FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Non-law-based norms is the substance from which laws emerge. you can't say "anything not illegal should be permitted", because not permitting things that aren't illegal is how things get to be illegal in the first place.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
A liberal's answer - this liberal's answer, for example - would be that, quite the opposite, the personal becomes political because society ie the body politic tries to screw around with people's personal lives.
This framing would make sense if you could define a "personal life" that politics should not screw with. But in fact, no such definition exists, any more than there exists a rigorous definition of "harm" or, in our context, "screwing". The appearance of such definitions is a product of values-coherence, of cultural homogeneity.
In fact, I rather think that for the personal not to be political, you would need a maximally liberated society, a society where the very idea of taking issue with another citizen's behavior would seem nonsensical, if that behavior is not literally criminal.
I think you are correct that this is indeed the Liberal perspective. I think it should be obvious to you and all others why this perspective is self-destructive. Behavior being criminal requires laws. How do those laws get written if you can't imagine objecting to someone else's behavior unless it's already against the law?
Human coexistence requires significant constraint of individual desires and will. Humans generally cannot "live secure in the knowledge that their life is their own"; the closest approach to this happy state is to get them to accept the constraints other humans place on them as normal and not really constraints at all, and the only way that happens is values-coherence.
I am not a full-on anarchist or libertarian in terms of the political systems that I think can produce good outcomes in the long term, but I do believe that "people can do what they want forever" is an essential component of the Good, and that government is good largely insofar as it gets us closer to that ideal (with the obvious epicycles about the government being empowered to infringe on freedoms in the interest of collective survival, as people need to be alive to be able to do what they want).
Maybe founding society on a goal that is obviously impossible to achieve or even closely approach is a bad idea? Values-diverse humans are going to want a lot of things that interfere with other humans against their will, and are going to have no way to calculate or enforce which infringements are minimal and which are unacceptable. Politics becomes a weapon, not a common tool, and then the whole thing burns down. You are currently watching this happen.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20hr ago
Because admitting they are up for debate means letting opponents speak and granting them legitimacy. If you can preemptively shut down the debate by declaring any other position beyond the pale, you win.
This is correct, but I've been arguing for some time that this isn't necessarily even bad behavior, because endlessly negotiating every facet of your existence with the entire rest of your society is antithetical to anything resembling a peaceful, prosperous existence. Such an existence depends on the personal not being political, and the way that happens is exactly by the formation of "common decency", of a set of norms and rules and behaviors that people conform to without significant argument or complaint, with those who cannot conform being ostracized.
We have to do this, but having done it, we forgot why it was necessary, and so burned down all the mechanisms required, and are now sort of rebuilding them badly, ad-hoc, and in a values-diverse environment they aren't made for.
I assume you are familiar with the phrase "with great power comes great responsibility." Do you recognize that it runs the other way as well? With great responsibility, comes great power? If so, what's the difference between power and dominance? If not, why not?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I have no opinion on the quality control inspectors on the Artemis program in particular, but I would note that we have seen strong DEI pushes that trade off directly against high-stakes safety institutions like air traffic controllers and pilot training, along with pretty much every field in the whole country. This is not something I'd be super confident in asserting obviously wouldn't happen, especially given the degree to which space programs are very clearly run off politics rather than engineering.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
To be clear, we are discussing a case where what they called up was used to excellent effect for three decades, and only now begins to turn on them when the entire country is coming apart at the seams.
It's not obvious from a pure power analysis perspective that they made the wrong play here. At least wait until there's some actual convictions, eh?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
You should not treat your political opponents as a homogenous group made of their most distasteful members
You should recognize when thoughts, positions, attitudes or memes become sufficiently widespread within a group to be normalized, such that it starts showing up in your day-to-day interactions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
While it was a bad shoot the current theory is his gun fired on its own.
To my knowledge, the evidence that his gun fired on its own consists of:
- His pistol being a SIG 320, which has a controversial reputation for uncommanded discharges
- Some people thinking they see the slide move in a handful of frames in a very grainy video.
From what I've seen, the latter point is very shaky, and is very pointedly not a claim the agency has made, to my knowledge. Digital video of this sort is not good at capturing gun mechanics at long range, poor lighting and in a confused environment. This same problem came up with the Mangioni shooting when people claimed the gun was a station-six or "welrod", as opposed to a semi-auto malfunctioning because it wasn't set up to work with a suppressor properly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Mu.
Human rules cannot constrain human will. This does not mean that rules are useless. It does mean that they are not a general solution to the problem of human evil. You appear to be doing an absolutely fantastic job of demonstrating this reality with your arguments, so my congratulations on that. I will certainly be quoting your arguments in the future.
Logic is not a human rule. If you are appealing to it, you must be bound by it. I believe I am doing a fairly good job of being bound by logic.
If the above is not a satisfactory answer, I invite you to elaborate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I can definitely say that any LE shooting someone who is restrained and is not pointing a gun at someone is outside of it is outside of it.
What about law enforcement shooting someone who is not pointing a gun and who they are not even attempting to restrain?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
To a first approximation, a supermajority of all journalists and editors, a supermajority of newspapers and TV news stations, A supermajority of the people and companies making "professional" books, music, movies, TV shows, video games, a supermajority of celebrities...
Right-wing media consists primarily of podcasts, youtube channels and streamers, and as of a couple of years ago nation-state actors were openly coordinating blanket censorship against them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
A while back, I would have said there wasn't one; small arms technology arguably peaked at the ar-15. In terms of form factor and general operation, I'd say that's still roughly the correct answer. Lately though, we're seeing more and more experiments with extremely high chamber-pressure cartridges and special bullet constructions that allow significant increases in performance, particularly against hard armor. I'm skeptical whether that increase is significant enough to represent the sort of improvement one sees between the 30s and 60s, but if you're looking for edge in terms of weapons, that'd probably be your best bet.
More generally, drones are legitimately revolutionary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
...All responses coming to mind sound too much like glazing. I guess I'll say that I think that's extremely cool, and leave it at that.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
By all accounts "torture prison" is a perfectly reasonable way to describe CECOT, "concentration camp" is another word one could use and only be exaggerating a little.
what specific features of CECOT that distinguish it as a torture prison?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
the harder and more massive a projectile is, the worse the risk of collateral damage. Hard projectiles retain more energy from a penetration or deflection, larger projectiles have more energy.
Shotguns fire shot, ie lots of small, soft projectiles. These have low individual energy and are bad at retaining the energy they do have through an impact. Dedicated breaching rounds generally use something like compressed lead dust to greatly minimize the chance of a ricochet, but even with buckshot the danger is much, much lower than that presented by an active shooter.
The short version is that any reasonable risk assessment would have held that breaching the door was a good idea, even if they didn't have dedicated breaching rounds on-hand.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
: individualism, freedom (especially speech), plus a certain "moral affinity for the strong".
I do not recognize a shared understanding of "freedom" or "free speech". European governments have expended considerable effort to curtail both my freedoms generally and especially my ability to speak. They have publicly discussed why doing so is a priority to them and strategized on how to do it better.
You: have a pathological hatred of the blue tribe, which you transfer onto europeans.
Hatred, certainly. Sinful, certainly. Pathological... Less so.
You are supporting a tribe that does not believe I should have a career or even a job. You are supporting a tribe that wants to destroy the economies of any place where legible concentrations of people like me live. That openly supports mobs beating people like me in the street. That does not believe people like me deserve equal protection under the law, and has been working for decades to deny it to us. That openly celebrates the murder of people like me, and the death of children like mine.
You are supporting a tribe that has, in my view, proved itself fundamentally hostile to every facet of my existence.
This might be workable if people like me were some vanishing, abnormal minority. In the real world, there are several dozen millions of us, and we retain considerable political, economic, and physical power, and we are currently negotiating a consensus on how to use that power to handle the above problems. Electing Trump was an interim product of that negotiation, but if and when he is expended, we will make additional attempts until we perceive the problem to be solved or until we are destroyed.
You are wrong that I am attempting to provoke a civil war in my home. You are wrong that those who are attempting to provoke a civil war in my home are having their efforts "frustrated". You are certainly wrong that the end result of this process is going to be crazy people charging naked into Greenland or Vancouver.
Dase is correct that this Greenland affair is downstream of the culture war. He is incorrect that the Culture War has been won in any meaningful sense by the election of Donald Trump to a second presidential term. The richest, most powerful country in the world cannot reach consensus on what its laws mean or how to enforce them. Its population has lost any semblance of values-coherence, and increasingly considers fellow countrymen an existential threat. For the last decade, people here have been treating this all as some sort of elaborate silly-goosery, but our actual inability to reach agreement on extremely fundamental questions of basic coexistence is a very big problem for people like yourself, who have offloaded most of the practicalities of your physical security to our military. Most of you seem to be handling this problem by hoping it goes away, that this is all a weird, momentary aberration, and that we will go back to presenting congenial Blueness into the future. I do not think that is going to happen, but you pays your money and you takes your chance.
Let's just wind this thing down. I am honestly tired of explaining the value of an alliance with a bloc with a huge economy and population and very similar interests.
Why would you suppose we have very similar interests?
despite being an Americanophile through and through.
What sort of American?
I want merz and everyone to tell trump to fuck off in no uncertain terms and stop giving him face-saving exits.
There's a considerable number of Americans who would welcome this, I'd imagine.
I don't want to live in Europe. I don't want to live anywhere like Europe. I don't want where I live to become more like Europe, even marginally. I would prefer actual war against the authorities to this happening. Your entire social consensus is inimical to what I view as fundamental human rights and basic principles of liberty. We are not friends in any meaningful sense; you are allied with my tribal enemies, and will be for the foreseeable future.
Again, Carney says it best:
You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
I perceive integration with Europe one of the major sources of my subordination.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Here you go. Or perhaps that's not a "serious manner"? Do you disagree that the BBC and the social consensus it represents is deeply hostile to America's Red Tribe?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Have you ever considered that you are a little bitch?
This is not acceptable. The rest of your post is fine, but you are being deliberately inflammatory.
You have no notes either way on your moderation log. I get that you are using the insult for dramatic effect, and so I am giving you a warning. Do not post like this in the future, or you will receive a ban.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
You are welcome to reject the inevitability of extinction. You are not welcome to use your rejection of extinction to claim divine right to getting everything you want the way you want it. If you need things from other people, resources, cooperation, whatever, you have to actually negotiate for them, not declare that they do what you want or else they're damning all humanity.
I am more worried about current power allocation than I am about hypothetical hostile super intelligent AGI. Maybe I'm wrong to think that, but given that the current AI safety alliance does not see a place in the future for me and mine anyway, it doesn't seem like I've got much of a choice.
You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
This is straightforwardly true. The problem is that it runs the other way also. The political problem facing Red Tribe has been obvious for some time:
- We have to win a conflict against Blue Tribe, or we will be ruled for the foreseeable future by people who hate us.
- We have to fund our side of this conflict out of our own pockets.
- Blue Tribe funds themselves out of our tax money.
- Blue Tribe is allied with the Blue-Tribe analogues in pretty much every Euro country, most of which are also funded to a considerable degree out of our tax money.
- Those allied Blue-Tribe-analogues have already won their tribal fight in their home countries, so completely that their operations are effectively uncontested
- Those Blue-Tribe-analogues interfere directly in our domestic politics in ways that give our Blue Tribe additional considerable advantages.
- Those Blue-Tribe analogues have repeatedly and obviously broken some of the rules we care about the most, and have been openly and quite effectively coordinating to help Blue Tribe break those same rules.
As the man says, Integration became the source of our subordination. European governments have been actively cooperating with Blue Tribe to close the door on us and our values for at least the last decade. We have already been fighting them for at least the last decade. There is very little hope that this will change, and there is very little observable value in maintaining a situationship that will never, ever break to our advantage.
The multilateral institutions on which middle powers relied— the WTO, the UN, the COP—the architecture of collective problem solving — are greatly diminished.
Yeah, that's sort of the point, isn't it? Why do I want this "architecture of collective problem solving" stronger, when in fact a lot of the "collective problems" it "solves" appear to involve my tribe's continued existence?
I am not sure who's going to be American ally in WWIII now.
How about we sit WWIII out? I for one am not particularly interested in seeing the sons of my friends and family fed into a droneswarm Armageddon.
Five years ago, even two years ago, it was taken as obvious that we (meaning primarily the US) were going to fight a major war with China and/or Russia. How does the above shift the probabilities, in your estimation? Do you think the crackup of the previous Rules-Based order makes an imminent fight with China less likely or more?
The obvious problem is economics. Does this end the Dollar as reserve currency? Does this crash the global economy? Are we Americans going to get super poor forever? ...I've been thinking about writing a post, collecting some of the economic predictions made here in the runup to the 2024 election, and comparing them to what's happened since, with comparison and contrast to the economic predictions about Brexit. To boil it down, I note that the economic predictions and even current assessments seem fundamentally unreliable, that the previous order seemed obviously unsustainable, and that the risk is worth it given the current trajectory.
I do not want America to rule the world, especially not if the version of "America" that rules is a Blue Tribe that has secured itself permanent unaccountable power. Even if it were my tribe ascendent, the value seems quite limited. I do not want to be subjugated by the Chinese, but I do not want to fight a major war with them either, and my assessment is that as of a year ago, pretty much everyone in this forum considered such a war to be an obvious inevitability. And for what? I do not want my country to be poorer, but I note that our previous economic model seemed to have very obvious problems that only ever got worse, and the only solution anyone could even begin to imagine was to keep doing the same things even harder, as pressure built toward an inevitable blowout.
I wanted change. This is change. It is scary and somewhat horrifying change... but it's not obvious what the alternative was supposed to be, and what seem to me to be plausible guesses seem worse.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
All available evidence indicates that you and all your descendents will someday die no matter what anyone does. All available evidence indicates that humanity will go extinct, and that extinction being soon is a distinct possibility, again no matter what anyone does.
I am not building AI. I am pointing out that Yudkowsky's proposed solution seems both very unlikely to work and also very likely unnecessary for a whole host of reasons, and that there appears to me approximately zero reason to play along with his schemes. I am not gambling with your life, or that of your descendants. You do not get to stack theories a hundred layers high and then declare that therefore, everyone has to do what you say or be branded a villain.
I say Yudkowsky demands unaccountable power, because it is obvious that this is, in fact, exactly what he's demanding. Neither he nor you get to beg out of the entire concept of politics because you've invented a very, very scary ghost story.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
Neither Yudkowski nor yourself are the first humans to discover that "living" requires amassing unaccountable power. Time is not used well under a rock.
In any case, I hear Pascal also has a pretty good wager.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
My determination to close off the effect zone would depend on my assessment of the probabilities firstly that such a lockdown could be effected, and secondly the probabilities of apocalyptic destruction from other sources. If lockdown seems unlikely to work, and also there are numerous other, similar threats, then it seems to me I might better spend my time using the time I have well.
"Bad Things" and "Subjugation" are subjective terms.
You want humans to cooperate. Cooperation necessitates hierarchy. Hierarchy is not objectively distinguishable from "subjugation".
Even real subjugators generally do not subjugate "for no other reason than that they can". "Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth" is the typical form.
If you want the able to help the unable, the bare minimum price for that help is for the unable to obey the able. This is not an obscure fact to anyone who interacts with young children. Absent such obedience, you are just obfuscating costs, and the obfuscated costs will bring the system down one way or the other in relatively short order.
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