FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
What does the Alternate history look like if America stays entirely out of World War I? It's hard for me to imagine things working out worse than they did in our timeline. Is it enough change that WWII doesn't happen, or ends up as the West vs the Commies?
Again, I think there's a strong case to be made that our current position is pretty similar to 1910 or so, for a whole variety of reasons. I think we should try to lean hard into isolationism this time around, not least from observing how WWI and WWII went for the sclerotic, unwieldy empires that rolled into them. Modelling our current choices off WWII history is like a 55-year-old morbidly-obese former athlete with a bad back and a bum knee thinking he can throw down like he did when he was an 18-year-old in peak condition. We should be considering our future more from the perspective of Tsarist Russia or the Austro-Hungarian empire, not from that of a vital, highly cohesive, highly motivated state gifted with secure borders and unlimited, untapped natural resources.
I suppose you believe we should have stayed out of WWII as well.
The standard narrative on WWII is vulnerable to the complication that in defeating one set of horrifyingly evil tyrannies, we made alliance with and gave away half the planet to another set of at least equally-horrifyingly-evil tyrannies, who we then could not prevent from decimating, immiserating and enslaving the half of the planet so ceded, which we then had to spend the next two generations containing at ruinous cost, and whose ideology fatally poisoned our own nations. I think it's pretty easy to be happy that we crushed Hitler and the Imperial Japanese, while still noting that the outcome was not something we should see as the way we want to do business going forward.
Further, World War II appears to be a pretty contiguous outgrowth of World War I, where we "made the world safe for democracy" in a way that appears to have laid the groundwork for incalculable ruin over the subsequent century.
I think we are, at this moment, enjoying the twilight of our own Belle Epoque. The lessons that I draw from the last century is that fighting to impose control over the whole world is utterly unworkable, hubristic and ruinous. We have more than enough problems at home; we cannot afford to fix all the problems of the wider world.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I think that's a colorable argument. The reason it is not my argument is that I learned growing up that the Constitution was a set of rules that we all had to follow, and then discovered in adulthood that the Constitution is whatever five justices say it is.
"Unconstitutional" in my childhood meant "a violation of one of the basic rules we and our parents and their parents have all agreed to live by, whose operation be fairly well reasoned out in advance according to basic logic." "Unconstitutional" now very clearly does not mean that any more. I am not deluded enough to think that reading the Constitution and familiarizing myself with the state of current precedent will allow me to predict what will and will not be considered "Constitutional" or "Unconstitutional" ten years from now. On the other hand, if you tell me who is appointed, I think I can predict what is and is not "Constitutional" ten years hence with much better accuracy than blind chance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
Just stop replying. You are making it worse.
Hello. Your initial post in this thread drew three reports, and was indeed not up to the standards we enforce on comments here. The following two posts, though, are right out. You do not seem to be looking for a conversation here, so I think it's best if you take some time to acquaint yourself with the rules before posting again.
You have one warning on record for "smug antagonism" from nearly a year ago, no AAQCs, and very few posts of any sort. I'm going to start you off with a three-day ban. When you return, please refrain from engaging in these sorts of antics. Bans will escalate rapidly if you do not.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
What can be destroyed by the Truth should be... or perhaps there remains some room for mercy. Hope is not a sin.
In any case, knowing that peaches do not come from a can does not require one to love peaches less. Maybe a clearer understanding of where the good things the American Experiment generated actually come from will allow more us to produce more of them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
Why? Surely it can be justified on the grounds that almost any replacement is going to be better for the US + allies than the current one.
The problem with claiming that things can't get worse is all the previous claims that things couldn't get worse, combined with the numerous, extremely horrifying examples of how they did, in fact, get worse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
If you want America to commit to yet another military intervention in the middle east, I think you should provide something pretty close to a guarantee. The last several interventions were all disasters, and further, demonstrated that the elites in charge of managing the interventions could not actually be held accountable in any meaningful way for their disastrous management and decision-making. This has been a serious problem, and until I see some evidence that it has actually been corrected, my vote is no, hell no, are you insane?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
We did that in Libya. The result was an unmitigated disaster.
There will not be a Constitutional convention, because the Constitution is dead.
The Constitution relied on common knowledge that obeying procedure was the best way available to generate and wield coherent power.
Manipulating procedural outcomes is, in fact, a superior method of generating and wielding coherent power, and we have created common knowledge that this is the case.
Because the Constitution relied on a form of common knowledge that no longer exists, not only is it dead, but the principles that generated it are dead. It is not just that the Constitution is no longer serving its intended function, but that the very idea that it could potentially serve that function is now understood to be ridiculous.
Or to put it another way, the Constitution required a particular set of beliefs to function. Those beliefs were fundamentally mistaken about core elements of human nature, the fact that they were mistaken has become common knowledge, and so now it is impossible for reasonable people to actually hold them.
I would like freedom of speech. There is no reasonable argument available that freedom of speech is a thing that can happen. The First Amendment has failed to provide meaningful protection for free speech in my lifetime, and the way it has failed to do so demonstrates that rewording the amendment would not help.
I would like my right to keep and bear arms to not be infringed. there is no reasonable argument available that rewording the second amendment would prevent the infringements that have been the norm my entire life.
The power to secure either my right to speech or my right to arms observably does not flow from the Constitution in any way other than the most trivial and incidental. I have watched presidential candidates publicly laugh at the idea that such protections could possibly exist. They were correct to do so, because such protections are a fiction.
You would be better off founding your political reforms off the divine right of kings. It would be a more fruitful soil than this appeal to the divinity of ink and paper.
He could also have shot to wound (or indeed intimidate) rather than shot to kill.
No, he could not, and you suggesting this demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of both the mechanics and the legalities of employing firearms in self-defense.
"Shooting to wound" or "shooting to disable" is not a technique law enforcement officers are taught, because it is, to a first approximation, not a real thing. Self-defense shooting training universally focuses on firing center of mass and as rapidly as possible, because this is by far the best, safest and most effective way to shoot in a self-defense scenario. The next-best target is the head. Limbs move around a lot more than bodies and heads, hitting them is not "non-lethal" by any reasonable definition due to the arteries involved, and missed shots can easily continue on to strike bystanders behind the target.
"Firing to intimidate", "warning shots" and so on are, to my knowledge, flatly illegal in all jurisdictions. Firearms are lethal weapons, and to legitimately discharge a firearm in self-defense requires you to believe you are beyond the point of warnings. Law Enforcement Officers give warnings by shouting them, not by discharging firearms.
In this specific case, the officer firing through the windshield was presented with a target consisting of the driver's upper torso and head, at close range and on minimal timing. The doctrine-correct response is to aim for center-of-mass or the head.
If you want fewer things like this to happen in the future, the obvious way would be for Blue Tribe to stop demonizing legitimate law enforcement and those conducting it, for Blue Tribers to stop attempting to disrupt legitimate law-enforcement operations, for Blue Tribe to create general knowledge that attempting to interfere in legitimate law enforcement operations by driving an SUV into the middle of them is not a good idea, and finally for Blue Tribe to internalize that if you are being ordered out of your car by officers of the law approaching on foot, the proper response is not to put your vehicle in drive and attempt to drive away.
It is obvious that Blues here and in the public at large desperately want this to be Law Enforcement's fault, but in fact the officers made zero observable mistakes, and the "protester" did everything wrong. She participated in a mob attempting to disrupt law enforcement. She blocked the road with her vehicle. She refused to comply with lawful orders. She attempted to drive away, struck an officer in the process, and in the process of this was shot dead. Every one of those actions was a profoundly stupid choice. Make enough stupid choices in sequence, and it is easy to get dead. The solution is not to provide additional protections to people making stupid choices, it is to teach people not to make stupid choices.
IIRC, the Bundy standoff had no disagreement over the facts for the standoff itself, and the subsequent killing of one of the participants resulted in the FBI shooters being caught tampering with evidence. None of this changed the tribal split.
Rittenhouse was filmed from multiple angles, and the film was available more or less immediately. Evidence abounded that he had acted within the law, evidence of him committing a crime did not exist. In the subsequent trial, every significant additional piece of evidence broke in his favor. None of this, nor even his acquittal, changed the tribal split.
My assessment is that the BLM riots and Jan 6th followed similar patterns. Both are much larger scale and far more complex, but the pattern of the evidence consistently breaking one way seems to me to hold in both.
We are past the point where evidence is dispositive. People want results, not process. It's not even really a mystery why: people on both sides perceive government as ineffectual at securing their values, and perceive those values under existential threat from their tribal opposites. Under such conditions, the natural consequence is a loss of faith in institutions and burgeoning extremism in pursuit of a solution to the perceived crisis.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Not that amazing. We have numerous previous incidents demonstrating the American public's total incapacity for achieving consensus over tribally-charged law enforcement incidents. For at least one side, and perhaps both, it is "who, whom" all the way down. This has obviously not gotten better since the Bundy standoff, BLM riots, rittenhouse and Jan 6th. It is pretty obviously not going to get better in the foreseeable future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
Tom Clancy was one of my favorite authors growing up; I read all his stuff up through Rainbow Six, and I'd say it definitely shaped my worldview, first in a "this is how the world is" way as a kid and teenager, and then contrasting the backlash as reality intruded as an adult. Favorite books were Without Remorse, Clear and Present Danger, and the Sum of All Fears. Even looking back without rereading them, there's a ton of passages that look very, very different from an adult perspective than as a naive kid, and I've often thought you could use his books as a pretty good example of why the political world he portrayed has collapsed so badly since.
You have a long, long history of describing yourself as:
- Severely disabled and destitute, with a dysfunctional family and no significant social ties.
- Terminally depressed, with little to nothing to live for and zero hope that things will improve.
- Incredibly frustrated that people you consider on your side are not committing acts of lawless violence and terrorism against people you regard as on the other side.
- Possessed of a profound, murderous hatred of your tribal opposites as a class, to the point of routinely mocking your allies for not murdering them already.
I personally have argued to you that it is in fact exceedingly obvious that individuals possessed of even minimal competence and resources can inflict such absurdly disproportionate harm to society that the culture war is a significant threat to our society's continued function. When I declined to provide you for specific details of how to do so, you spent some effort to call me out as a liar.
My assessment is that you resent what peace we currently enjoy and wish for nothing more than to see that peace drowned in blood. I think anyone who answers the questions you ask here is a fool.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Death cometh, soon or late.
All humans die, and relatively soon. If we can preserve treasures, our children's children can enjoy them as well. Losing them cuts the links between past and present, and that is a hateful thing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
But what common ground can you find with someone who will engage in a fascist distortion of truth in order to justify their violence?
...My confidence that the other commenters are correct, and that you are trolling. The part where you constantly hew to general statements and abstractions sort of gives it away.
What "violence" specifically are you referring to? Which "fascistic distortions of truth"? When I and others talk about such things, we have no trouble grounding the discussion in specific cases, and working toward general principles from there. You would be well advised to do likewise.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Is it possible to share space with people who have evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints?
In some circumstances, observably, yes. You could examine how this happens. In some circumstances, observably, no, and this could also be examined. You could dig into what the breakpoints are, where one situation devolves into the other.
If the purpose of discourse is to arrive, together, at convergent notions of objective reality in the face of the vast impulse towards fiction and willful delusion, then when do you reject that which is demonstrably evil?
Not yet. Hopefully, not soon.
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
Alternatively, see here.
The purpose of discourse is to arrive at the truth. But once you arrive at the truth, discourse has served its purpose, and therefore ends. This place exists to promote discourse; to the extent that your questions have been answered and you have arrived at certainty, you have no place here. This is a place of charity, and without doubts and questions, charity cannot exist.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Yes, I'm aware that if we assume a particular form of hard Materialism axiomatically, then Determinism or something much like it is a necessary consequence. But there is no actual reason to take that particular form of hard Materialism as one's axiom, and crucially, adopting it as an axiom appears, speaking strictly within the Materialist frame, to degrade rather than improve one's ability to make predictions about the material world.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
If better data arrives that goes against determinism, should we discard it? Because determinism has been a popular theory for a very long time, the various deterministic theories have been empirically tested, and they have been uniformly falsified. What you are proposing here is the final stage of Determinism of the Gaps, refusing to acknowledge all previous tests and all previous data, making no testable predictions at all, and relying entirely on, to put it succinctly, faith.
Sure, that might change in the future. Also in the future, the Son of Man might return on a cloud in glory to judge the quick and the dead. Also in the future, the stars in the night sky might be replaced by a high-score readout, and then reality as we know it gets turned off. But I have actually read a few of the old books, enough to know that what your argument is not particularly new, and what is relatively new is the part where you've (wisely) given up on making empirical claims or predictions entirely. I disagree that Determinism should be treated as the best available hypothesis when it now makes no predictions and all previous predictions it made have been falsified.
I do recognize that this is tangential to your main point, though, and my apologies. it's a bugbear for me.
Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.
...
Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics?
How does your belief in everything non-quantum being fully clockwork yield non-identical predictions to my belief in free will? I contend that in this case the answer is not mu, as my belief in free will delivers superior predictions about reality. My evidence for this is the way that every functional system we have relating to managing interpersonal interactions operate off the assumption of free will, zero functional systems for managing interpersonal interactions operate off deterministic assumptions, and every attempt to build such systems off deterministic assumptions (and there have been many) have uniformly failed.
But how could it be any other way?
Reality around us could not be baseline reality, and our minds have a connection to the actual baseline reality. It doesn't really matter if baseline reality is God or the simulation server in this case. Claims that our minds are deterministic must confront the fact that they do not operate in a deterministic fashion at any level, and most claims and even evidence to the contrary appear to have been falsified.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I don't think they're capable of receiving and internalizing the message, unfortunately. It doesn't help that the creative talent pipeline is fucked as well. People chasing quality will find ways to produce quality in their small pockets; most of these large studios will probably just die. Welcome to the new Dark Ages.
But the market has more or less said, as far as I have seen, that it tolerates a lot of blue/woke design choices though?
You cite a bunch of correlated factors on the production end, all of which are accurate. It is indeed true that if all the major studios and all the major media outlets all adopt an ideological tack in the same direction, the industry as a whole will indeed move in that direction.
As for customers not buying a lot of new games or consoles anymore, that's gotta be partly down to the economy and due to publishers playing it too safe instead of creating anything very creative most of the time? They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.
There will always be excuses for why failure is the fault of nebulous outside forces and not the deliberate decisions of those in positions of authority. These excuses are not going to get Doctor Who another season. Take Star Wars in particular; they've just had a major triple-A game release within the last year or so. Searching for "star wars outlaws sales" gives me the following summary:
Star Wars Outlaws has sold approximately 1 million units since its release in August 2024, but it underperformed compared to Ubisoft's expectations. Despite receiving generally positive reviews, the game struggled in a competitive market and faced challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity.
...Why would it face challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity? Isn't the whole point of the Star Wars brand that it's about as close to universally-popular as you can get? Well, not any more, apparently.
They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.
Marvel released 21 movies leading up to Endgame, and I watched most of them. I watched I think two movies post-endgame. I'll never watch another marvel production again. I do not appear to be alone in this decision. Why is it that 21 movies = massive success, but 23 = dismal failure?
Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.
Bungie made a money printer with Destiny and Destiny 2. It's now in serious trouble. Destiny 2 is my hole, it was made for me! I got in as free-to-play, spent increasing amounts of money on DLC, evangelized the game to other players. When the Lightfall DLC dropped, I went all-in and paid a hundred bucks to pre-order the whole expansion package. How'd that go? ...I quit Destiny for good. A lot of other people did too. Bungie's done massive layoffs, game quality has dropped into the toilet with tons of bugs and bad design choices.
But it's cool, they've got a new game coming, a revival of their classic Marathon IP. It's now been delayed, its lunch has been pretty thoroughly eaten by Arc Raiders, and its current trajectory is pretty clearly toward total failure. Sony paid 3 billion for this company, right about the time their output turned to literal shit.
More broadly, was Tolkien overdone? Was Wheel of Time overdone? You're telling me there wasn't actually a market for big-budget fantasy TV, after the dismal collapse of Game of Thrones? Witcher was shaping up to be a hit; why did it implode?
If tentpole IP is a bad investment, why did everyone invest so hard into it, and where's the better path forward that they're missing?
Any observer who does not suffer from "Iraq Syndrome" is not thinking objectively. The GWOT destroyed the Republican party as an institution, and arguably destroyed America as a nation. It was ruinously expensive by every possible measure, for little to no perceivable benefit. Those responsible have taken no accountability and have suffered no consequences, and there is not even the slightest reason to be confident that Lessons have been Learned. And that was before we entered a fundamental revolution in military affairs, wherein it is questionable whether our comically expensive military is actually capable of surviving, much less dominating.
You should not need to stick your dick in a blender three times (four? Five?) to learn not to do that, but apparently some people need to go all the way down to the angriest inch.
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