FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
We haven't begun to fight because we're never going to. Because we're not capable of it.
Speak for yourself. Maybe that is the way you are. Maybe that is the way the people around you are. It is not the way I am, and it is not the way the people around me are. There's a decent argument that Rittenhouse single-handedly ended the Floyd riots, and he survived the Blues' attempts to crush him for it, and the attempts to crush him appear to me to have been costly for the Blues. They attempted to crush Kavanaugh, and failed. Gun owners refuse to comply with state and federal laws, and they get away with it. This is exactly the sort of coordination you and @The_Nybbler consistently claim doesn't exist, because you are both so black-pilled that you refuse to accept contrary evidence.
Because anything more than those random hicks requires levels of organization of which we are not capable.
Abbott defying Biden on the border requires significant organization. Gun owners refusing to comply with registration requires coordination. But in fact, you are fundamentally wrong about the level of coordination required to destroy our present society. The amount of organization required is effectively zero. It can be done with individuals alone.
Who swear that no matter how dire things get, should anyone dare talk to them about organizing or coordinating or fighting together — even if they've been a friend for decades — that automatically makes that person "the Enemy" and they will shoot them dead on the spot.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Red Tribers coordinate on all sorts of things, from defying law to purging the Republican party.
As for your "other vectors," I suspect you're talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Infrastructure vulnerabilities are a significant part of why I think small bands of hicks with rifles have a better chance than you allow. To my knowledge, they never did find the guys who shot up that substation, and that is an example of an attack that can be effectively carried out by one person alone.
In any case, no, I am not talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Yes. At the very least, I want people to accept the war was lost long ago, and there's nothing we can do about it now (if not going further, to "accept we're utterly doomed and LDAR," or even "spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come by taking The Exit early," but I get that most are too religious to consider that).
This is what I don't get. If we've already lost and the best thing we can do is to kill ourselves and spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come, why are the horrors to come horrors? You don't appear to believe in God, so once you're dead that's it, and none of this actually matters in the end. Even fighting, it really is not that hard to make sure you aren't taken alive, and then the horror is over. If you're right, we fight and they crush us, and this is worse... why? We're already doomed, no? What benefit is derived from quiet surrender? You already hate your life and want to die; how does surrendering to the blues improve any part of your situation? Why do you care about this question at all?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Your enemy holds the bureaucracy.
Abbott and DeSantis are coordinating open defiance to the bureaucracy. Maybe they'll lose, but they haven't yet. The Bureaucracy tried to put Rittenhouse in a cell for the rest of his life, and he's a free man. The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
They hold the media.
The media are losing their influence, and in many cases their ability to even keep their doors open due to their entire business model going extinct.
They hold the vast majority of the corporations.
And they are destroying those corporations, in a way that's pretty impossible to hide.
They hold Federal law enforcement and state law enforcement in many states.
And yet, those agencies can and have been successfully defied, and they can and have fought and lost.
And of course all big city law enforcement
And those cities continue to decay.
They don't actually have a plan. They have a scam that works when we endlessly cooperate with it, and that falls apart if we simply and consistently defect. We are currently organizing that defection, and it is delivering tangible results. Your predictions have been consistent for some time, and increasingly they are being falsified by the actual outcomes. Your prediction was that Abbott would not be able to defy Biden on the border, but he did. Your prediction, I think, would be that Republicans would "compromise" and vote for the border bill, but we didn't. Resistance is not costless, but the costs can and are being borne.
Your tribe has paths for exit but no paths for entrance -- you may birth more young people but they end up rejecting you under the influence of the institutions.
Time will tell.
And most of your tribe respects all of those institutions despite their obvious capture.
Too much of my tribe does, it's true, but less and less each day, and the more we push resistance, the more obvious the problems with the system become and the less my tribe respects it.
When Trump is duly convicted in New York Kangaroo Court, a large number of your people will say "Well, the jury had more information than I do, so he must be guilty" or similar rationalizations to trust the institutions.
This is a prediction. Let's see how it goes.
Because the very idea that the institutions are utterly corrupt and should be defied is anti-conservative.
To the extent that this is true, it seems to me that Conservatism is on the way out. Again, Abbott and DeSantis seem to be going for open defiance. The gun culture is definately going for open defiance. Trump's supporters are going for open defiance. Maybe you're right and it will all fizzle out, but that does not appear to me to be the trajectory we're on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Should Hirohito have surrendered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Do you think Japan should have continued to fight on further?) The war was already lost well before that point; all continuing to fight did was get even more Japanese killed.
We are not the imperial Japanese, and the Blues are not 1940s America. Should the Russian Whites have surrendered meekly to the Reds? My read is no, but again, our situation isn't Whites vs Reds either. We are actually in a much better situation, against a much less ruthless enemy. We have not yet begun to fight, metaphorically or literally. There is no rational basis for despair in the current situation.
This would require a Red Tribe capable of coordinating, rather than being downright allergic to it.
The Reds I see around me are evidently capable of considerable coordination. You should at least consider the possibility that your personal experiences do not generalize.
They'll grumble, and mutter about "2nd amendment solutions," but they'll bow down and comply.
Your opinion is that I am a liar, because I have repeatedly stated that I believe that "2nd Amendment solutions" are both a possible and practical solution to the current situation, without providing details of how that would work. I've stated that I prefer being called a liar to providing those details, annoying as it is, because I'm still hoping the current push for peaceful defiance will work. But I will note that every time you initiate this argument, you claim that "2nd Amendment solutions" means hicks with AR15s in twos and threes attempting to fight the US government. I think you badly underestimate both the chances both of the hicks actually trying this and the possible effectiveness of the strategy if they do, but I believe I've stated a number of times that my understanding of "2nd Amendment solutions" does not consist of Red Tribers, singly or in numbers, fighting the government with their personal collections of small-arms. If that was the scenario I was expecting, I would be significantly less confident in success, though still not as pessimistic as you. But that is not, in fact, the scenario I think is likely, and my assessment of that scenario is not the source of my confidence. If the Blues find a genie that magically un-exists all guns in America, it would not materially change my estimate of our chances for overthrowing Blue Tribe. The Second Amendment and the firearms it is intended to protect are much, much more valuable as a coordination mechanism than for pure tactical advantage. The tactical advantages come from other vectors, vectors which neither you nor most others appear to have grasped. I think this is a good thing, because we might still be able to unwind this mess before people like you stumble across them, a whole lot of people die, and the lights probably go out for the forseeable future.
And the part I can't figure out is, what your actual position is. Let's say you're right about everything. I'm lying, and we have no chance. You appear to argue that the correct option is unilateral surrender, let the Blues do whatever they want, in the hope that they'll abuse us less. Is that correct?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Not the current crop of Bureaucrats, certainly.
Bureaucrats do not create society or wealth. They are a necessary evil to keep the peace and prosperity that productive people build, and the "necessary" part assumes that they are not corrupt.
Our Bureaucrats are deeply, irredeemably corrupt. They are not necessary, only evil.
One of those options is to coordinate the withdrawal of consent from and the subsequent dissolution of the current system. It's a pretty good option, in my view, and apparently a lot of other Americans agree.
The standard Blue tactic is to isolate a situation and then drown it in "process". That doesn't seem to be working so hot any more. What else you got?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
The mistake was allowing there to be "federal money" in the first place. The mistake was cooperation in good faith.
But in any case, no, it isn't crazy to accept taxpayer money and "expect to make your own rules". The federal money had a purpose: to fund education of youth. It should be available to any ruleset that can accomplish that purpose. "education" should not have been redefined according to partisan Blue ends, and the rampant failure of Blue educational systems to actually achieve that end should be a dealbreaker. Instead, the money that was allocated to a purported common purpose has effectively been embezzled. The common purpose is not achieved, and instead the money ends up funding a large class of Blue activists and propagandists.
But by all means, continue your blind appeals to processes that have evidently failed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Very few private educational institutions don't receive federal funding. Private means private-run, not exclusively-privately-funded, because we built a gigantic money pipeline for "our" "education system" back when people were still foolish enough to believe that resources could be shared.
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?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d 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
12d 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
12d 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
12d 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
12d 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
12d 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
12d 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
13d ago
Weren't they Gnostics? Gnosticism definately still exists.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d 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
14d 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
16d 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
16d 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
17d 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.
I'll say that you were right that non-violent defiance wouldn't work, and that we should escalate. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul" remains true. It also remains true that keeping one's soul does not appear to require pacifism. Belief in God cuts both ways: it means we see no reason to pursue victory at any cost, but it also means some of those "costs" are in fact acceptable. Faith in God does not preclude prosecuting war, nor inflicting the harms of war. There are no "horrors to come"; pain and death are the inevitable lot of all men, always have been and always will be.
You've mangled the argument rather badly, but sure, close enough for purposes of this discussion. If Blue Tribe hegemony is destroyed, that will not in fact solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Destroying the Third Reich didn't solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Neither did grinding down the Soviet Union. Both were still the right thing to do, and worth the costs required to do them. In the latter case, Von Nuemann was wrong; beating the Soviet Union was not worth a nuclear exchange. We probably should have paid more than we did, but a full-blown nuclear war was not worth it to stop a tyranny that was, in fact, already doomed.
If the defiance accelerates and grows, are you and @TheNybbler going to admit you were wrong?
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