FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
But by responding straightforwardly and honestly, one can at least claim to hold principles instead of having to admit that they're calculating tribalists who make decisions based on tribal allegiances rather than principles.
What penalties do you observe for being a calculating tribalist who makes decisions based on tribal allegiance rather than principles? Do you observe these consequences to be uniformly applied? If I argue that being such a calculating tribalist is the correct response to the current situation, what would your counter-argument be?
And moving up a level, a tribe that accepts or even encourages its leaders to submit to such tribalism has to admit that it's a tribe that is merely trying to beat the Enemy because they're the Enemy, rather than following principles that they believe the government and society at large should follow.
By no means.
"Principles" are another way of saying "rules". To the extent that we use the term "rules", we use it to refer to legible rules. But it is not possible to construct a perfect, legible ruleset that covers all situations and contingencies, such that human judgement is obviated by a flowchart.
The point of society is to promote good things and suppress bad things. Values-coherence allows people to do this under generalizable rules which rely on those coherent values for grounding. When values are mutually-incoherent, this is no longer possible, and attempts at sticking to generalizable rules is signing up for exploitation without meaningful limits.
My perception is that the fact that there was even a single random blue-haired leftist who, when confronted with such a slogan, hemmed and hawed about dog whistles instead of straightforwardly and honestly answering, "OF COURSE it's okay to be white! I want white people to feel perfectly okay being white, and the principles and policies that I am (we are) pushing doesn't conflict with that in any way, so much so that if you or anyone else believes - incorrectly - that such a conflict exists, I will actively help you resolve that conflict, by crushing whatever might be making white people suspect that such a phrase is wrong" placed another chink in the armor that tribe was wearing.
How did this chink in the armor manifest, in your view? Obviously not only did a single activist do this, but it was the default response for Blue Tribe as a whole, with any dissent being exceedingly marginal and fringe.
People talk (foolishly, in my opinion) about Woke being dead. It is obvious to me that Woke did not "die" because principled moderates put it back in a box, but because Red Tribe burned many of its own principles to go all-in on tribal warfare, and turned out to have better terrain for it than the Blues. The moderates had more than a decade to fight, and in that time they accomplished nothing significant, fielded no champions, won no battles outside the context of Red Tribe treating the culture war as a war.
Trump will not last forever. A large portion of the Republican elite very clearly want to wash their hands of him and go back to the way things used to be. That is not an acceptable solution to Red Tribe, though, and every success we have had at securing our values has come from refusing to accept this exact sort of "moderation".
"It's okay to be white" was effective because Blues really do believe that it is not okay to be white. They could not allow themselves to let it stand.
"Stand if you disavow fascism" is effective not because Republicans won't stand, but because many of them will, not because they are notably less fascist than those who remain seated in any objective sense, but because they want the people making the demand to be nicer to them. In doing so, they weaken my tribe, and I hold them in contempt for doing so.
The basic fact is that at the object level, it is not the case that Blues have a problem with people being white in the same way that Reds have a problem with Fascism. The actual difference in tribal attitude and inclination cannot be handwaved, and while it is obvious that it cannot be agreed upon either, the current situation does not require agreement for things to proceed along their current trajectory. Speaking in broad generalities, it appears to me that Reds are not fascist to any significant degree, but Blues are actually quite racist against white people. Perhaps this perception is wrong, but if it is not wrong then it makes no sense to demand symmetrical responses.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The article I linked is a list of holders for the office of high priest. The last entry vacated his office in 70 AD.
Near as I can tell, there is no valid priesthood and there has not been one for nearly two millennia. There are, if the genealogical records are correct, people who satisfy the genealogical requirement to be a priest, but IIRC genealogy is not the only requirement, and there are a bunch of rituals and structures that are required as well, but are not now possible because the infrastructure is gone.
As an outside observer, it does not appear to me that the Law is being kept, or indeed that keeping the law is in any way possible. Obviously, Jewish opinion differs sharply, and that is their right.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
As we've discussed at some length, I think they are badly mistaken in this assessment.
If Red Tribe needs the approval of the press to secure political victory, political victory is no longer a viable option and we will need to find alternative paths to securing our values. We have plenty of evidence of what results from cooperation, conciliation, compromise and capitulation to Blue Tribe. There is no road forward there.
Blues and "moderates" act as though if Trump could just be disposed of, all this ferment will go away. But the reality is that Trump is the moderate, mild voice of peace. If he fails, we will escalate until either we are destroyed or until we find a way to get the outcomes we consider necessary. Trump is an expression of the wicked problem of apportioning political power in a values-incoherent society, and not the progenitor of that problem nor meaningfully in control of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I were a Republican representative, I'd have no issue standing to such a question because i don't self-identify as a fascist.
I don't self-identify as a fascist either, but the label has been abused to the point that it is self-defeating to cooperate with its continued use.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
my point is that believing a people are "chosen" isn't an argument for giving them whatever they want. What if they behaved badly to the God who chose them, and thus are being punished by him?
C'mon.
Wikipedia's article on the subject appears roughly two thousand years out of date, if you have information I do not. A quick search indicates claims that some group has announced that they've appointed a new "high priest" recently, but gives no indication why I should consider this appointment religiously valid.
Also, Jewish prayers refer to the sacrifices in the Temple even if actual sacrifices are not possible.
Why would references to non-existent temple sacrifices in a non-existent temple satisfy the requirements of a Covenant that explicitly specified actual sacrifices in an actual tabernacle/temple? For that matter, why haven't they just fabricated a tabernacle? Not that this would be valid either, given the absence of the ark and the spirit of God seated upon it, but it would at least be a step in the correct direction, no?
I'm sure committed Jews have many answers to such questions, but I am not a committed Jew, and I am not required to believe as they do. My understanding is that the old Covenant was broken irrevocably with the destruction of the temple and the end of covenant practice in AD 70. If modern Jews disagree, that is between them and God. Meanwhile, the new Covenant I believe I enjoy with God has a number of requirements, but none command political support for a Jewish nation. This is all slop-millenarianism nonsense.
Yahweh is not synonymous with Jews. Yahweh frequently demonstrates his supremacy by cursing and punishing the Jews, according to the Jews' own scriptures. As for the Christian perspective, "We must obey God rather than men", told to the Jewish authorities by the fathers of the Church. Nor, IIRC, did the early Christians defend Jerusalem from the Romans, and there's a solid argument that they were following Jesus's instructions when they declined to do so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
In Genesis God promises Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse".
Yes. How does this promise to Abraham overwrite the numerous subsequent and far more detailed formal covenants God makes with the Israelites throughout the rest of the Old Testament? It is you and Mike Huckabee who are not taking the text seriously. Those of us who do are not greatly troubled by this notion, and have not been for centuries.
Carlson says "Oh I, uh, don't curse Israel because Gold told me not too, I just don't think Netanyahu is a real Jew or Israel is the Israel mentioned by God."
There is no particular reason to believe that post-sack-of-Jerusalem Judiasm is a valid continuation of the previous religion. There is likewise no particular reason to believe that the modern state of Israel is in any metaphysical sense the valid successor to the ancient state of Israel. The temple is gone. The Ark is gone. The Altar is gone. There are no sacrifices any more. There are, as far as I'm aware, no priests. No holy-of-holies, and so on. You are attempting to justify a scriptural interpretation that holds up one verse and shoves down a thousand other verses, as though this one verse were the entirety of the bible. This is a very bad way to do scriptural interpretation, but again, your interest does not appear to be in accurately understanding the will of God or even the text as a literary document, but exclusively pushing your monomaniacal agenda.
He is pigeon-holed into this anti-semitic canards that don't get to the truth of it: that is hostile foreign propaganda-myth, it's not true.
So he's stupid for believing his sort of anti-semitism when really he should prefer your sort of antisemitism? Have fun with that.
Meanwhile, in the real world, serious belief in Christianity does not require one to be a Zionist. The prominence of Christian Zionism is a historical fluke emerging from a confluence of social factors, it has largely run its course, and it will not, I think, be coming back in the future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Leviticus 26 is Yahweh telling the jews that if they fail to obey him, he will punish them grievously. Your model is that worship of Yahweh requires worship of the jews, but Leviticus 26 demonstrates that Yahweh himself states that the Jews suffering under a curse is part of his will. Why should I as a Christian commit to protecting Israel if God himself has stated it is his will that they not be protected?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
You don't need to go into new law/old law. the old law itself is incompatible with SS's claims.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
The most unfortunate part is that what you call the "strawman" of Christian Zionism is actually the only internally coherent position a Christian can hold...
This is an absurd statement on multiple levels.
As a bare existence proof, it's notable that most of the history of Christianity as a religion, it has not exhibited anything approaching the strawman behavior you are claiming is required for internal consistency.
In terms of actual theology, your claim appears flatly incompatible with the 26th chapter of Leviticus, as well as many, many, many other passages. You do not actually know what you are talking about even a little. You are hostile toward jews and you want everyone else to be more hostile toward jews; you say whatever you think will nudge those listening in the direction of greater hostility.
I meant in the sense that I'm neither a lower class Indonesian or a lower class white British man so I don't have a direct dog in the race.
One notes that it is possible to be interested in axes of identity other than class, and judging by your comment history it seems clear that you pretty clearly adhere to such interests, between a thin veneer of self-interested line-go-up markets cheerleading.
No reason why Amelia in the UK who has a job making and serving mediocre coffee should get paid any more than Mehmet making and serving mediocre coffee in Ankara.
Is Indonesia as wealthy per-capita as the UK? Is the wealth of Indonesia roughly equivalent in terms of concentration within the population? That would at least potentially be two reasons why Amelia should be paid more than Mehmet.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
More importantly, though, because even among the people who do favor a more technocratic approach, almost nobody would claim that “man can be perfected (that’s not the point), and even the very few who would still believe that such an outcome is only possible far into a theoretical future.
...And yet, we very clearly have a large, cohesive population of people enthralled to vast, superhuman "processes" that were instituted for nakedly utopian goals, continue to operate in the same way they have since their foundation, and at no point changed goals. These processes observably square the circle by continuously adding epicycles between where they are and the goal, rather than admitting the original goal was unachievable and abandoning the effort. See the war on poverty and blank slate education for two notorious examples.
A commenter here once argued to me that affirmative action and other forms of anti-racist government intervention should be implemented for at least three centuries before we could really draw conclusions on whether they worked or not. How does that sort of mindset differ from Utopianism specifically in the actions it produces?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I think this is a fair-enough way to divide "soldier" and "warrior", but a lot of people who are using the term and see value in the term are not using it in this way. Particularly, I think the people arguing that a "warrior ethos" is needed are arguing based on something pretty close to the logic above, and not on occupation or social class. Likewise, it seems to me that they often argue that warrior ethos should be taught/acculturated, not merely located.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Maybe the problem is your conception of the term?
What I observe in this thread:
A - "people wanting a 'Warrior Ethos' is stupid. Why would people want it? Warriors are violent and dangerous, we want less of them."
B - "Because Warrior Ethos is not primarily about being violent and dangerous. It's a term for an approach to handling unbounded chaos that is generally useful in all manners of high-stakes, high-demand endeavors. War is just one of the most high-stakes, high-demand endeavors, so it's the trope-namer."
A - "If it isn't about being violent and dangerous, then warrior is a bad name for it."
See here, also.
Can anyone charitably explain this "warrior" obsession?
My civilian understanding:
"Soldier" is centered on process, regulation, drill, standardization, War as science/industry.
"Warrior" is centered on prowess, performance, results, war as, for lack of a better term, art, an anti-inductive, chaotic process that cannot adequately be codified.
Soldiers typically generate success by consistently stacking small advantages and snowballing them into an insurmountable advantage.
Soldiers typically generate failure by following the process in situations where the process is a bad fit, or at their worst following a process that is just straightforwardly bad.
Warriors typically generate failure by taking high-risk gambles and losing, and at their worst doing so with "high risk gambles" that are just straightforwardly a bad idea that process would have warned them against taking.
Warriors typically generate success by disrupting the enemy's process, creating out-of-context problems and then capitalizing on the enemy's failure to efficiently manage them.
Look at the American Military over the last few decades, both how it fights and how it sustains itself. Would you say that its biggest problems are coming from following process too loosely, or too tightly? With the caveat that the problem is very complicated, I'd argue the latter. The Navy's current woes seem pretty clearly to arise from a widening gap between process and reality. The Afghanistan/GWOT failure seems pretty clearly to have been a process failure through and through. Failure to anticipate and keep in step with the drone revolution seems to have likewise been a process failure.
This shows up in other fields as well. Take NASA and SpaceX. Which is the better performer? Which fits more easily into "Warrior", and which into "Soldier"?
The people obsessed with "warriors" think we have too much process, past diminishing returns and into straightforward loss, and we need more performance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
The professionals are roughly equivalent to the Klan in its heyday, and the tourists are roughly equivalent to the populations the Klan emerged from and operated within.
Insurgency seems a reasonable description.
If you disagree with his central thesis, then I welcome actual arguments.
Here you go. My children's bedtime interrupted my furious attempts to edit them into the original post. I left them out of the initial post because I thought they were honestly too obvious to need elaboration, but that's never a good bet.
I don't think "Hard Times Make Strong Men" has to be parsed as "Hard Times Make Strong Men 100% of the time", but given the rest of the meme it should at least mean "Hard Times Make Strong Men more often than good times."
I think the more accurate formulation would be "Hard times make strong men inevitable. Good times make weak men inevitable." This formulation not only seems obviously consonant with my understanding of history, but the reasons why it should be so likewise seem obvious: Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength. By contrast, bad times impose many consequences on weakness, and often provide an abundance of free energy through which strength might be exercised, not least the general population's desire to organize their collective power and resources to change things for the better.
But of course, this requires us to take the terms "strong" and "weak", "good" and "bad" seriously. Likewise words like "decadence", which Devereaux seems to believe contain no semantic content of significance, and so declines to even engage with in any meaningful fashion.
If you agree that states usually beat non-states, and rich states usually beat poor states (as you seem to suggest with "not as the expected result") then you agree with the core factual claim of the Fremen Mirage series.
I think a culture can build an effective military force, such that they win a disproportionate number of their engagements, not merely through technocratic KPIs (amount of money available, population size, etc), but through specific cultural features and norms. I think such a culture can then replace those cultural features and norms with a new set, and as a consequence begin to lose a disproportionate number of their engagements, even though it now has more money, more population, and a greater share generally of the technocratic KPIs than it did when it was winning. Further, I think this signal is strong enough that predictions can be made in advance.
By contrast, it seems to me that Devereaux aims to convince his readers that military affairs are largely deterministic, with a layer of luck on top. Therefore, empires are born because they got a streak of good RNG hits, and Empires die because they got a streak of bad RNG hits, and human decisions are not really terribly decisive either way.
In which case what is it that "Hard Times Make Strong Men" means that you find both true and interesting? "Hard Times sometimes Make Strong Men, even if that isn't the way to bet" is trivially true and uninteresting.
"Hard Times make strong men, strong men make good times" is interesting because it provides a firm historical basis for hope. The problems we face are not inevitable, insurmountable. Things can change. Often the hardships we face can shape us to better change them.
"Good times makes weak men, weak men make hard times" is interesting because it warns us that there is no permanent victory, that good times are not stable, that preserving and extending them requires effort and constant vigilance. And this is not a general warning: the hazard is specified, so it can be recognized in advance and action can be taken accordingly.
You claim that Devereaux is (a) wrong and (b) obfuscating this. You have not stated a concrete point where you disagree with him, or a false belief you think he is trying to insinuate. I think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.
Here are two paragraphs:
Now, the way this trope, and its contrast between ‘civilized’, ‘soft’ people and the ‘uncivilized’ ‘hard’ Fremen is deployed is often (as we’ll see) pretty crude. A people – say the Greeks – may be the hard Fremen one moment (fighting Persia) and the ‘soft’ people the next (against Rome or Macedon).
A brief search confirms that this "moment" covers two centuries, and the entire point of the meme is that cultures change over time. It's possible that there's a valid argument to be made here, but he's pretty clearly chosen not to make it.
But we may outline some of the ‘virtues’ of the ‘hard men’ sort of Fremen are supposed to have generally. They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized).
Is self-sufficiency and flexibility a bad thing? Is there such a thing as overspecialization or excessive complexity as legible cultural problems? Are the average men in societies, populations, or tribes more or less capable of becoming soldiers en masse, due to the culture they've been shaped by? Does this problem show up even from the perspective of men who appear to, in fact, be quite strong? Fuck that noise, questions are for dweebs! Let's round it to "all men in the society are warriors", that sounds way less complicated.
Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes. Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents.
"Literate". Why portray "literate" and "intellectually decadent" as synonyms? Could it be that arguing against "intellectual decadence" is a hell of a lot harder than arguing for the merits of literacy, and so he finds it most convenient to substitute the former for the later? Can we wait two more sentences to find out?
The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’ conditions, associated with complex societies, wealth and book-reading weenies (read: literacy) make for morally inferior people who are consequently worse at fighting. Because we all know that moral purity makes you better at fighting, right? (My non-existent editor would like me to make clear that I am being sarcastic here, and it is extraordinarily obvious that moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success.)
...And there's your answer.
"moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success". What a disgusting example of intellectual cowardice.
Nothing always leads to battlefield success, so it's good to see that he's really putting himself out there with the bold claims.
And yet, character, of both leaders and followers, very obviously matters immensely in leadership, and leadership matters immensely in all domains of large-scale human conflict. I am pretty sure that "moral purity", in the sense that he very clearly is framing the term, would not be a very good way of describing the phenomenon, which is why I find his framing choices so execrable. But in actual fact it is obvious that Morale and Morals/virtue/character are pretty clearly linked, and that even central examples of Moral Purity in the sense he frames it have in fact been used historically to build winning armies. Discipline is incredibly important in all forms of military affairs. Commitment. Loyalty. Determination. "The moral is to the physical as three to one." We know what amoral armies look like; there is a reason people don't want to rely on them. And yet, even that last link opens up a whole vista on how morality or its absence change war, how morals/character/virtue cannot be done without, the lengths leaders must go to in generating makeshift analogues in their absence, all in the context of a problem that, by itself, greatly illustrates the reality of decadence as a sociopolitical force.
More recently, we have the truism that "no one is going to fight a war on behalf of an economic zone." While we haven't tested this principle hard yet, I know which way I'd bet.
think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.
I reiterate: This is propaganda, and worse it is stupid propaganda. You should not trust him to describe or diagnose "cults" of any description, and you should re-evaluate whatever lessons you have drawn from his writings.
Very briefly, central examples of the "Hard Times Make Strong Men" thesis do not claim that non-states usually beat states, or that poorer states generally beat richer ones. Devereaux is attempting to frame the thesis this way because if he can bake absurdity into his audience's understanding of the argument, then it's all over but the sneering, which is pretty clearly what he's primarily interested in doing.
"Hard Times Make Strong Men" exists as a thesis because we can directly observe that rich, powerful states often actually do decline, that states are defeated by non-states, and rich states are beat by poor states. Not all the time, not as the expected result, but often enough that very clearly wealth, population, or whatever other technocratically legible KPI one prefers are not deterministic. Why is this? What causes upsets? What causes the mighty to decline? What injects mortality into the putatively super-mortal? This is a fascinating question, but Devereaux appears mainly interested in cauterizing such interest in anyone he can, and is enthusiastically willing to employ the argumentative dark arts in doing so.
Here are two paragraphs:
Now, the way this trope, and its contrast between ‘civilized’, ‘soft’ people and the ‘uncivilized’ ‘hard’ Fremen is deployed is often (as we’ll see) pretty crude. A people – say the Greeks – may be the hard Fremen one moment (fighting Persia) and the ‘soft’ people the next (against Rome or Macedon). But we may outline some of the ‘virtues’ of the ‘hard men’ sort of Fremen are supposed to have generally. They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized).
Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes. Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents. The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’ conditions, associated with complex societies, wealth and book-reading weenies (read: literacy) make for morally inferior people who are consequently worse at fighting. Because we all know that moral purity makes you better at fighting, right? (My non-existent editor would like me to make clear that I am being sarcastic here, and it is extraordinarily obvious that moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success.)
...This is propaganda. The person writing it likes you stupid. To the extent that you not of my tribe, the more you listen to him, the better for me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I remember his "fremen mirage" series, and being left with the strong impression that he was playing word games in an attempt to obfuscate a fundamental reality he found unpalatable. Particularly, his four-part definition in the beginning of the first part more-or-less immediately convinced me that he was not operating in good faith.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
The problem with most conversations of this sort is that memory exists.
The Jan 6th protestors were also "hilariously incompetent", to the point that they forgot to bring any weapons at all. And yet, this apparent incompetence somehow failed to overshadow "what they were actually trying to do."
It's who, whom. We observably take Red violence seriously, even when it is hypothetical. We observably do not take Blue violence seriously, even (especially?) when there are multiple bodies. This is not an accident. This is the essence of Tribalism.
Normal white Midwesterners don't get his will to power ideology.
Also their women do not like him and he doesn't seem to actually like white women. Really hampering his aspirations to make white children. So he pivots to rationalizing how having kids with Hispanics is okay.
More power to him on that front, but this part:
Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of white people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their podunk hometown. My experiences taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my volk in any meaningful sense.
They have no destiny except under the caligae.
...Is kind of indicative of why this guy and people like him are not the future of Red Tribe.
He's a Blue. His values are Blue to the core. It doesn't matter if he were Von Neumann reborn; he doesn't want what we want, he isn't interested in our values and so he's never going to be on our side in any meaningful way. If he were supremely competent, then he'd be dangerous; as is, he appears mainly to be an instructive, cautionary example.
You did not believe Trump could win a second term, and argued vociferously that all was lost years ago. Is all more, less, or about the same lost as it was in 2024?
In any case, you have already concluded that I am a liar, and I have already concluded that you are incapable of being anything other than tiresome or dangerous, and that I prefer you tiresome.
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