going point for point on which side was worse or who's tit justified which tat.
You've written a bit more about your understanding and critique of populism in this thread:
It's not necessarily populism to criticize things like Chinese outsourcing, certainly it's not populism to get in the weeds on bank regulation. Populism is when complex topics are collapsed down to simple narratives about how things could be great if not for ${outgroup_schemes} and all we need to do is implement ${simple_fix} and that second order effects are made up by ${hated_outgroup} to prevent good policy.
...I do not think this is a very good or useful way to define populism. Democracy being what it is, those who make a career of amassing and wielding power and influence are always going to seek to secure popular support for their preferred policies, and collapsing those policies down into simple narratives about ingroup and outgroup is always going to be a highly effective way to secure such support.
Was the GWOT Iraq War populist? It seems to me that it must be, by your definition. Certainly it involved a great deal of collapsing complex policies into simple narratives about ingroups and outgroups, second-order effects blamed on hated outgroups, etc and so on.
But I would not agree that the GWOT was populist. Specific elites had the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Hussein's government as explicit policy goals, as part of a broader strategy to reshape the politics of the middle east in a direction they thought preferable in the long-term. They then, with a great deal of organized deceit, seized on an acute crisis to collapse these policies into simple narratives of the sort you describe, the better to sell them to the public. To the extent that opposition arose, it arose much more from the grassroots and individual organization, rather than being driven by institutions and the social networks that inhabit them; to the extent that the anti-war movement enjoyed elite support, that support was far more fragmentary and arising from individual effort and organization than top-down institutional action.
The Iraq war was genuinely popular, at least for a time, but that popularity was secured by the specific machinations of specific leaders, notable among them being Colin Powell lying to the world about Iraq's WMD, backed in lockstep by the full might of the federal Bureaucracy, and even considerable portions of the entertainment and media industries. And in fact, this elite commitment to what turned out to be a straightforwardly disastrous set of policies was what planted the seeds for the populist backlash we see now: the rise of populist political insurgents like Ron Paul and the Tea party on the right, and the antiwar movement, Occupy Wall Street, Social Justice, Bernie Sanders/the Squad, and now actual communists on the left.
You say:
There is a base rate of bad governance and populism as an influence makes them worse and more frequent.
...But this appears to me to be straightforwardly untrue. Humans inevitably make mistakes, but it does not seem to me that there is a "base rate of bad governance". Specific policies are good or bad. Specific ideologies encourage specific bad or good policy choices. Elite rule, technocracy, whatever label we're applying to anti-populism, is supposed to deliver superior policy choices and thus superior outcomes, and if it doesn't actually do that, I think it is extremely important to be able to recognize that fact!
My understanding of Populism is essentially wisdom of crowds as opposed to relying on institutional knowledge production of Elite Rule/technocracy/rule-of-experts. Institutional knowledge production can be very powerful, but by its nature it is resistant to accountability, self-critique and self-correction, such that it can easily decay into serious tyranny. If elites homogenize around a bad set of ideas sufficiently to insulate themselves from all contrary evidence, critique or consequences, what alternative is there but Populism? Knowledge must be generated somehow if we are going to cooperate together.
I know republicans have accused democrats of being communists forever but they really aren't.
Democrats have not all or even mostly been Communists. The overwhelming majority of Communists in America have either been democrats, or have been allied with democrats, or have drawn support and political cover from Democrats, and that support and cover has been voluminous, both in the past and right down to the present day. Explicit campaigns to protect Communists have been part of the Democrat auto-hagiography for my entire life, and continue to be treated so long after the general principles those campaigns supposedly enshrined have been torn down and trampled out of existence. At some point, this ceases to be tolerance and becomes complicity. I believe the Democrats passed that point some time ago, and I do not believe that they have had or will have the capacity to meaningfully restrain the Communists they have nurtured and protected for so long.
If the Democrats never marginalized the DSA then how do you understand the current conflict in the democratic party? Why is the DSA primarying long standing members if they were there all along?
The Democrats treated Communists as outriders, as useful tools to be managed and exploited at arms-length. This is in notable contrast to how the Right has treated Nazis and White Supremacists, given what seems to me to be the evident moral equivalence of the two groups. We did not give the Nazis and WS types tenure in our institutions, we did not appoint them sinecures from the public purse to teach our young, we did not enshrine them as celebrity prophets or moral authorities or social critics. Angela Davis is pretty clearly morally culpable for the murder of a federal judge. Ayers and his cohort are in fact central examples of terrorists. Chomsky really was a vocal defender of Pol Pot's genocidal madness, and so on and on.
And now, having been fed and protected and maintained within the tribal apparatus for decades, these outriders are exploiting institutional crises to make a play for the throne, and Blue Tribe has no meaningful defense against them, precisely because they have not been marginalized! Meanwhile, the right continues to maintain its cordon sanitaire against the Nazis and WNs, and until recently even anyone so-labeled, even well past the point where doing so makes any sort of practical sense. Our insurgency came not from an extremist fringe, but from a broad-based, grass-roots, moderate center; as many have noted, Democrats pretty clearly won the 2024 election, given that Trump, Musk, RFK Jr, and influential supporters like Joe Rogan all were quite recently moderate democrats.
Ultimately politics just can't deliver what so many want from it. It's not the source of prosperity, it's not the fount of culture. It does matter and is necessary to settle coordination problems and keep things moving along. But there's this terrible cycle where politicians promise that the government will deliver what is not in its power to deliver, then they fail and populists think the reason for this failure is because the politicians are insufficiently diligent or forceful.
I'm familiar with the problem, but disagree with your description of it.
Politics runs on hope. You cannot organize political power without offering a narrative about how that power will improve the lives of the people providing that power. Since narratives are just words, narratives can be lies, and lies are generally easier to sell than truths in the short and even the medium and long terms. The only defense available against the advantages of deceit is trust built up by reliable behavior long-term, of good governance and good policies reliably leading to good outcomes.
Our current elite system built what trust they've enjoyed by creating the consensus impression of good governance and good policies, assisted in no small part by extremely strong narrative control arising from a functional monopoly over the mechanisms of knowledge production, and by a large patch of low-hanging technological fruit to be picked. But now the abundance of technological progress has dwindled to a single, narrow corridor of dubious safety and benefit, and the monopoly on knowledge production has been shattered, and in fact the governing elite consensus has been obviously, catastrophically wrong so many times in a row that their credibility has collapsed.
All of this is to say that the terrible cycle you're pointing to is an emergent property of human society under the conditions that we are currently stuck in. Politicians have to promise a relatively hopeful future, and to the extent that this is not possible, they will lose to extremists who at least have not yet been proven useless and wrong.
And this was where things were always going. Progressives secured their social dominance by claiming credit for the post-war boom years; that these conditions were highly artificial and unrepeatable was not something they were willing to admit in their narratives until the 2000s, when they transitioned to the Globalist narrative. Now the Globalist narrative is played out, and they have nothing coherent to replace it with; hence the decay into explicit race and class warfare, which at least can provide a coherent narrative, even if a ghastly one.
The force vector making things worse from politics is founded in your sentiment upstream, that things might as well get worse, we might as well have an actual communist party so that all the masks come off and we can have this end of history battle between the two failed 19th century ideologies.
The Democrats founded massive government entitlements under FDR, and have ceaselessly pushed for the expansion of those entitlements in the multiple decades since. There is no plausible alternate path where they might do otherwise. There is no plausible path where this ceaseless expansion of federal control over the economy does not result in large-scale financial ruin. They were always going to go for open borders. They were always going to go for speech controls, and general restrictions on individual freedom, for massive social engineering campaigns, for making compulsory whatever is not prohibited. These ideological currents have been running strong for three hundred years across the entire western world; how could any of this be otherwise? The concern was that they would continue these trends slowly and carefully with sufficient competence that resistance would continue to be minimal and easily smothered by their mechanisms of social control. It seems good to me that we can, in fact, lay such concerns to rest. Nor do I concede that my ideology is failed, or particularly 19th-century.
I'm of the bold opinion that the Democratic party getting worse is in fact bad, that it has been bad that the Republican party has gotten worse under Trumpism.
One of my formative political experiences was watching the federal government burn dozens of men, women and children alive on national TV, cover it up, have the cover-up fail, and nonetheless escape any meaningful consequences. I'm not sure I agree that the Democratic party is in fact getting worse; I am not willing to endorse the old version either.
Another of my formative political experiences has been observing the Blue Tribe celebration of Progressive politics in Europe. They have been holding Europe up as an explicit example of what could be possible if Red Tribe would just get out of the way for my entire politically-aware life. And now, I can see exactly what it looks like when Progressive politics is allowed to operate without meaningful opposition from Red Tribe, and it looks to me like hell on earth. Why should these empiric observations not contextualize my understanding of Blue Tribe and the Democratic party right down to its core?
Another of my formative political experiences was voting for Bush II on the grounds that he promised to stop engaging in foreign "nation building", and then watch as he dove head-first into the GWOT in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Should America have off-shored its industrial base? Should America have recentered itself around a "service economy"? Should America have attempted to secure and maintain a position as global hegemon? Should America have attempted to forcibly reform and modernize the middle east? Was the Civil Rights regime a good idea? These are serious policy questions, and our answers to them appear to have had serious consequences in the real world. I do not concede that there is some monolithic, undifferentiated "we" that is responsible for the policies resulting from these questions, such that any consequent failures can be attributed to some amorphous "base rate of bad governance." Opposition to industrial offshoring in the 90s was explicitly populist, and support for that offshoring was explicitly emergent from elite/expert consensus. Likewise for American hegemony and foreign adventurism and the Civil Rights regime. Socialization of these failures cannot be allowed, or the elites responsible for them will continue generating such failures until our ruin is absolute.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16hr ago
Thank you for the explanation! My satisfaction is immeasurable, and my day is improved.
I actually read FiO and a bunch of its spinoffs back in the day, and I think I might have read this Chatoyance person's fic in particular; the art looks familiar. Can't say I remember the story, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19hr ago
Who is Chatoyance, and why do they have a hatedom? I want to know about the Paris Hilton of the amateur crazy straw design world.
Is anyone actually going to grapple with the problem that if there is even one domain where offense is imbalanced with defense for mass death then we're all definitely going to die in this world?
There are more than one domain where offense is imbalanced with defense, and certainly some of these domains involve mass death.
The feasibility of these domains scale with the technology base. Sufficient levels of technology preclude society, and some of those levels are either not far off or else already exist but have not yet been evenly distributed.
Crucially, most of the obvious, plausible domains require the advanced tech base to operate. So it seems at least plausible that tech can seriously damage society, but in the process remove the tech base it depends on, thus throttling the threat below an omnicidal level.
Beyond that, problems that can't be solved except by investing some small group of people with absolute, unaccountable power probably can't be solved period. Alternatively, they're totally solvable so long as it's me and mine getting the absolute, unaccountable power since obviously we're the only ones that can be trusted to wield it responsibly, a fact that only the terribly-irresponsible would possibly fail to recognize.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Finished The Screwtape Letters - extremely illuminating and thought-provoking book.
It's a good one. Even entirely leaving aside the theological frame, this quote:
The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
...is a notable piece of cosmic horror, and in my experience observably true.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
He has shown you, o man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
People point to progressive wins like Roe and Obergefell as these inevitable conservative losses when those issues were fought for way longer than to get to the SCOTUS case.
When Roe hit, people in Red states were able to secure abortions. When Obergefell hit, homosexuals in red states were able to get married. We are now many years and many victories past that point on guns, and none of these victories have actually allowed people in Blue states to exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms, even in many cases the people who specifically won their cases in the Supreme Court. Further, the court has shown a worryingly consistent habit of backing down from or dodging cases addressing the issue, often rejecting cases with much stronger facts in support of the second amendment, in favor of cases with much weaker facts.
I used to believe that the Constitution was whatever five justices said it was. Now it is evident that it is not even that. We have tested the question of whether the Supreme Court can get a decision Blue Tribe doesn't like to stick. It cannot.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
This deserves a more in-depth response, but I really need to get to work, allow me to whack only the tallest poppy:
Obama did not make space for people who praise Mao.
Prairie Fire was a 188-page political manifesto published by the Weather Underground in 1974. It was written primarily by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn and articulated the radical splinter group's ideology, endorsed revolutionary violence, and, according to Jonah Raskin, "embodied a muffled desperation that underlay the bravado about Third World liberation." The name for the manifesto was derived from the writings of Chinese Communist revolutionary, Mao Zedong. In his “Little Red Book,” he wrote, “a single spark can set a prairie fire" as an analogy for revolution. The ideas in the book drew not only on Maoist philosphy, but also Marxist/Leninism. The manifesto encourages a mix of mass-organizing and clandestine revolutionary violence. "Never disassociate mass struggle from revolutionary violence," the author's argued. "To leave people unprepared to fight the state," they said, "is to seriously mislead them about the inevitable nature of what lies ahead." "Prairie Fire" was distributed in radical bookstores, food coops, headshops, on college campuses and many other places that movement activists met. It was met with a combination of strong emotions throughout the Left. Ultimately, the ideological arguments articulated in "Prairie Fire" led to a new split in the Weather Underground, with some gravitating toward the "Prairie Fire Collective," which favored mass-based, above-ground revolutionary politics, and the "May 19th Communist Organization," which remained underground and pulled off the infamous Brinks robbery in 1981.
Do you recognize a conflict between these two statements?
@Corvos for good measure.
Do you have citations or examples for any of that?
Of course I do.
Who, exactly, are these Blues who want to ban Christianity
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National-level Democratic candidates have campaigned on the idea of taxing churches whose teachings they disagree with.
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Virginia Democrat to Introduce Bill to Prosecute Parents Who Refuse to Treat Child as Opposite Sex, plus the coverage of this law in Blue media. California passed a law making acceptance of GAC a factor in custody disputes. Lots of commentary from Blues generally supportive of this idea.
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Masterpiece Cake Shop and related cases as a measure of legal tolerance for Christians generally in Blue territory. Conclusion: Blues will coordinate legal consequences for those who do not conform, and the courts are unwilling or unable to make them stop.
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Observable trends in application of "hostile work environment" laws in corporate workplaces or the educational system. Where human interaction is most governed by rules, how do the rules actually work?
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The FACE act, and the history of its enforcement.
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SPLC framing of "Christian Radicals" as a terror nexus > FBI/Law Enforcement scrutiny of communities so labeled > debanking, crackdowns in the corporate/financial sector, with none of this recognized as a problem in any way by Blues.
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the Kamloops "graves", the subsequent church burnings, and the reaction to those burnings by officials, the media, and Blue Tribe generally.
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COVID lockdowns and how they were applied to churches and to freedom to worship generally, versus Progressive-approved mass gatherings.
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More generally, the observable trajectory of first amendment activism, and Progressive attitudes toward dissent generally, and Progressive attitudes toward what I would recognize as actual Christianity. They hate us, and if you think laws or rules will restrain that hate long-term, you are lying to yourself.
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More specifically, Christians worshipping in public in Seattle have been repeatedly attacked by antifa, the police have repeatedly declined to intervene, local officials have blamed the Christians for causing the problem through being Christians in public. Local sentiment appears to hold that this is fine, that the Christians should have known better than to intrude. Progressive sentiment nationally doesn't appear to see this as a problem that needs addressing.
revoke police protections
Rioting is a well-established Blue Tribe political tactic, codified under the maxim "No Justice, no peace", and has been for decades. Blue officials will withdraw police protection by ordering officers to stand down and let the rioters act as they please. One of the most egregious examples of this was CHAZ, where police stood back and allowed rifle-wielding gunmen to seize control of a neighborhood, threatening and shooting at the locals without interference, for a month straight, only changed their policy when the gunmen actually murdered someone, and explicitly allowed the gunmen to walk away from the murder they committed with zero effort made to apprehend them. Progressives nationwide watched this behavior, and either shrugged uncomfortably or actively defended it.
Christians? white people? Something else?
Reds seems like a reasonable catch-all, but Christians specifically is an obvious point of friction.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
To the degree that we're declining it's almost entirely due to these populist currents causing awful short sighted political decisions.
A lot of people think the 1990s were pretty good years, and they're my personal bet for America's high-water mark. Would you care to make a list of the worst political decisions made since 1990, and see how many of them were populist vs elite, or however you'd frame the dichotomy?
No, it's actually not good that we're going to have brain dead communist populists fighting brain dead right wing populists over who can hold back progress more effectively in 2028.
This is where the sense of unceasing decline comes from.
In would in fact be much better for everyone if the communists were kept marginalized.
When were they marginalized in the first place?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I would rather live in a white, Western European, country with views diametrically opposed to my own than a non-white one that agrees with me on a bunch of stuff.
It depends on the diametrically-opposed views on the one hand, and the non-white country on the other. I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in Singapore or South Korea or Japan or even Vietnam than in East Germany or post-revolution Russia. I'm pretty sure there are some South-American countries I'd take over the combloc in full flower. There might even be some places in Africa that make the cut.
In any case, what profits choosing the white, Western European country if one of their diametrically-opposed views is on the necessity of importing infinite non-whites as fast as possible and at any cost?
Going back to what I actually posted, do you actually agree with Joe Biden that a black person who didn't vote for him isn't black?
No, that's stupid.
Or that a person who wears a shirt and tie and is on time all the time is white?
No, that's also stupid.
Personally, I think race is biological and related to one's ancestry.
So do I. But again, so what? At no point have I denied that race or ancestry exist, only that they necessarily trump beliefs and values.
Now that I've offered simple, straightforward answers to your questions, maybe you could do the same to mine?
Do you actually think there are no black or Muslim people with whom you could meaningfully cooperate? Do you think there are no white people with whom you cannot meaningfully cooperate?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
It is not good to be swallowed alive. but if you are swallowed alive, it may still be possible to cut your way out. And failing that, it may be possible to choke the swallower to death on the way down.
Since when do right-wingers base their own ideas on moronic progressive polemics about race?
A white person can, in fact, hate other white people because they are white, with this hatred being their method of insulating themselves from such hate. This is in fact a moronic progressive idea about race, often inculcated through polemic, but that observably does not stop many of them from committing fully to their ideology.
Recognizing that this is, in fact, how they think, and that their thinking this way does, in fact, have serious consequences in the real world is not "basing one's own ideas on moronic progressive polemics about race". Nor is handwaving the beliefs they observably coordinate large-scale political action around as some sort of cutesy, irrelevant affectation a wise approach for dealing with reality. It may be stupid, but they really mean it, and they will smash an unlimited number of valuables trying to make two and two make five.
I think there are black people (or brown people, or Muslim people) with whom I can meaningfully cooperate in some circumstances. I think there are white people with whom I cannot meaningfully cooperate in some, perhaps even most circumstances. Does this seem implausible to you? Do you genuinely believe that racial conflict is the only form of conflict that really exists?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
you must admit that a discovery that his true skill was makeup and wigs would only improve the farce.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
It's too bad they have political beliefs you disagree with, they're still American or English or whatever.
"Political beliefs you disagree with", cashed out into a succession of real-world outcomes, has historically been considered sufficient cause for the mass firebombing of urban centers.
Likewise the Cathars: "Kill them all. God will know his own."
And yet, fundamentally… it’s not true that conservatives as a group are working for the same goals as I am but simply have different ideas of how to pursue it. It’s not true that conservatives simply think that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy or that economic growth works better than foreign aid to help the global poor or that, as regrettable as it is for gay couples who long for children, children will be severely traumatized unless they are raised by heterosexuals. I would certainly prefer it to be that way. I want to have respect for all belief systems; I want to believe we’re all working for the same goals but simply disagree on certain facts.
But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.
Since reading the above piece several years ago, I have seen more than sufficient evidence to conclude that this description is roughly representative of the mindset of Blue Tribe in general. I have spent much of the last ten years arguing in detail specific examples of how this is a really serious problem that impinges on every facet of modern life, from education to taxation to lawmaking to law enforcement to the academy, national demographics, immigration, warfighting, industrial policy, economic policy, entertainment and putting rockets on Mars. And you are telling me that none of this matters, because the people doing it speak the same language as me, and heard the same bedtime stories as me, and share my ethnicity. Can I not see that we are as brothers?
You may recall that Cain and Abel were brothers.
That they are white people from those countries, descended from other white people also from those countries, who speak white people languages, and are members of European-descent cultures.
I agree that they are white people from those countries, descended from other white people also from those countries, who speak white languages and are members of European-descent cultures. So what? To the extent that they are ideologically committed to my destruction or immiseration, they are my enemies. In what specific ways does their genetics or their family history or the language they speak or the culture they grew up in make them less my enemies?
Note that I am not arguing that demographic security is an unreasonable goal, for either Americans or for Europeans. I am not even arguing that it is negotiable. I think that if a hostile political class mass-imports voters in a bid to permanently win the political game for their side, the proper response is to coordinate meanness against them until you are confident that they will never, every be able to do that again, while at the same time informing all the imports that they will immediately return to their points of origin or their blood shall be on their own head.
What I am confused by is your belief that the very people deliberately mass-importing foreigners for the explicit purpose of more efficiently stamping on your face are somehow less of a problem than the foreigners they are importing. If a bullet flies two inches past your head, is the problem the bullet, or the fact that someone is shooting at you? If someone is shooting at you, is it less of a problem if they speak the same language as you?
How many people have "Democrats" murdered in deliberate political violence since 2000 and how many people have Muslims murdered as deliberate political violence since 2000? Now consider the size of the denominator in each. Muslims are far worse.
How many deaths in America are directly attributable to Democratic policies? The floor of that number is at least four digits higher than all the murders and all the violent deaths attributable to Muslims or Muslim policies in America. Can Muslims selectively nullify rule of law? Blues can, and have, repeatedly and with vigor. Can Muslims plausibly threaten political closure? Blues can and have through multiple avenues, and continue to do so. You may well be correct that Blue rule would be better than Muslim rule, though I absolutely would not concede such an argument given the history of Blue Rule over the last century. But it hardly matters, because Blues aim to rule now, and have a plausible path to securing that rule now, and Muslims are, at worst, a small and relatively ineffectual part of that plan. Blues do more harm, by far. Blues threaten more harm, and more plausibly, by far. And at no point have I ever seen the supposed racial or cultural or biological solidarity you repeatedly appeal to improve this situation in even the smallest or most insignificant way.
Your neighborhood has far higher chance of being taken over by immigrants.
How do they get here? Who is importing them? Who is dedicated to preventing all attempts to remove them?
Blacks are a declining demographic, there are billions of potential immigrants.
How would they get here? Who is demanding we let them in? Who has bent every organ of the state to facilitate their arrival? Who has undermined the actual laws we put in place to keep them out?
You don't share any ties with Lebanese Christians either.
If they are Christians in any meaningful sense, then I share more of significance with them than I do with the average white European Progressive. I can meaningfully appeal to the principles and values of Christianity to someone who is likewise a Christian. On the other hand, to the degree that they do not in fact share a reverence for the principles and values of Christianity as I understand them, then I have only mistook them for a Christian, and am open to being corrected.
If there is a way to meaningfully appeal to the average progressive, I have not found it in a decade of looking.
In Australia, the reason they have a problem with Lebanese Muslims was from the ZOMG BASED Lebanese Christians lobbying to let them in, not from white progressives. Bilal Skaf living in Australia is the fault of Maronites and Orthodox Christian Arabs, not of Australia's "Blues."
Let us be speak clearly here. Is your claim that the majority of non-European immigration Australia has experienced has been driven by ZOMG BASED Lebanese Christians, and not white progressives? What percentage of non-European immigration to Australia do these Lebanese Muslims represent, presuming that your account is accurate? Because you seem to be arguing that Christian solidarity would result in worse results than white "solidarity" with progressives... but if, as I strongly suspect, Progressives have in fact been directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of non-European immigration to Australia, that would make your argument pretty damn stupid, wouldn't it?
You mention Bilal Skaf, who I had previously not heard of. Why is he still alive? My understanding of Western values holds that he should be dead. Why is he not? Who made it happen that he is not?
The fact is, "Blues" and blacks generally have long-standing ties to our country and thus belong here, and immigrants don't.
This sentence has no meaning to me. "Belong here", specifically, is an empty phrase. I share no loyalty to Blues. I share no common allegiance with them. I share no binding history. I share no values, no traditions, no ties of brotherhood, no common sympathies, no aims or goals, no interests. There is, at best, a sort of inertia generated by trillions of dollars spinning in a circle that seems to be perceptibly slowing, and a series of scams that the slowest among us have not yet caught on to. It is difficult to say that there is even a "here" where one might meaningfully belong.
I don't know what the hell you're talking about when you say liberals want to murder you.
I gave you four specific examples of blues explicitly saying that they think people like me being murdered is a positive good, or in one case instinctively and enthusiastically celebrating a murder committed in front of them. There are many, many more where those came from, but we could also dig in to the colder policy side, where statistically-foreseeable, endemic murder is routinely treated as an acceptable cost for the pursuit of blue ideological goals. It seems to me that if you don't see this, it's because you don't want to see it.
I spend a lot of time in a deep blue city and honestly I often say stuff like what I do here and people are generally pretty nice to me.
The blues I am around are pretty nice to me too, given that I am very careful to never, ever let them know what I actually think or value. I have heard personal friends and family speak favorably of blues murdering reds more than once. I've heard casual expressions of hostility toward reds too many times to count. But I'm not restricted to anecdotes; again, I can point to lots and lots of examples of Blues wielding both lawless and official political violence as a tribal weapon, and both securing their goals and suffering little to no consequences as a result.
Yes, the political situation in the country is terrible. I wouldn't deny that. It would also be a lot better if there were no immigrants here given that it would disempower the political faction you hate so much.
The fact that it empowers the faction I hate so much is exactly why that faction is so hell-bent on importing as many immigrants as possible. They hate me, and likely you as well, and they see mass immigration of politically-aligned third-worlders as a way to make an end-run around democracy. The fact that they believe this should make them your enemy. If you cannot grasp the idea that people dedicated to inflicting unlimited harm against you are not people you can cooperate with, I'm really not sure what to tell you. I would have thought that ethnocentrism and quokkadom were mutually exclusive, but perhaps the perversity of Man is truly without limit.
It kind of sounds like you're trying to make up a fake ethnicity of white people to hate so you can blame them without looking in the mirror at your own "tribe" or being "racist".
Blue Tribe is pretty clearly not a "fake ethnicity". You can go to any media organization, any academic institution, any school, any court, or indeed Bluesky or Reddit and see them, live in the wild. They are a highly cohesive socio-political culture, distinct in a variety of ways, and not even slightly shy about expressing their beliefs to the world at large.
I do not think Racism, the real, actual thing, is correct nor particularly useful. I also do not think there remains any meaningful social benefit to policing it, given the givens. Where I oppose it, I do so on the grounds that it is stupid and counterproductive in some immediate, obvious sense. Here, I oppose it because it seems obvious to me that your appeals to racial solidarity are going to make your opposition to mass immigration less effective, not more. Progressives want mass immigration because they think it is a path to durable political closure against people like me. I believe they are mistaken to believe this; we can, should and will coordinate meanness on a variety of avenues sufficient to bypass whatever closure they achieve. But the fact remains that they will never stop pushing mass immigration so long as they see it in their interest, and they will always see it in their interest so long as their ideology makes them implacably hostile to the traditions and values of the West. If you do not want unlimited mass immigration, Blues, not immigrants, are your primary problem. With the Blues out of the way, you can simply deport the immigrants. With the Blues in the way, neither deportation nor indeed any form of large-scale net-positive cooperation is possible.
The English people who enabled the rape gangs are just that: English people.
Yes. And they imported the rapists, and protected them. Why is that not at least as much of a problem as the rapes themselves?
And sorry but your kvetching about guns or Rittenhouse is exactly the kind of thing I am calling an ephemeral culture war issue. You and all of the other gun owners in America haven't done shit to stop immigration or advance literally any other right-wing cause besides gun ownership itself. That's fine, I like guns, but come on.
You sneer at Rittenhouse, but there is a strong argument that his actions were the single largest contributing factor to the end of the largest campaign of lawless political violence America had seen in generations. By standing and fighting, and doing so well, he forced the system that had heretofore oscillated between tolerating and encouraging the riots to finally begin shutting them down, for fear of things getting out of hand in a way they couldn't afford.
In any case, as I've mentioned many times in previous conversations, the guns are not actually the point. The point is the political coordination that the guns enable and multiply. And the fact is that the political situation is better for me in America than it is anywhere else in the Anglosphere or Europe, or indeed anywhere else in the world, and that political coordination is why. We are doing better at rolling back mass immigration than anywhere else in the world. We are less inhibited in our speech than anywhere else in the world. Red tribe has better access to meaningful political power in the US than anywhere else in the world. I think it is obvious that our political successes have dragged much of the rest of the world away from coalescing Progressive closure. And if we are indeed swallowed, I think we are capable of cutting our way out of the beast's guts.
I will fully concede that we have done a very bad job for a very long time. I note that one commonality of all our historic failures was that, over and over again, we cooperated with Blues and operated off the assumption that such cooperation would be reciprocated. That assumption is dying a death, and the cooperation with it, and we are now doing much, much better than we were following the policies that you seem to be arguing for.
What accomplishments do you claim, by contrast? What successful opposition to immigration can you point to?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I am pretty sure the Janissaries are an example of people being compelled to become a different ethnicity; it seems like a strong argument against your whole line of reasoning here, in fact. Nonetheless, I will readily agree that it is, at a bare minimum, extremely hard to compel someone to be a different ethnicity; what I am asking for is evidence that you can compel people to stop being communists, because I cannot in fact think of any examples where this has successfully been done, and it is something I would very much like to know how to do. You are saying that it obviously can be done. I am asking for proof.
This is a totally bizarre way to think.
The same back at you. You say a white American or British or French progressive is still part of Western civilization. What does that mean? What predictions does this statement make?
Let's compare Muslim shit to Democrat shit.
Democrats will murder people like me, and will publicly cheer for the murder of people like me, and will discuss among themselves the fervent conviction that the murder of people like me is a good thing and they want more of it. Democrats also commit terror attacks. Democrats also bring political chaos, crime, and rape, and also enable those who do with a zeal such that the distinction becomes meaningless. Democrats will allow masked men to kick my teeth in or burn my house down, and they will ensure the police look the other way when this happens. Democrats will allow other masked men with guns to declare themselves my immediate rulers, and will likewise ensure the police look the other way when this happens. Democrats will deliberately foment nation-wide riots, protect the rioters, and harshly punish anyone who attempts to defend themselves. Democrats will preclude the possibility of broad social coordination toward net-positive cooperation, as they invariably infiltrate any institution so developed, destroy any pro-social function it achieved, and repurpose it as a war-engine for their ideology, or simply divert the money to the material support of their partisans.
And when I say Democrats will do these things, I mean that they have done these things and are, in many cases, still doing them at this moment. And if this were not bad enough, the only reason Muslims are a problem at all is because Blues have dedicated themselves, ceaselessly, to importing as many of them as possible, explicitly because they deeply prefer Muslims to people like me.
I genuinely do not feel very strongly about blacks and am a little confused why you brought them up.
Because they are a non-white demographic for which many of your criticisms likewise apply: long-term failure of integration, massive crime, social decay, etc, etc, and because I have seen many similar arguments about how red-blue differences are really not that important, and how it's really the blacks that are the problem, and I disagree with them for the same reasons I disagree with your argument here.
Moderately more aggressive law enforcement would be enough to solve most of the issues associated with that demographic.
Indeed. And how would this not likewise be true for Muslims? Cut off the massive, community-wide, trivially-detectable fraud explicitly enabled by Democrats, enforce the laws Democrats explicitly refuse to enforce, and why are they more of a problem than Blacks?
They are neither a growing demographic nor one that is displacing whites from the most important institutions in our society.
Affirmative action? Reparations? In fairness, the former would not have happened, and the latter will not happen, without the explicit support of Progressives, who continue to enthusiastically broadcasting that support in the clearest possible terms. It is true that Blacks are not, on the whole, displacing whites from the most important institutions; there simply aren't enough of them. But Blues have quite thoroughly displaced Reds from those institutions! The thing you identify as a potential concern has already happened, but you don't seem to notice it because both sides are "white". Which should I be more concerned about: the potential future institutional capture of hostile Muslims, or the actual, current, entirely cemented institutional capture of hostile Blues that has been steadily ratcheting up its hostility toward my tribe my entire life?
Do I want to live in a black neighborhood? No, but no one is trying to make me and there is no chance that my neighborhood is going to become one.
This has literally been done in the past! Multiple major cities were outright destroyed, All major cities were seriously blighted for decades and most have never actually recovered! The people who metastasized these harms learned nothing from the horrors they inflicted on the innocent, are constantly looking for new ways to inflict further such harms, and absolutely will try even the worst of the old methods again if given the opportunity.
But I have genuine, long-standing ties of kinship and cultural commonality with "Blues" that I don't with some "refugee" from "Lebanon".
I do not. How are those ties of kinship and "cultural commonality" supposed to help when Blues decide that my religion needs to be illegal, or that I shouldn't be allowed to have police protection, or that a mob should burn my church down, or that I should be charged with serious felonies for attempting to defend myself or even for owning the means with which to effect such a defense? How will they help when Blues flood my nation with hostile foreigners for the explicitly stated purpose of disenfranchising me and my progeny? How will they help when Blues steal my taxes and repurpose them to lock me out of political power, or, having accomplished this, to abuse me in every legible facet of my life?
I share no genuine, long-standing ties of kinship and cultural commonality with a "refugee" from "Lebanon", unless they are a Christian. But I likewise recognize no genuine, long-standing ties of kinship and cultural commonality with someone who literally grins at the thought of my children being murdered. What the fuck is "Shared civilization, culture, blood" supposed to actually mean in the face of that level of evident hostility? Rittenhouse was white; did that prevent Grosskruetz from attempting to murder him? I'd guess the prosecutor was white, so show me where the "shared civilization, culture and blood" kicked in when he tried to bury Rittenhouse under a jail. Where did it help Fields, or Keltner, or Gardner, or Finicum, or Danielson, or Perry, or Malinowski? I'd add Baca, but does he count in your book given that he's Hispanic? I'd bet money his attackers were white, should that increase my sympathy for them?
You are summarizing protracted, murderous tribal hatred as some "ephemeral culture war issue you are worked up about right now", but I am pointing to real cases with real consequences. It's true that Muslim immigrants perpetrated the rape gangs in England. Who brought them in? Who covered for them, out of fear of appearing "racist"? Who has been dedicated to importing more of them, and who has instituted naked two-tier policing to keep a lid on any possible backlash? White progressives did these things, and are still doing them. Please tell me exactly where and how the "shared civilization, culture and blood" entered the equation when those white progressives were turning a blind eye to rape and torture and slavery of white children, en masse. Be specific. Let's really dig into the details here, because goddamn would I not want to get distracted by "ephemeral culture war issues", that would be just awful.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
A white communist can be reasoned (or compelled) out of being a communist
What evidence leads you to this conclusion? When the communists massacred the flower of Poland in the Katyn forest, did the fact that the killers were white offer some form of consolation? Did a hundred years of horrifying Communist disasters inoculate Progressive ideology against Communism in some magical way that cannot be seen or measured but should nonetheless be relied upon?
Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that there is more than one way to be a really bad neighbor?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I think MAGA or something like it was where the Republican party was always going to end up. I likewise think that Communism or something like it was always where the Democrats were going to end up. I would prefer we get the masks off and the cards on the table sooner rather than later; We, collectively, are in a better position to handle the present problem now than we will be in another five years of decline, and we will be in a better position in five years than we will be in ten. I'm not certain that sooner is better; maybe delaying might produce some unexpected, out-of-context perturbation that dramatically shifts the trajectory in a positive direction. But based on the available information, confrontation seems inevitable, and the sooner the better.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
As another data point, I currently use a $100/month Claude subscription, duck.ai free from the browser, and midjourney.
Claude was paid for and set up from work, and it is very, very good. I am an artist, and it is much better at coding than me, and is able to implement code solutions for the technical problems I run into integrating my art into my company's project. It is tremendously efficient and effective so far with all the tasks I've thrown at it.
Midjourney, I paid a hundred bucks for a year's subscription. I used it very heavily on a project, and got some excellent results out of it, but the project petered out and trying to apply it to other projects has not worked well so far. Mostly I've dropped it for the time being to work on other things.
Duck.AI I've found is pretty good at solving code problems, but more than that is very good at assisting in finding solutions to technical problems with complex art software like blender. It is much, much better than the old solution of googling questions, even before google search enshittified, because it generates topical summaries aimed specifically at the question presented rather than websites which contain keyword matches somewhere within them. I've been making really good progress in areas that were too frustrating to pursue previously, and it's frankly pretty great.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
It is said that the difference between Extremist and Moderate Muslims is that the extremist Muslim wants to kill you, while the moderate Muslim wants the Extremist to kill you. I observe that a similar distinction obtains for Blues. Not all Blues, certainly, but likewise not all Muslims, and the two are close-enough allies that accepting one is going to mean you get the other in any case.
It does not seem to me that Progressives consider themselves part of Western Civilization in any way I recognize. Given that their project has from its inception exhibited a radical hostility toward every part of Western Civilization they do not own and cannot seize, which has only grown more vicious over time, I do not understand why you think they are part of something they fervently declare their desire to destroy, nor why you should want them to be. I can understand that they emerged from western civilization; parasitic wasp larva emerge from caterpillars, but this does not mean they will develop into butterflies.
I am fine with living around Muslims, right up to the point where they start doing Muslim shit. I am likewise fine living among Democrats, right up to the point where they start doing Democrat shit. Past that point, I do not think living near either of them is a good idea. I reconciled myself long ago that Blue-controlled territory is not a place I am willing to live, nor even to visit if it can be reasonably avoided.
I have long noted that a fault-line within the right runs between those who would prefer to ally with blacks (or other non-white populations) against blues, and those who would prefer to ally with blues against blacks (and other non-white populations). Perhaps it might come down to an assessment of which alliance seems more plausible to you. An alliance with blacks seems quite unlikely to me, and getting less likely by the year, but it nonetheless seems profoundly more likely to me than any alliance with Blues. Many of the perceived grievances between Reds and Blacks are illusory, and much common ground exists even if it remains stubbornly unrecognized. But the grievances between Reds and Blues are very real and growing by the day, and the common ground appears to me to be non-existent; our values are far too incoherent and antagonistic for mutual coexistence.
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.
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