FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
It depends on your understanding of the problem, I think.
If the problem is "blacks are statistically distinguishable from whites at a population level due to worse outcomes", probably.
On the other hand, the Mississippi Miracle and similar data points indicate that we do know how to secure significantly better outcomes for black people in a variety of ways, and my tribe at least is actively being prevented from fixing the problem.
Bukele in El Salvador is another example of the difference between the three. El Salvador's murder rate was absolutely intractable, right up until the moment it was promptly tracted. One of my strongest objections to the general thread of HBD discourse is the pretense that nothing can be done, when in fact it is highly probable that we could significantly reduce many of these gaps and then reassess. Maybe if we can't completely erase the gap, all the problems will persist... alternatively, maybe they won't be as bad, and maybe significant improvements in one area will lead to better outcomes being possible in other areas.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20hr ago
"we can't fix this at all"
vs
"everything we've tried to fix this has failed"
vs
"actually, we have a way to fix this, but solutions are being blocked by specific actors for specific reasons".
The difference between these three positions really matters.
That being said, I do not consider mastectomies to be that irreversibly life-altering. If you change your mind, you can still get implants, and we have the tech to prevent any kids you might have from starving to death (and arguably had the tech for 10k years or so).
Are mastectomies more or less irreversibly life-altering than anorexia or bulimia? If schools were actively encouraging their students to pick up these habits, and hiding this fact from the students' parents, would that be more or less acceptable than the current status quo?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
For my money, ACAB is/was a major social justice meme, and Blue-aligned politicians can be relied upon to endorse all ascendant social justice memes for the cameras.
I've been repeatedly and regularly told that Wokeness in general and the BLM/Abolish Police memes in particular are dead, dead, dead since at least the 2024 election. How can they be dead, and also a major political candidate repeating them is too normal to comment on?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
This is a topic I've written on at some length, but rather than extrude the usual word-product, would you mind if I asked for a bit of detail in what you would consider a good response?
On the theory end, the short of it is that there's a couple prongs:
- "Don't be ruled by people who hate you" is the first and most important rule in politics, and Reds and Blues really do hate each other.
- "Manipulation of Procedural Outcomes" is incompatible with law or institutions generally, and is how things actually do work now.
- "Tolerance is not a moral precept", and we all, like Ozy, love John Brown.
On the practice end, there's tracking of things like selective prosecution, obvious rule-of-law violations, sequential breakdown of core civil society functions, interlocking hostility between legislation, social norms, and official and pseudo-official process, all backed by evident grassroots social sentiment, which I and others have been discussing here for some time.
So we could approach it from the theory/model-of-the-opposing-tribe end, or we could approach it from the observed outcomes end. The conclusion of both is that it's a very bad idea for Reds to try to live under Blue rule, both in terms of the outcomes of the Reds who might be in such a situation getting ground to extinction, and in terms of everyone, given that Blues do not, in fact, have a biological monopoly on lawless violence as a response to perceived injustice.
So what are you looking for?
Selective rigor is not a marginal problem that you have the luxury of ignoring.
It really sucks to see both sides engaged in an arms race to see who can be worse.
This is a war. How do you expect a war to operate?
[EDIT] - My estimation of your reasonableness and sincerity has been trending upward of late, so let me put a little more effort into this.
If you offer people a choice between "laws are enforced against you, laws will not be enforced against your enemies" and "laws will not be enforced at all", some people will choose the former and some will choose the later. The people who choose the former will die out, and you will be left with only the people who choose the latter. When this happens, the problem is not that people aren't upholding the law, the problem is that there is no law to uphold. A lot of people, myself included, believe this is the situation we find ourselves in. Appealing to the majesty of the law is not going to shift us, because we do not observe majesty of the law, but rather fractal deceit. You can think such an assessment is foolish in the extreme, but at some point you should probably consider explaining why it is foolish. Just for starters, I note that Trump does not appear to have used the FBI to censor conversation of and cover up evidence of his alleged corrupt activities, as we now know the previous administration absolutely did. In your view, does the Trump administration get points for not engaging in this particular "arms race to see who can be worse?"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Seen this thread, out of curiosity?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
It's also that woke failed to censor the Internet.
Woke did fantastic at censoring the internet. They silenced loads of people, they broke up organizations, they debanked people, the works. Elon bought X, and they went out of their way to try and ensure the purchase did as much damage to him as possible. And if Trump had lost the election, I'm quite confident they would be well into the process of destroying his businesses and personal fortune at this very moment, and the censorship would have returned at full strength. Likewise the other tech companies; they hedged when it looked like Trump had momentum, and when he won they bent the knee. Had he lost, the censorship would have simply continued to ratchet up.
None of this is guesswork. Europe is not shy about announcing their intentions for censorship of the internet, nor of providing practical demonstrations of how their system works. Democrats publicly announced their intention to create a similar regime in America, and were well on their way to doing so when Trump won.
City residents noticed the 2020 crime spike.
This is true, and the massive violence spike that killed ~8,000 black Americans slacked off. And yet, the officials they voted for are largely still in place, and still executing as much of the decarceration agenda as they think they can get away with.
Woke also overreached on trans issues.
Woke owns the schools, and a large plurality, possibly an outright majority of those staffing the schools are either true believers in trans ideology or unwilling to impede the true believers in any way. Ditto the medical field, from what I've seen. The activists are somewhat quieter because they don't at this moment have the Federal Government as a megaphone. Nothing I have seen indicates to me that they or their coalition have moderated in any way, nor that Blue Tribe is any closer to cutting them loose. Instead, Blue Tribe will do what it did under Biden: claim woke is over and nothing's happening, while providing their movement limitless resources and the full backing of every major social instutition.
But woke has not overwhelmed the country like many feared, nor is it likely to do so even after Trump is gone.
The problem is not woke overwhelming the country. The problem is whether, in the process of preventing such overwhelm, the country survives in any meaningful way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
It's referring to the Malinowski and Deschler shootings, among others.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
...I understand that this place is corrosive to the angels of our better nature, and I freely admit to significant corrosion myself. Is this your genuine viewpoint, or are you trolling me?
For many, perhaps most Republicans, Woke demonstrated that the present crisis is existential. It is common to see arguments that "woke is over"; rarely do people making such arguments explain their understanding of exactly how "woke" "ended". The only remotely plausible answer I can see is that Trump was re-elected.
Arguments that Woke is over and therefore it's time to move on from Trump are self-defeating if Trump is the only coordination point powerful enough to actually deliver meaningful setbacks to the woke coalition. If we had compromised and not pushed Trump in this last election, even a non-Trump Republican victory would likely have resulted in unbroken Woke advances, simply because very few of the plausible Republican candidates are willing to do what is necessary to contest the culture war, and none to the degree Trump brings to the table.
And it should be emphasized that the sauce here isn't, for the most part, Trump himself or the choices he personally makes. It's Trump as a Schelling point for war rather than surrender. Sell him out, and the people coordinating our end of the sale will absolutely, obviously sell us next. Republicans like myself stick with Trump because we see no viable alternative.
[EDIT] - an amusing note for Massie in particular is that his campaign apparently sent out an advert today, using an old endorsement given by Trump in 2022 to try to fool voters into thinking that Trump was endorsing him now, rather than his opponent. One plays the cards one has, I suppose.
You can't separate the fact that people hate the dude from the fact that he deserves to be hated.
You can note that lots of other people deserve to be hated, and for some reason the people who hate this guy often love those other people with zero reservations.
The due ran a fraudulent charity, and one of the things the fraud money bought was a self portrait! That is hallmark movie villain shit!
Wow, that sounds really bad. I assume this was one of the felonies he was convicted of, right?
Consider his peers:
-
A serial rapist who burned a few dozen women and children alive on national TV in a botched propaganda stunt.
-
a dry-drunk who lied the nation into multiple pointless, fruitless, ruinous wars, resulting in more than a million dead, the devastation of multiple entire countries, and the foreclosure of the nation's economic future.
-
A guy who directly and intentionally armed drug cartels in a bid to more effectively undermine the constitution, resulting in numerous murders of innocent civilians.
-
A senile kleptocrat who had innocent civilians murdered in an attempt to intimidate the public into surrendering their human rights.
...But those guys are just fine, because the problem is hallmark movie villainy, not multiple rapes and murders and massacres and whole nations turned into killing fields.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
to be clear, that 6,000 is for 2025, not over USAID's lifetime, correct?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
If a movement existed that was running for office on re-enslaving blacks, and it looked like this movement had a good chance of winning the election, how do you think black people should respond to that? How would you respond to that, yourself?
Democracy is not a universal solution. It is entirely possible to vote your way out of having a functional country. This is not, I think, a hazard that you can "trust the experts" to assess risk on your behalf.
Blue Tribe is evidently in favor of a variety of government actions to which I believe large-scale lawless violence is a reasonable response. Maybe I am unusual in making such an assessment, but if I am not, we are well into the deep end with no clear path back to solid ground.
It may be useful to consider Trump as a coordination mechanism, rather than a solution in and of himself. What is the proper response to Blues weaponizing the IRS against Reds' ability to organize politically? If I offered you a trade where a president of your choice got to disburse 1.776 billion dollars, and in exchange I get to use the IRS to attack your tribe's ability to coordinate politically for the indefinite future, is that a trade you would accept?
Again, and again, and again, Trump is the moderate, gentle voice of piece. This is as good as it's going to be, and it's never going to be this good again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.
It's one program, out of many thousands of programs. I think we can agree that it's selected for how well it fits the point. Do you believe it was an unrepresentative outlier? If it was an unrepresentative outlier, how did it get approved in the first place?
USAID's 2025 budget was 34 billion dollars, a roughly 30% increase over the 2001-2024 average of 23 billion.
What's your estimate for the percentage of that .536 trillion dollars that amounted to something between conspicuous waste and taxpayer funding of Blue Tribe partisan political activity?
Why do you think this activity required a ~33% increase in 2025 specifically?
Are principles ever adaptive?
Absolutely, in a values-coherent environment.
A core part of the value of principles is that they act as a very costly signal.
Sure. What they are supposed to signal is "I am making a significant sacrifice to maintain something we both care about". But this assumes "we both" actually do care about it. Signals are for communication; you don't need signals to draw your own conclusions. If the response is "I don't care about the thing you are maintaining, and will not sacrifice to maintain it", then the question becomes whether solo maintenance is worth it (probably not), and whether solo maintenance is even possible (probably not).
People would adopt them for the adaptability.
Yes, and the result is that rule-following becomes normal and expected, and rule-breaking becomes unusual and disturbing.
The value of having principles is that it communicates that people can trust you, and depend on you. Regardless of the shifting tides of the sociopolitical currents.
Many people claim a principle of following the law. Few people will actually follow a law that demands they docilly allow a subset of their neighbors to murder them and their family with machetes. Most curious! How can we explain this inconsistency? Assuming such a law were passed legally, it would in fact be a law, so shouldn't they follow it? Don't they have principles? Well, no. Humans are human. They are not going to cooperate in upholding a system that they perceive to be ruinously hostile to their interests. Society depends on a supermajority perceiving it to be strongly positive-sum. If you want to continue to have a society, you need to maintain that perception. If you fail to maintain that perception, appeals to rules or norms or principles will not save you.
Very, very few principles are actually worth unlimited commitment. If you want a society based on principles which receive unlimited commitment, it is going to look very different than our current arrangement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
A more accurate way to phrase this would be "principles are clearly not adaptive in the current sociopolitical enviornment."
This is not a mistake blues or reds are making. Principles are not, in fact, adaptive, and fixing that is not something individuals or even individual tribes can accomplish, and probably is not something that can be accomplished at all in a values-incoherent environment.
Whatever it is religious people are doing, they don't believe in God in the same way that I believe in the existence of the sun.
Pretty clearly not, since you can see the sun and do engineering off its presence.
What's your understanding of traditional marriage vows?
"to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part"
Does such a vow make sense to you?
Would you take such a vow, and if you did, would you really mean it?
Would you agree that such a vow is best modelled as a bet, which resolves only on death? But what is the point of a bet that you can only "win" when you die?
What I'm trying to gesture at here is that there exists a class of decisions which humans make based on incomplete information, and about which one might uncharitably claim they are resistant to evidence-based assessment, but which nonetheless are meaningful and at least plausibly positive-sum. Belief in God, and prayer and other elements that go along with it, appear to me to be a member of this class.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Not "before", "outside".
Suppose we are living in a simulation. A lot of simulation theory bootstraps itself into plausibility by assuming that there are going to be many layers of simulation, and thus we are unlikely to be in baseline reality. The part people don't seem to pay much attention to is that, presuming we are in a simulation, our observation of our own simulations demonstrates that there is no necessary relation between a given simulation's rules and the nature of baseline reality. That is to say, if you do not have direct access to baseline reality (and entropy and consciousness are two strong empirical indicators within the materialist frame that we do not have such access), then you have no valid claim to insist that baseline reality conforms to your observations of the simulation's rules. It might or it might not, and other than observing it directly, you simply don't know.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
The question is "Why did 2010s wokeness overcome the antibodies when 1990s PC couldn't?"
Politics runs on hope. "Hope" was the theme that won Obama the White House. People organize politically because they hope to secure better outcomes; having so organized, if those better outcomes are not secured, obviously the previous political organization didn't work and you need to try something else. Blues expected things to improve significantly when Obama replaced Bush in 2008. Six years later in 2014, it was pretty obvious that the current set of Progressive policies weren't delivering sufficient progress, and so Blues collectively pushed for more radical policies.
Feminism and race were two of the most prominent drivers of Social Justice as an ascendant ideology, and both seem like strong examples of policy starvation. There was a really good article I would dearly like to relocate that talked about the detente established around the turn of the century between blacks and whites, wherein Whites would help improve conditions for Blacks, and Blacks would stop calling Whites racist. Well, what do you do when, after a decade or more of this, conditions for Blacks haven't measurably improved? Likewise for women: previous waves of feminism rewrote the social contract between the sexes on a purely consent-based framework, and yet lots and lots of women still feel like they're being violated. The only category for violation their model recognizes is of consent, and so they model the problem as a rape epidemic, and frame their new policies to match.
In both cases, Social Justice went the way it did because people found that their current policies couldn't sustain hope in a better future, and so turned to more radical alternatives. I guess I'd say that this bolsters rather than replaces the stories you listed.
- The Academy probably was not aiming for 2014 Social Justice specifically, but policy starvation forced them to abandon left-neoliberalism in favor of something more radical.
- Anti-discrimination law didn't work. Outcomes for Blacks remained quite bad. Therefore, it became a floor rather than a ceiling, and policy starvation forced those concerned to aim for something more radical.
- The establishment center-left couldn't hold the line because their credibility was already burned; they'd been ruling for at least the last six years; you can't promise hope and change when your government and its consequences are why people are hoping for change.
- Social Media offered what appeared to be new (and more radical!) methods for solving problems: national-level mob action, for one obvious one. These methods hadn't yet been discredited, so people could hope in them.
Of these, it seems to me that Social Media is the closest to being a genuinely novel development rather than an incremental evolution of what came before. Smartphones and related technology radically reshaped the media ecosystem in a very short period of time, and in a way that heavily favored upstarts and rabble-rousers and heavily disadvantaged the establishment.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Which games have good characters, really? I mean really good character writing.
The original Marathon had great writing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
If they did believe that there's good Americans as well as bad, than the question would make some sense. They would recognize the parts of culture he's talking about as American, and as being imported, and they could justify it, but I'm pretty sure they ,think it's homegrown by now.
To a considerable extent, it is homegrown. BLM was run by people claiming to be "trained marxists". Social Justice draws heavily on the theory of Continental Philosophers, and the "Internationalist" faction in American politics has always looked up to Europe for inspiration and social proof of their ideological project. And sure, it goes both ways, to the point that Europeans pick up American memes that on a first analysis make no sense in their context.
Is the WEF an American or a European project? I would argue that assigning it to either is a category error, but if forced, I would say European. In my view, the Enlightenment was from the start a European project, and Anglo-American participation is an outlier, albeit a significant one, but the distinction arguably elides more than it reveals. Organs like the WEF are part of a distinct, cohesive, long term socio-political construct, and that construct observably transcends national boundaries.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
SCOTUS recognizes that the equilibrium where the public and elected representatives and elected governments in many of the richest and most populous (blue) states are prevented from legislating their own domestic in-state firearms policy (which does not relate to core federal government spheres like defense, border control, foreign policy, interstate commerce or central banking) against their will is unstable and will, at some point, result in the court being packed and the US’ brief experiment in comparatively greater freedoms reverting to the current European/Canadian/Australian model, not just when it comes to gun ownership but in every other case too.
When you boil it down, the question is over where the power is kept and how one accesses it.
Your claim is that Blue States can't be bound by the Constitution if they disagree with those restrictions, because otherwise they'll overthrow the system. If this is an accurate description, then to the extent that Reds wish to have their own access to power, the key to accessing it is to present a similar threat of disastrous consequences unless their preferred carve-outs are granted.
One notes that establishing sufficient threats probably results in less stability for the system overall, not more, but human collectives have never been all that good at math.
The same motivation to accommodate local political sentiment, for example, is what struck down mandatory gerrymandering of black-majority districts in some southern states that was forced upon them, and what struck down Roe.
As has been pointed out many times before, Black-Majority districts and overturning Roe are examples of ending blue impositions on red areas. We still have never had Red constitutional impositions on Blue areas, while we've had the reverse for many decades running, and still have many active. "We'll consider gradually ramp down our abuses of your autonomy, on the understanding that you will never, ever get to abuse our autonomy in any way" is not an attractive pitch for the side that has been relentlessly abused for many decades.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
apologies, my phrasing was ambiguous; obviously there's a human victim, but also a human perpetrator. A human raped another human, using a dog as a tool.
Your distinction seems reasonable, but the dolphins thing I've heard before and still is a bit horrifying. I think you're right that it's assigning far more moral agency than a dolphin can actually support, but on the other hand the idea that dolphins are approaching human-smart is endemic in most contexts, and I've heard rumors of them getting nonconsensually amorous with humans. There's an element of "it doesn't matter if they don't understand why this is wrong, I do".
I guess that's just another reason to stay clear of deep water.
On my tank game, I got a simple grenade-throwing enemy working using unity's Behavior system, my collaborator got his messaging system working, and we got a bunch of old systems cleaned up and working properly again. He's working on engine and transmission mechanics, while I've had to hop over to another project where I'm trying to build a pixel-art environment tile set for another collaborator's RPG. After much experimentation for painting techniques for high-detail pixel art, I caved and got myself a midjourney subscription. The plan is currently to use midjourney to generate chunks of terrain detail, which I will then cut out into raw sprites. I will then clean up and normalize these to remove generation artifacts and inconsistencies, then use them to assemble the final terrain sprites. So far, it's working pretty well, and is the first time I've used AI for serious art production.
@Southkraut, @ArjinFerman, how go the projects?
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