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FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

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joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

				

User ID: 675

FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

29 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 675

I've never had a single person tell me it's easier to have a wife. In fact it's the one thing I hear most guys complain about at work.

Is this what the argument is?

You accepted violation of the law to allow illegal immigrants in. On what grounds do you appeal to the law now?

I believe I've also been pretty clear that I do not consider the law a valid entity, but welcome my opponents sacrificing their values to uphold it when they are willing to do so.

Trump is acting as though he expects the ceasefire to be respected. Notably, he's acting like he expects both sides to respect it, and is willing to criticize Israel for shooting back. It seems pretty clear that Trump is, in fact, imposing a ceasefire on people who have a strong preference to continue shooting; if this is the case, then both sides are going to want to goad the other side into accepting blame and consequences for breaking the ceasefire, so that they can continue shooting with their opponent in a worse position. If that's the situation, then getting the ceasefire to stick means convincing both sides that they will not succeed in this and that brinksmanship games are an unacceptable risk, which is what Trump and his administration appear to be doing.

I maintain that Trump at least appears to be doing the right thing: pursuing obvious American interests as efficiently as possible, while actively avoiding entanglement in the problem. Trump declaring a ceasefire and blasting both Iran and Israel for limited violations makes it significantly more likely that the fighting will stop, and indeed both Israel, Iran, and the media are acting as though the ceasefire is a real thing that there are consequences for violating. But also, it seems to me that Trump's general approach vastly reduces the chances of America getting dragged into the war, because our stance now is that there is no war to get dragged into, and contradiction of that narrative by Iran or Israel is being framed as wrongdoing.

This seems like a pretty significant change from the status quo, and I am happy to see it.

[EDIT] - ...And skepticism and resistance to the contrary, it does in fact appear to be working. Per CNN headlines:

Iran is ready to resolve issues with the United States, [Iranian] president says on call with Saudi crown prince
Israel lifts country’s restrictions, and airports will resume full operations

And of course:

Rep. Al Green introduces articles of impeachment against Trump over Iran strikes

...some things never change.

It also led to the 2000s, and the 2010s, and the 2020s. Lots of things look really great if you refuse to look at the long-term consequences. Meth, for instance.

Have there been any notable cases of national injunctions being used to successfully gain value? All the ones I've heard of have been wielded by blues. If this tool hasn't been used by reds, why would removing it put reds in a worse position?

A lot of things seem to work this way lately; if a thing is only of value to one tribe, the other tribe has little incentive to preserve it.

It seems to me that you have failed to understand the current state of discourse in Conservative Christian circles, and have instead proceeded with basing your reasoning off cached data from a quarter-century ago.

The fundamental difference that you appear to have missed is that Christians lost these arguments decisively around the turn of the century, and their opponents got their way. As a result, Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society. The powers of compulsion no longer rest within our hands, and so we can focus on persuasion instead. And the worse Progressivism makes things, the more persuasive our arguments get.

But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens. Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.

Congress has not decided that illegal immigrants since the last amnesty are legal. They could do so. Alternatively, they could decide that whatever laws my side has, is, or will violate weren't actually laws after all.

I certainly believe that Congress should decide that violations of the law I support are no longer violations of the law. I think they should not do that for violations of the law I don't support.

To say the law is useless is an overstatement. People like you might still follow it, even though people like myself will not. That's useful!

Trump has bombed Iran's nuclear sites, using B2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound massive ordinance penetrators. All aircraft have successfully cleared Iranian airspace, and Trump is claiming that all three nuclear sites were wiped out. No word that I've seen of a counter-attack from Iran, as yet.

AOC has concluded that a president ordering an airstrike without congressional approval is grounds for impeachment. Fetterman thinks it was the right move. Both are, I suppose, on brand.

My feelings are mixed. I absolutely do not want us signing up for another two decades of invading and inviting the middle east, and of all the places I'd pick with a gun to my head, Iran would be dead last. I do not think our military is prepared for a serious conflict at the moment, because I think there's a pretty good likelihood that a lot of our equipment became suddenly obsolete two or three years ago, and also because I'm beginning to strongly suspect that World War 3 has already started and we've all just just been a bit slow catching on. That said, I am really not a fan of Iran, and while I could be persuaded to gamble on Iran actually acquiring nukes, it's still a hell of a gamble, and the Israelis wiping Iran's air defense grid made this about the cheapest alternative imaginable. I have zero confidence that diplomacy was ever going to work; it's pretty clear to me that Iran wanted nukes, and that in the best case this would result in considerable proliferation and upheaval. Now, assuming the strikes worked, that issue appears to be off the table for the short and medium terms. That... seems like a good thing? Maybe?

I'm hoping what appears to me to be fairly intense pressure to avoid an actual invasion keeps American boots of Iranian soil. As with zorching an Iranian general in Iraq during Trump's first term, this seems like a fairly reasonable gamble, but if we get another forever war out of this, that would be unmitigated disaster.

What about "Two wrongs don't make a right?"

One wrong also does not make a right. Then too:

"But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."

...but by all means, if you truly are committed to the idea that two wrongs do not make a right, I encourage you to apply this logic to wrongs committed by my side.

I wrote up a post late last week about Trump ordering airstrikes against Iran's major nuclear facilities. Consider this a follow-up:

CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE! It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE (in approximately 6 hours from now, when Israel and Iran have wound down and completed their in progress, final missions!), for 12 hours, at which point the War will be considered, ENDED! Officially, Iran will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 12th Hour, Israel will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 24th Hour, an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR will be saluted by the World. During each CEASEFIRE, the other side will remain PEACEFUL and RESPECTFUL. On the assumption that everything works as it should, which it will, I would like to congratulate both Countries, Israel and Iran, on having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end, what should be called, “THE 12 DAY WAR.” This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will! God bless Israel, God bless Iran, God bless the Middle East, God bless the United States of America, and GOD BLESS THE WORLD!

DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

On the one hand, this seems literally incredible. On the other hand, Vance is on TV right now answering questions about the process, so they're committed to the bit, and it would be a rather strange thing to lie about. On reflection, it's possible that both belligerents have taken enough punishment that they're ready to call it a draw.

If this is not real, it's going to be about as humiliating as imaginable for the administration. If it is real, on the other hand, it's going to throw a lot of the discussion over the last few weeks, and particularly since the airstrikes, into fairly sharp relief. I'm particularly interested to discuss Nick Fuentes's remarkable predictive accuracy with regards to this new development.

There's been some discussion lately about whether it is better, on breaking events, to hold one's tongue and wait for further developments, or start talking immediately. Many have argued that it's better to wait. I disagree: When one of these things happens, and we want to talk about it, and we experience the nervousness that we might be making fools of ourselves if what we say is proven wrong by revelations tomorrow morning, in that moment we have an opportunity to be far closer to honesty, with others and with ourselves, than at any other time throughout the year. Uncertainty is the prerequisite for charity, and these moments of uncertainty force us to realize that we ourselves can, in fact, be wrong. People should be more open to talking about breaking news, not because it allows for hotter takes, but because it gives one skin in the game and favors rational analysis over sophistry. It is good for us all to call the coin before it has landed.

In that spirit: I think this is real. I think Iran and Israel have in fact agreed to a ceasefire and to an end to the war, and I think there's a high probability they'll stick to it. I think the strikes actually worked, and Iran's nuclear program has in fact been pretty thoroughly wrecked, with their timetable set back by, say, more than five years.

If this is what it appears to be, it's a hell of a thing.

you are objecting to laws being broken to try to get the illegal immigrants out. The law was very definitely broken to let the illegals in; either you objected to this, or you did not. If you did not object to it, why object now? If you did object to it, then you observed that your objections were ignored then, why would you expect your objections to carry weight now?

If you do believe that the law should not be broken here, but you offer no remedy to the law being broken before, then is that not accepting violation of the law to allow illegal immigrants in? If you say you do not accept it, what does "not accepting it" mean in concrete terms?

Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.

...It seems to me that your arguments would benefit greatly from expansion into more than single-sentence, contextless dismissal. You appear to be arguing that the population as a whole is still moving away from religiosity. But my argument was not that people are moving toward Religion, but rather that they are moving away from liberalism and its axioms, upon which the Progressive edifice is founded. My argument is not that Conservative Christians will secure power, it is that power will lean somewhat more in our direction and very hard away from our most dedicated opponents, because our critiques are valid and theirs are not.

They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.

I am highly confident that none of the 2028 contenders will be Boomer-brained Gen-x-er preachers or middle-aged church ladies, in either party. I'm highly confident that the Republican 2028 contenders will be much more sympathetic to Conservative Christian social critique than they will be to Progressive social critique, and will consider protection of religious freedom for Conservative Christians as a winning political cause.

I'm weakly confident that Republicans will win in 2028, and I am highly confident that taking advice from the Hananiah set would degrade those odds, not improve them. The sort of reductive mental caching you seem to be deploying in this thread is a fair bit of the reason why. Rather than engage with what is actually happening, you consistently substitute factual realities for an imagined set more conducive to your axioms. Here, you are trying to round "Conservative Christians have persuasive critiques of our current culture" to "The Religious Right is ascendent, will try to jail people for viewing porn."

The problem with your claim, as I understand it, is that this is not actually going to happen, and the reason it isn't going to happen is not that people with power will take your advice. You can box phantoms for the next three years as much as you like; the world will proceed without you.

One might draw a parallel to (broadly speaking) Democrats and smoking tobacco. In the 90s, there was a claim around the Republican side of things that the Democrats were going to ban tobacco. One could believe this, because it was very clear that the Democrats as a group were not fond of the tobacco industry, and because the people who really did want to ban tobacco seemed mostly to be deep-blue democrats, and also because the people making this comparison somehow didn't mention counterexamples. But in fact, Democrats did not ban tobacco, nor did they make any serious effort to try to. Instead, they took numerous steps to paint tobacco consumption and the tobacco industry as sleazy, dirty, and dangerous, relying on coordinated social power and messaging to try to push people to drop the habit of their own volition, thus carving away the industry's financial base and reducing its lobbying power. What laws were passed were either focused on forcing the tobacco companies themselves into cooperating with this push, or else targeted attacks on areas where tobacco was framed in the worst light and where public support was strongest, such as the lawsuits.

I think this is a pretty good model for what an actual Red-Tribe attack on porn and the porn industry would look like.

What makes something mechanistic isn't a label of "mechanistic" slapped on it, it's that you can actually demonstrate the gears by doing gear things with them: turn gear A, which turns gear B, and so C, and so D, and so E. Stop gear A, and gear E also stops. People can and have slapped a "mechanistic" label on the conscious human mind. That doesn't change the fact that they can't actually point to gears or do gear things with them when it comes to those minds. The distinction is crucial, and the blind spot created by ignoring it is considerable.

Do you have a poll showing this?

I do not think this level of low-effort sarcasm is conducive to good discussion. This is a warning; please do not post this way in the future.

The Republicans will not ban abortion at the federal level. Neither will they commit significant political value to attempting such a ban.

Do you believe that Tim Waltz actually directed this man to kill state politicians to clear up seats for him to run for the Senate?

I am going to say that this is almost certainly a lie. I've been watching the story develop as well, and have been updating against my previous prediction that this guy was a Red ideologue, and in favor of him being a straightforward wacko. I'm not sure how this shifts the calculus; if he were a Red ideologue, claiming Tim Waltz put him up to it makes this an after-the-fact false flag, but it's also compatible with serious delusion.

I would estimate a roughly 0% chance that he is a democrat operative, or that any amount of "training" he received from "elements of the US military" is anything at all resembling the median image evoked by that phrase. If I visit a shooting range with a buddy in the guard, I'm "receiving training from elements of the US military". That doesn't make me John Rambo.

Reporting on his previous activities shows a clear pattern of delusional/manic energy animating his various schemes.

However, in the preceding years, Boelter seemed like a hard worker striving to make his ideas real, and sometimes, struggling to make ends meet. His fervent personality frothed with big, civic-minded ideas on how to "make the world a better place," Kalech said. In the professional relationship they had, Boelter was clearly "idealistic."

"I think he sincerely believed in the projects that we worked on, that he was acting for the greater good," Kalech told ABC News. "I certainly never got the impression he saw himself as a savior. He just thought of himself as a smart guy who figured out the solution to problems, and it's not so difficult – so let's just do it. Like a call to action kind of person." Most of those grand-scale projects never came to fruition, and the last time Kalech said he had contact with Boelter was May 2022. But in planning documents and PowerPoint presentations shared with ABC News, which Kalech said Boelter wrote for the web design, Boelter detailed lengthy proposals that expressed frustration with what he saw as unjust suffering that needed to be stopped. Some of those projects were also sweeping, to the point of quixotic -- even for the deepest-pocketed entrepreneur.

Boelter first reached out to Kalech's firm for a book he had written, "Revoformation," which Kalech took to be a mashup between "revolution" and "reformation." It's also the name of the ministry Boelter had once tried to get off the ground, according to the organization's tax forms. "It seemed to me like maybe he volunteered more than what was good for him. In other words, he gave too much away instead of worrying about earning money, because he didn't always have money," Kalech said. "It was never clear to me if the ministry really existed. Are there congregants? Is there a constituency? I don't know. Or was it like something in his head that he was trying to make? That was never clear to me."

I'd imagine I'm not the only one here for whom this description feels uncomfortably familiar. I've known a few people like this.

Kalech recalled that Boelter chose his firm for the work because they are Jerusalem-based, and he wanted to support Israel. Boelter's interest in religion's impact on society is reflected in a "Revoformation" PowerPoint that Kalech said Boelter gave him, dated September 2017. "I am very concerned that the leadership in the U.S. is slowly turning against Israel because we are losing our Judaic / Christian foundations that was [sic] once very strong," the presentation said. "I believe that if the Christians are united and the people who are leading this Revoformation are a blessing to Israel that it will be good for both Israel and the U.S."

Over the years, Boelter would reach out with what appeared to be exponentially ambitious endeavors, Kalech said: "What he wanted to take on, I think, might have been bigger." Boelter wanted to end American hunger, according to another project's PowerPoint. And while the idea would require massive changes to current laws and food regulation, it appeared Boelter dismissed that as surmountable if only elected officials could get on board. "American Hunger isn't a food availability problem," the presentation said. "American Hunger is a tool that has been used to manipulate and control a vast number of American's [sic], with the highest percentage being people of color. This tool can and should be broken now, and failure to do so will be seen as intentional criminal negligence by future generations. We should be embarrassed as a nation that we let this happen and have not correctly [sic] this injustice 100 years ago," one slide said. One slide described how his own lived experience informed his idea, referring to him in the third person: "several times in his life Vance Boelter was the first person on the scene of very bad head on car accidents," and that he was able to help "without fear of doing something wrong" because he was "protected" by Good Samaritan law – which could and should be applied to food waste, the slide said.

This part right here seems illustrative. This guy is not tethered. It does not sound like he understands mundane power, nor what is relevant to that power. He's feeding back the banalities he observes via cable news as the final output of the political process, and he thinks the eight-second soundbite in between anchor waffling is what the actual top-level inputs look like. He's unbearably, excruciatingly naïve

To keep an eye on which lawmakers supported the necessary legislation, "there needs to be a tracking mechanism," the presentation said, where citizens could "see listed every singe [sic] elected official and where they stand on the Law (Food Providers Good Samaritan Law)." "Those few that come out and try to convince people that it is better to destroy food than to give it away free to people, will be quickly seen for who they are. Food Slavers that have profited off the hunger of people for years," the 18-slide, nearly 2,000-word presentation said.

There's the lists of Bad People, and the focus on politicians. Also, complete disconnect from basic reality. The windmill he's tilting at doesn't exist. To a first approximation, hunger does not exist in America. There are food banks literally everywhere. Most grocery store and many restaurants supply them with large quantities of nutritious food.

"At least in his mind and on paper, he was solving problems," Kalech told ABC News. "He would think about things and then have a euphoric moment and write out a manifesto of, How am I going to solve this? And then bring those thoughts to paper and bring that paper to an action plan and try to implement it." The last project Kalech said Boelter wanted to engage him for was a multifaceted collection of corporations to help start-up and expanding businesses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, all under the umbrella "Red Lion Group." The 14-page, over 6,000-word planning document for the project outlined ideas for what Red Lion Group would offer: ranging widely from "security services" to agricultural and weapons manufacturing sectors, medical supplies, investment services, martial arts, oil and gas and waste management. Red Lion would also serve in media spaces: with "CONGOWOOD" Film Productions "to be what Hollywood is to American movies and what Bollywood is to Indian movies."

...The above doesn't sound like a Red Tribe partisan flaming out into violent extremism, and it doesn't sound like a Democratic machine assassin. It sounds like an earnest moderate normie with deteriorating mental health catching a bad case of the currently-endemic madness. The last two personal interactions I had were with Blues, both mentioned their desire for bad-people-murder unprompted. I do not doubt for a second that I could get equivalent expressions from my Red acquaintances. I'm pretty sure large portions of the population are simply marinating in this soup 24/7; fill an echo chamber with "kill the bad guys" enough, and someone's going to take you seriously.

It bears mentioning that the above is from the Press, and one should never trust them. But from the evidence available, it looks like I was wrong and this guy was just a normie psycho with nothing approaching a coherent tribal agenda.

If the rule you followed led you to here, of what use was the rule?

It takes all sorts, I suppose. The meme is not an exaggeration, though, and the phenomenon is widespread enough that it is a meme and you have heard of it.

By all means, lay out this excluded middle ground. What's the answer to the problem? What's the difference between an endpoint and a frontier?

I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will.

I have had materialists very directly deny the existence of free will in extended argumentation with me. I have observed other materialists, here and elsewhere, insist that no evidence against Materialism exists, and also that we know free will cannot actually exist because otherwise it would break materialism. Noting these positions is not a "pretense".

But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?

Things can work without us knowing how they work on a mechanistic level. Starting a fire is mechanistic; people worked with fire long, long before they had a mechanistic explanation of how it worked.

We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.

But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).

They are not my absurd standards, they were the absurd claims of the scientists and philosophers who built the paradigm of the material mind. These men claimed their axioms were empirical facts for more than a century, and used those claims to wield vast social, economic and political power while steadily retreating from every scrap of empirical evidence available. It is not my fault that much of the modern world was built by lying to people about empirical fact. I will not stop pointing that the lies were in fact lies, nor tracing the social consequences of those lies down to the present day. Nor will I cease to note the evidence of my own self-reported mind-states, and the ways in which simple observation entirely contradicts the materialist narrative.

Nor will I claim that I have knowledge that I do not, in fact, have. Determinism is a perfectly respectable axiom, and utility can be acquired through its use. but it is an axiom, the utility is acquired strictly through its use as an axiom, and it pays no direct rent at all.

But the middle is a rather anodyne thing: acknowledge that excessive sex-positively drives behavior that makes neither men nor women satisfied, while at the same time acknowledging that total abstinence outside of marriage is neither desirable nor achievable.

I'll agree that total abstinence outside of marriage isn't achievable at the population level; humans will inevitably human. In what way is it not desirable or achievable at the individual level? If a guy and a girl abstain from sex outside of marriage, get married, and so cease to abstain from sex inside marriage, what has this cost them?

The claim as I understand it:

You have social media models, women who are making a living squarely in the "model" category of posting pictures of themselves in skimpy clothes or bikinis or whatever, but are not selling nudes or selling actual sex, don't have an Onlyfans, aren't advertising availability as a sugar-baby, etc. Super-rich guys from Dubai (or presumably elsewhere, but Dubai is the usual claim) DM them soliciting straightforward prostitution, offering to fly them to the guy's location in a private jet, pay them an absurd sum for a considerable amount of degeneracy, maybe let them have a mini-vacation afterward, and then fly them home, and the women find this offer acceptable. To the super-rich Dubai guys, this is essentially ordering takeout as the money involved is insignificant. For the women, the money is very significant, and it turns out that they do indeed have a price. It is claimed that this happens often enough that it is A Thing, an element of the social media ecosystem of which common knowledge more or less exists. It's sort of the difference between people looking for work and people willing to be headhunted.

The quoted phrase is the above, framed maximally-uncharitably.

I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.

We already know that our minds and wills interact with the material world. You can make me experience pain by poking me with a pin, or deaden the pain with morphine. You can make me feel euphoria by putting me on a roller coaster. You can make me stop completely by damaging my brain.

Think about it in computer terms: I/O is not Read/Write; naïvely, mouse and webcam drivers are not alone sufficient to work with CPU and RAM. Empirical demonstration of the brain equivalent of Read/Write would be mind reading or mind control. If this were even weakly possible, the world around us would look very, very different than it does. You can induce subjective experiences by zapping the brain. You cannot predict behavior to any significant degree by reading the brain, and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.

If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.

We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc. Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead. All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.

[EDIT] - It should go without saying that none of the above supports a claim that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Odinism, the Imperial Cult, Shinto, Buddhism or any other non-materialistic system of belief has a better claim to truth than Materialism. We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.