FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
I am going to die when leftist looters burn my family alive FC.
I have come across pictures like this, and contemplate that some day in the not-to-distant future, they could very well be my wife and children. But you are claiming certainty. Okay. What are the intermediate steps? What happens, specifically, between here and there? Make your predictions, and we can see how it goes step by step. If it doesn't go the way you're thinking, you can hopefully recognize that you are being irrational. And if it doesn't go the way I'm thinking, I can recognize that I've underestimated the threat. Either would be a positive result, no?
In the meantime... Do you live in a Blue area? If so, you should move. Do you own guns? If not, you should get them, not because they're particularly useful in a fighting-the-blues sense, but because you should have the means to protect your family. More than that you should be building skills and cultivating social networks. I worry about my family being burned alive, but not by looters, because I don't live near potential looter populations, the local authorities look favorably on armed self-defense, I have a strong social network, and my wife and I have plans to improve our position over the next few years.
Any opportunity to win and then mulch them first is worth taking, no matter how bad the odds are (I'm assuming "ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force" means no effective resistance to mop-up mulching after victory, since a random 5% is far too low to include that part)
Why? I hate Blues so much it often keeps me awake at night. But you are claiming you think they're going to kill a significant portion of the US population, and so you need to do it to them "first". Okay, how are they going to do that? What's the sequence of steps? Because we're talking about the power and water going out and the trains stopping, and also incidentally dozens of millions of your friends and neighbors dead. That means you get real poor real fast. that means crime goes through the roof and probably stays there. That means everyone's life gets fucked for the foreseeable future. If you're certain something bad enough to be worth all that is coming, you should necessarily be certain about how we get from here to there. So, how?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
You've already called me a liar and and stated that I should not be listened to. Why are you still trying to talk to me?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
If violence is your last resort, you're not prepared to use it at all.
And that's why the only possible response to someone cursing you out is a mag-dump.
You don't need to be frothing at the mouth and shooting every minute of every day, but it needs to be the goal you base all your other plans around reaching or it will never happen, just like writing a novel.
Salami slicing is an actual problem. Coordination is an actual problem, a very serious one.
Let's say a man with a pencil mustache and a dapper black suit hands you a button. You press this button, and a randomly-selected two to five percent of the US population is abruptly mulched, the trains stop running and the power and water goes out for the indefinite future. There's also a 75% chance that the American Blue Tribe ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force, and a 25% chance that the Red Tribe ceases to exist.
Do you pressing that button right now is a good idea?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr ago
...A quote from a recent conversation seems relevant.
I am pretty confident that people can't do much better with a torture regime than we've seen them do in the past. That is to say, I think the problem is pretty well bounded by irreducible limits on human agency and capacity, and I do not expect this to change in the forseeable future.
The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree. I don't think the Enlightenment revolutions of the 1800s - 1900s are repeatable, and I think the social systems that produce similar regimes are observably dying. That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia. It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society. Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.
For a long time, castles were the defining paradigm of force. When gunpowder arrived, one might argue that it should benefit castles, since it allowed faster mining and quarrying of stone with which to build them. One would be wrong.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12hr ago
But why did you ignore the other two sentences I quoted?
Because they were prefatory, and the sentence I quoted appears to be the conclusion that follows from them.
Why do you think these sentences say "we know how to solve all our problems"?
Because he doesn't seem to see that statement as an obstacle to attempting solutions to all our problems. He says institutions can never resolve all the conflicts, that Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos. And then he concludes that the Revolution should proceed anyway, endlessly, and that this is a good thing. Doesn't he?
"Limits" stop things. This "limit" stops nothing, instead it "drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom", and he seems to consider this a feature, not a bug: "it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced". "Revolution" is commonly understood to mean the seizure and exercise of power. He claims that "revolution" will never end, and that this will plausibly deliver benefits indefinitely.
I do not see how this statement cashes out in a practical limit to socialist ambition. To the extent that it proposes a limit, the limit is entirely theoretical, and it appears to explicitly claim that such a theoretical limit will and should be ignored.
That's my understanding at least; am I misinterpreting him? What am I missing?
If you want to argue linguistic precision, I'd say this falls under "problems we can't solve aren't actually problems". I don't see anything here equivalent to "we can't solve some problems, and we need to accept that and not try."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12hr ago
Why isn't that fear enough?
Because, in my assessment, it's not rational. It appears that others agree with me, Abbott and DeSantis among them, among a number of other leaders and their supporters. Defiance of Federal authority is observably being coordinated, right out in the open where you can watch it happen.
You can believe that such defiance is inevitably doomed to fail, but I disagree, and it appears others disagree as well. Very well: we've made our predictions, and the outcomes will be as they will be.
What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.
It doesn't seem to me that they're getting it, and the trend seems to be that they're getting less of it over time.
Because you will be punished if you don't?
It seems to me that their capacity for punishment is declining, and that well-chosen actions can force it further into decline.
Trump is certainly being punished. He has survived so far, and is plausibly going to win the election. If he does, they will stonewall him and continue their efforts to destroy him, and the result that matters is that the system will continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. If he does not win the election, or if they succeed in destroying him, the system will likewise continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. I do not see a route by which the establishment arm of the GOP regain authority over and support from their base, which has been in open rebellion for some years now. Abbott has not yet been punished, and neither has DeSantis. Even if Trump is destroyed, and Abbott is destroyed, and DeSantis is destroyed, someone else will step up to take their respective places, and the process will continue.
This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.
Abbott has done so before, and Biden backed down. Abbott is doing so again, and Biden is very likely to back down this time too.
There is more defiance to Federal authority now than there was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. It does not seem to me that the trend supports your interpretations or predictions.
...As for the rest, I maintain that the ultima ration is preferable to an uncontested blue tribe win, and that it favors Red Tribe. I also maintain that it would be a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale, think it should be our last resort, and do not believe that discussing it in detail is a good idea, especially in this forum. I continue to decline discussion of the ultima ratio beyond these points, and continue to be comfortable with your assumption and assertion that this means there is no substance to my argument. I invite you to dispense with the questions and simply proceed to state that I offer no explanation and thus should not be listened to. Others are free to draw their own conclusions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13hr ago
I'm trad and generally supportive of MAGA-Style socio-populism. What am I, Left?
The AuthLeft and AuthRight are defined by a belief in the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint - all members of the AuthLeft and AuthRight believe this, and furthermore members of other political ideologies don't believe it, and This belief is the most salient factor in determining identity among political ideologies
Why would any other feature of an ideology be more salient than a belief that "we have the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint"? What does it matter what you call it, or what theory you use to justify it, if that is where it cashes out?
Further, you seem to be implying that this is about labels, that Libertarians or Christians don't suffer this problem because they're Libertarians and Christians, as though it is the label that provides the immunity. People can absolutely hold this belief while calling themselves Libertarian or Christian. I can point to a lot of Libertarians and Christians that don't hold this belief, and I can point to core axioms of the two ideologies that directly contradict this belief, and thus plausibly provide some immunity from its contagion. But the question is whether or not it is present, and the labels applied are entirely superfluous to that question. Libertarians do not have a long history of governance to examine, but people who called themselves Christian have in the past and do in the present absolutely hold this belief. That is something I would dearly like to help solve, by providing strong arguments as to why they shouldn't.
You're using these idiosyncratic concepts "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight" whose applicability to broader political discussions is questionable.
I'd be interested to drill down on why you think it's questionable.
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Do you reject the idea as incoherent in and of itself?
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Do you grant that it's coherent, but don't see the connection to the examples I've provided?
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Do you see the connection in those examples, but think I'm overstating it?
The space of possible political positions is much broader than you give it credit for. I would encourage you to read some of the original works by any of the thinkers we've been discussing lately - Zizek, Lacan, Marcuse, Derrida, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and see if there's anything in there that surprises you.
I look at the history of the modern world, and I see a lot of mistakes made. I notice patterns in these mistakes, a correlation, a commonality between apparently disparate theories and ideologies, that seems to explain things that are otherwise mysterious. Why is this a bad idea?
Which makes more sense: Using the theory to understand the practice, or using the practice to understand the theory? The point of philosophy is to teach, to shape the minds of other humans, individually and collectively. The shape of the minds at the end of this process is the best measure there is of the quality of the theory, is it not? What those minds say and do is the best measure of how they have been shaped, is it not? We have three hundred years of history available to us. Why appeal straight to the sacred texts? Is that how you treat ideologies you don't have a personal sympathy for?
...Let's suppose I'm wrong. Let's suppose that I should be looking at the text. Here's a sentence out of that paragraph:
Here is the limit which drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom : it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced.
...Nothing here is surprising me. Nothing in the rest of the paragraph is surprising me. I've gone and read the chapter it's from, and I'll freely admit that I'm not confident that I understood it all, but what I think I grasped didn't surprise me. I'm entirely open to the idea that I'm totally missing his point, or that I'm falling into confirmation bias, but he seems to be advocating permanent revolution, with an assurance that This Time It Will Be Different. Am I wrong? What am I missing? How is this incompatible with "we know how to solve all our problems"?
So, who is identical with who? And who's the odd man out here?
If #2 actually is as you seem to be intending him, then #1 is the odd man out, because #2 does not actually believe the axiom that "we know how to solve all our problems is shorthand for. Free market democratic capitalism observably doesn't solve all our problems, ASIs don't exist in the present tense, and wouldn't be "we" even if they did. As you seem to intend him, #2 doesn't claim that we have the tools at hand to solve, say, racism and poverty, or indeed any other problem, doesn't claim authority to use those tools, and doesn't blame people for getting in the way of the fixes he doesn't have. All of these contradict the description I laid out.
On the other hand, if #2 is a "Libertarian" who believes nothing matters as much as solving the alignment problem, or is scheming about "pivotal acts", or believes that we should export "free market democratic capitalism" to the rest of the world at gunpoint so as to make the ASI arrive sooner and thus shorten and minimize the death-agonies of our non-utopian existence, then there's a fair argument he actually does believe that "we know how to solve all our problems", and #3 is the odd man out.
If someone actually believes the axiom I'm summarizing as "we know how to solve all our problems", they can be a lot of different things, but whatever they are is flatly incompatible with both Libertarianism and Christianity, at least as far as I understand the two concepts. The axiom is a claim that one has the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint. It is not a subtle thing.
I don't actually care whether the plan is Marxist revolution or Pivotal Acts purportedly aimed at preventing unaligned AGI; either is inimical to my values, and for the same reasons.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Forceful arguments tend to generate forceful responses.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
What profits a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his soul?
If you are already willing to embrace annihilation, I can't see why you should fear the future. Either things are going to be generally okay, or opportunities for abrupt death will only grow more plentiful.
I assume that you are here claiming that the AuthLeft and AuthRight are really "the same" in some sense, in line with your previous posts on the subject.
Yes, I am.
Admittedly though, it's not clear to me if "progressives" and "white identitarians" are the same thing as the "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight", and the arguments I outlined in the old thread may not be relevant to this new thesis. Please correct me if I'm going astray.
I consider White Identitarians are a subset of the Authoritarian Right. I'm pretty sure @BurdensomeCount isn't white, but I'm opposed to their ideological project for the same reasons I'm opposed to @WaltBismarck's ideological projects, past and present. While they are likely opposed to each other, the things that are similar between them are the things I find unacceptable. To me, they fit a single classification, because a single set of objections, a single set of values-incompatibilities, and a single set of necessary responses covers both of them. I've previously used the example of Luciano and Gambino soldiers, or Stalinists and Trotskyites, both of which are groups who obviously are "different" in many ways, but who from my perspective are classified identically as, respectively, "mafioso" and "communist".
I readily concede that other people with other values and other interests might care deeply about the distinctions I see as irrelevant, and might consider the similarities I consider paramount to be inconsequential. I can't speak for people who don't share my values, but my values are my values, and I think they are good ones, and generally more useful than the alternatives.
In any case, this is not a new thesis. It's exactly the same thesis I've argued in many previous discussions, though it's entirely possible I've communicated it poorly. Language is difficult, especially where others have not broken up the ground for you in advance, and I have a lot less time for in-depth conversation than I used to.
I responded by citing multiple substantial policy disagreements between them that were unrelated to race.
I found your citations unpersuasive, but didn't have time to get into it further and so figured it was best to let you have the last word until the next time the topic came around. I've still got both that thread and several of the linked articles up in my tab graveyard reading list.
You later claimed that the far left and far right are actually the same because they both endorse the same core philosophical commitment, specifically the commitment to the idea that "we know how to solve all our problems", presumably using Enlightenment reason or something equivalent.
I believe that "We know how to solve all our problems" is a brief, common-language encapsulation of the core thesis of a specific ideological movement, and that this ideological movement is best understood as the central example of the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment this movement did not exist, and post-Enlightenment this movement has been overwhelmingly dominant throughout subsequent history. I think this movement's axioms are both very wrong and very dangerous, and further believe that its dominance is rapidly approaching an end, for reasons directly related to how this movement was formed and how its ideology predetermines its tactics.
Isn't traditional Christianity quite opinionated on how we can solve all our problems? "For man's happiness consists essentially in his being united to the Uncreated Good, which is his last end."
Christianity's equivalent formulation would be "He will solve all our problems," with the understanding that the solution comes at the end of time and from an agency beyond ourselves. Compare the phrase "the poor you will always have with you" to the conceptual bundle represented by the declaration of a "war on poverty". One flatly states that the problem of Poverty is unsolvable under mortal conditions. The other assumes that the problem of Poverty can be defeated through coordinated human action, right now and under present conditions.
We, as in present humans and present human agency, no divine agency required or admitted, no delay to the unforeseeable future required or admitted.
Know How To, as in the knowledge we already have or can immediately gain is sufficient to our objectives. The Enlightenment does not claim that problems might be solvable with a few thousand years more of study, it always claims that the Revolution can begin immediately. If circumstances force an admission that solutions cannot be achieved immediately, then they are the fabled Ten Years Away, or at most a generation. This frequently resulted in solutions being Ten Years Away for a century or more, without apparent concern on the part of the Enlightened.
Solve, the objective. Not ameliorate, not reduce somewhat, but render to the past-tense in their entirety. Again, unfortunate realities can soften this rhetoric by introducing intermediate steps, but these steps are never presented or accepted as sufficient in themselves; the total, one might say final solution remains paramount.
All, as in not some, not most, but a fully universal claim.
Our Problems, again a universal claim. Everything humans consider a capital-P Problem. War, disease, poverty, hunger, crime, hatred, inequalilty, envy, fear, pain, even in some cases death. No problem is admitted to be insurmountable. Note that this does not preclude selective redefinition as "good, actually" (mass murder, mass torture and enslavement, assorted horrors committed against the outgroup), or simply ignoring something as not actually being a problem (human mortality), as is convinient.
This is the Enlightenment axiom. Progressives are called that because they believe that we are Progressing from a state of unsolved problems to a state of solved problems, and they believe this because they have adopted the axiom I have just described. The point of the Orwell passage in our previous discussion was to show how that perspective projects out into thought and language: the bedrock belief in our fundamental control over the world we find ourselves in. Prior to the conversation with Hlynka, I was thinking in terms of plans and payout matrices, looking for a solution to the problem. Hlynka reminded me that there is no solution, that there is no plan, that we are not in control of the world; all we control is ourselves; we make our choices and live with the consequences.
And the corollary to this axiom is likewise quite simple: "If a problem isn't getting solved, then it's because someone is in the way." and from that corollary, Progressivism's danger unfolds.
But I argued that there are leftists (communists, even) who deny this axiom.
Did you? From the thread:
Zizek has transitioned over the years towards a position where he treats Marxism as more of a regulative ideal to strive for, rather than a single defined end state. McGowan critiques the traditional Marxist conception of a utopian social order free of contradictions because it fails to account for the lessons of Freud and Lacan about the fundamentally self-destructive nature of the human psyche. He describes his position as one of "permanent revolution"...
I am not familiar with either Zizek or McGowen, but the description you provide explains why they don't buy into Marxian Utopianism, not why they aren't adhering to "We know how to solve all our problems." Advocating for "Permanent Revolution" certainly doesn't sound incompatible with the core axiom described above. Do they believe that our present society could be vastly improved through a proper re-ordering of society? Do they believe that poverty, mental illness, crime and so on are essentially ills that our society has chosen to inflict on the less fortunate? Do they believe we might choose otherwise?
But if they have in fact abandoned the core axiom, if in fact they don't believe in Progress toward a Brighter Future, then I'd say they've left the Enlightenment and are doing their own thing. I would also argue that they're no longer a central example of a Marxist, whatever they choose to call themselves. For a similar example, consider Scientology: to me, the most salient feature of Scientology is its hierarchical nature, designed explicitly to crush and control individual members. Scientology splinter groups that have broken from that hierarchy but continue to believe the lore and perform the basic rituals together still call themselves Scientologists, but I can continue to object to "Scientology" as a group while considering them irrelevant to the discussion. In the same way, I don't actually care if someone wants to call themselves a "Marxist"; it's a perennially-fashionable label, as appalling as that is. What I care about is whether they believe, as Marx and all the central examples of Marxists very evidently did, that "we know how to solve all our problems."
If a Marxist thinks like this, is he no longer a Marxist? Well, he obviously doesn't become a traditional Red.
They don't have to be a traditional Red to no longer be an Adherent to the Enlightenment; there are other things in the world. These two are especially relevant to me because I am a Red and believe Redness is correct about most questions, and because the Enlightenment is dominant. Absent an adherence to the Enlightenment axiom, though, why should I be concerned about a pair of bespoke academic theorists? What impact have they had on the actual world?
Do you think that white identitarians think they "know how to solve all our problems"?
It certainly seems so to me.
I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich and anyone who supports me in this battle is a fellow-fighter for a unique spiritual—I would say divine—creation...
In the Midwest I encountered a different kind of white person that honestly seemed quasi-Asian to me. They had no will to power. They were not Romans. They seemed more like the Chinese of the Ming era, or like modern Europeans. But there wasn’t a Faustian spirit to be found anywhere... ...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.
Putting it all together it’s quite clear, both from the high level outside view, as well as the empirical evidence of where people choose to go if they are allowed to, that even though the rulers of a society may not be deontologically acting in particularly nice ways, and that there is a subgroup which is doing worse than they would otherwise be doing if the rulers would “just change their behavior” and allow them more say in how the place is run, the choice in reality is often not “nasty” rulers vs “nice” rulers, but rather “nasty” rulers vs even nastier alternative, and in that case the net change in sum total welfare of those “oppressed” by these rulers may well be more positive than every other plausible world, and so the “nasty” rulers are good for humanity as a whole and should be seen as such.
No one who thinks this way can ever be my ally, and I can never be on theirs. Distance great enough to ensure mutual ignorance is the best that can be hoped for.
Things can be derived from the same source and still be different. Humans and apes are descended from a common ancestor, but they're not "the same" in any meaningful sense.
True enough. In one sense, it's obvious that there is no objective measure of similarity and difference; Hitler was composed of different cells at any given minute of his life, after all, and both Hitler and Lincoln were adult human males. By "the same", as regards to ideologies, I mean that the features relevant to me are isomorphic, that identical analysis, objections, predictions and responses are generally applicable across the proposed set. That seems like a reasonable definition to me. I don't think my definition of the Enlightenment axiom is esoteric, and I think it has strong explanatory and predictive power, and is thus generally useful even for people who do not share my worldview. It's possible that I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
That's all I have time for. Considerably more than I had time for, actually. I'll have to leave it here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Almost everything we think and do in the modern world has at least some of its roots in the Enlightenment.
A lot of what we think and do has some of its roots in the Enlightenment. There are notable exceptions, a lot of those exceptions cluster in thought-space, and they form the foundation of Red Tribe.
The United States itself is a product of the Enlightenment (founded by Enlightenment thinkers etc.) and he was a super patriotic Red Tribe American.
America (together with Britian and their progeny) appears to me to be a clear outlier in the range of Enlightenment societies, throughout the entire history of the Enlightenment from its founding till now. It is nonetheless true that America has much of its roots in the Enlightenment, though, and I would argue that is why America is doomed. We didn't get enough of the Enlightenment to wreck us on the spot, but we got more than enough for the social equivalent of cancer, which we are now dying of.
Taking his arguments seriously we could also accuse him of all kinds of things that he would disagree with and doesn't believe in because of tenuous links.
In the first place, he is not here to defend himself, so it seems rather unsporting. But I am here, I am better at maintaining decorum than he was, and I'm willing to defend most of his arguments or make similar ones of my own. If you think taking my arguments seriously leads to absurd results, feel free to elaborate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle, that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement, and that their conflict with each other is fundamentally an example of the narcissism of small differences. To the extent that I understood his arguments, he also appeared to be correct about Hobbes vs Rosseau.
If the US government issues visas for a hundred million inhabitants of the third world to come to the US, Texas can’t do anything about it other than secede.
Texas can coordinate defiance to federal authority without pursuing secession. Federal authority is a norm, not an immutable law of the universe, and norms can go away over time. Here, defiance by Red Tribe provides the other half of the back-and-forth wrenching that will tear this norm out of its cultural foundations. The first half of the wrenching has been amply supplied by Blues for decades to any exercise of Federal authority by Reds. If Trump wins, we're absolutely going to see more broad-spectrum "resistance". If Abbott and DeSantis continue on their current trajectory, then we'll see more Broad spectrum resistance from Reds as well. Keep that up, and it's entirely possible that Federal authority loses all credibility, and the existing system simply dies. That's a better outcome than most we could ask for, and requires no battles or redrawing of borders.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Well, no one was going to look at the actual rule, anyway.
I certainly wasn't going to, because I assumed this is what it would look like, and it appears I was correct. Mandatory gender identity affirmation for elementary kids. Denial of gender identity affirmation technically possible at older ages, provided that one class of Blue partisans wants to deny it, and a second class of Blue partisans seconds their motion.
Given that it's a federal rule and is going to be immediately complied with in all Blue areas, how often do you expect those Blue areas to conclude that "sex-related criteria that limit participation of some transgender students" will actually be implemented, much less approved of by federal authorities?
Why do you think this is a reasonable rule? Why do you think using it to coordinate Red Tribe defiance is a bad idea?
Be nice, until you can coordinate meanness. Abbott appears to be coordinating meanness.
From a Red Tribe perspective, there is no rational reason beyond naked fear to respect or maintain federal authority. Nullification is indeed on the horizon, it's just the one behind us, given that we're certainly two and perhaps as many as five generations past the point where Federal authority could plausibly be claimed to operate according to well-defined and well-respected rules. We Reds already know that laws we pass at the Federal level aren't real laws, that our Supreme Court victories don't count, that it isn't actual democracy when we win elections, that we do not enjoy meaningful rule of law. We know the existing system has no intention of cooperating with us at any level. Our situation is a conflict, not a mistake.
We won on immigration law, and our laws were ignored. Blue Tribe spent decades actively facilitated the illegal immigration of dozens of millions of people from the poorest regions of the world, and they did it while explicitly celebrating the thesis that this would give them an insurmountable and irreversible advantage politically. It seems pretty clear that they have in fact derived a very significant and irreversible political advantage from this tactic. Blues look at this as a fiat accompli, but why respect a system that doesn't respect you? @TracingWoodgrains points out that all the establishment institutions are solidly against Red Tribe. Given that reality, why continue to support and maintain those institutions? Because we need them to keep society running? Have you seen society?
The correct move is to withdraw the consent of the governed, and make them fight for every step. Impose costs anywhere and everywhere. Impose friction. Deny them freedom of action at every possible point. Contest every issue under every theory imaginable, and when those run out, think up new ones. Never concede their legitimacy, never grant them authority, never cooperate. When they push back, escalate, and when they push back on that, escalate again. Attack their institutions and organizations. Locate, isolate and persecute their partisans. Engage in economic and legislative warfare. All this has been done to us; tit-for-tat is the correct strategy given the state of play. The Progressive Coalition is not a stable entity, and it is already suffering severe policy starvation. It does not appear to have unlimited state capacity to spare. It is entirely possible that we can grind them down to the point that the social structures they're leaning on simply collapse, and their project of cultural imperialism dies of exhaustion, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions. Formal secession is not necessary, much less the severing of economic ties or serious breach of the peace, only a destruction of the mechanisms of centralized power.
And if we are not so fortunate as to get the happy end, all the efforts put into this strategy pay dividends at the subsequent levels of escalation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
We can only fight on in his name, because he was in fact right.
Again, you don't choose to accept it or not. You just do. Or at least I do. So possible inferential distance here.
There's definately significant inferential distance here. I have flat-out, explicitly, in-a specific-moment decided to change my beliefs twice: once to stop believing in God, and then about a decade later, to resume believing in God. In both cases, the choice was made for purely willful reasons, because I wanted to, not because of any conviction or certainty. In both cases the decision was made against a backdrop of personal crisis; the first time, I perceived myself to be a terrible Christian and this made me miserable, so I decided to just stop believing in it any more. Ten years and a great deal of drama and personal ruin later, I concluded that not believing in God hadn't actually made me any less miserable, and if I was going to be miserable either way I'd rather be miserable with God than without him, and so decided to begin believing again. Life has been much better since.
I didn't choose to not believe in God. One day I did and the next I did not. Suddenly all the contradictions and holes loomed large.
I've had this exact experience going both directions. When I decided not to believe any more, I have a strong memory of watching all the valences flip, and the same happened the other way when I decided to believe again. In both cases, it was absurdly obvious how good the new arguments were, and how ridiculous all my old commitments had been. It's definately not an experience one forgets.
More generally, thought, I observe that most of my belief-choices aren't a snap decision, but rather a process. There's one political topic in particular that I had very, very strong feelings, opinions, values, etc about. Because I cared a lot about it, I consumed a lot of news and analysis about the topic. After some years of this, I did some self-reflection, and noted that this topic appeared to be a self-licking ice cream cone: I cared about it because I was constantly reading news about it, and I was constantly reading news about it because I cared about it, but in fact none of the news was ever actually surprising, just endless repetitions of the same basic themes over and over ad nauseum. Consuming content on this topic was pointless, and caring about it had long-since become pointless emotional masturbation. So I took a lot of my cached thoughts and feelings about the subject, made a conscious decision to label them "compromised", decided that I would no longer have an opinion on the topic, stopped consuming all content on the subject, and pre-committed to no longer grant emotional valiance to any further material on the subject I was exposed to. This did not make the strong feelings, opinions, values and so on go away on the spot, but any time they popped up, I did my best to trample them right down again, and over the next few years, the feelings, opinions, values and so on shifted quite significantly.
Deciding to believe in God didn't make me Christian on the spot, and my current faith has been constructed by a large number of decisions of how to spend my time and attention, who I talk to and about what, whose opinions I give weight to, and so on. In the aggregate, these choices massively shape how I experience life and how I think about those experiences, and they have led to very significant changes in values, desires, and even personality over time. And to me, the connection between willful choice and results is obvious.
I've seen this a fair bit in my marriage, and now that I'm a father. I love my wife; she's by far the best thing that's ever happened to me, hands down, not even close. I am confident that the case for her excellence could be made objectively, but I don't actually care: things happen, and sometimes I get annoyed or frustrated with her, and when that happens I actively work to grant that frustration and annoyance as little space in my mind as possible. My goal is to love her more perfectly, and I make an effort to actively encourage thoughts and behaviors conducive to this goal, and actively prune thoughts and behaviors that impede this goal. Likewise with my children; I may not be able to control my emotional reactions to a situation, but I can certainly control how I feed or starve those reactions, allowing or denying them self-reinforcement.
Now maybe somewhere in my subconscious evidence was being weighed but I don't seem to have access to that process.
Not only evidence, but status, competing desires, and a variety of other motives. Maybe it's a genuine difference in how our brains work, or maybe it's a skill you didn't learn, or an illusion I've bought into, but...
Have you ever lied to yourself? Like, you think "I want to do this thing, but it's bad and I shouldn't." and then you think "I'm going to anyway", and then you think something that isn't really words, but more a deliberate pointing of your consciousness in some direction other than "I have just decided to do something bad." If you do it right, the very real moment of decision doesn't really enter long-term memory, and in retrospect you doing the bad thing just sort of... happens. It's the internal monologue version of passive voice, and if you make a habit of it the moment of choice gets smaller and smaller until it seems to vanish completely, and you get a reflexive habit. From experience, it seems pretty easy to just not look too hard at that process, or at a lot of other processes within the mind, and average it all out to "things just happen, I don't know how."
I'm pretty skeptical that my own introspection is unusually strong; it might be typical-minding, but my guess is that most peoples' brains work pretty much like mine, one way or another.
...from your previous comment:
I might also go so far as to say that almost by very definition beliefs cannot be under our conscious control. I cannot choose to believe in God, and I should know because I spent a lot of time trying so that I would fit in. I just could not do it, no matter how I tried.
Dump your entire current social network, and surround yourself exclusively with Christians. Actively cultivate deep, meaningful relationships with them. Adopt the axiom that Christianity is correct, and apparent incorrectness is a problem with your perspective or assessment. Consume high-quality Christian arguments, actively work to adopt Christian perspectives, seek status from fellow Christians, focus on all of Christianity's good points and on all of non-Christianity's worst features. Actively work to contemplate your life and experiences through a Christian lens, and actively work to develop an understanding of Christianity that fits with your understanding of life and the world. Do this all day every day for several years, and see what happens. My guess is that if you did so, at the end of those years you'd be a whole lot more Christian than you are now. Do you think otherwise?
...And of course, you could swap Christianity out for Hinduism or Veganism or Objectivism or Communism or any other coherent worldview/value set. Those feelings about what is true and what isn't are totally real, but given that we observe them changing, and given that we can observe them being influenced by things like media consumption and social status, how they change over time can't be all that great a mystery, can they?
Most people aren't rational from what I can tell, and what we believe isn't either. We build our beliefs off what feels true, not from rationally evaluating them.
I have observed my own feelings of what is true shifting significantly based on media consumption and social desirability, among other influences.
Why do people when weighing evidence weigh some more and discard some or going looking for more? So that the evidence supports the position they already hold, the position they already believed, before they started examining it "objectively". And the same for axioms, they pick those which support their pre-existing conclusion
If people have no control and beliefs simply self-reinforce, how do people change their minds about a thing? More generally, have you not observed yourself choosing between available reactions to a disruptive event? Have you not observed yourself choosing to adopt one attitude over another in response to a given situation?
Which is why people can hold beliefs that are contradictory, because the critical thought is downstream of belief.
Indeed it is, but that would not prevent the belief from being downstream of the will, would it?
They waffle, they prevaricate, they deflect. What they don't do generally is willfully decide they are wrong and change their beliefs.
My prediction isn't that people, when confronted by an opposing argument, decide to change their mind and adopt their opposite's position. My argument is that people have considerable control over the trajectory of their minds over the long-term, and they steer that trajectory through choices, some acute, some chronic, through exercise of their own will, decided by their own internal deliberations and competing desires and values. Those desires and values they choose to feed grow stronger, those they starve grow weaker, and through this process their mind changes as a consequence of their choices. How could it be otherwise?
I think you are right they are not driven by evidence, but I have never ever in my life made a willing act of choice in my beliefs.
I think you have. Consider the following:
When someone presents you with a belief, you can choose to either accept or reject it uncritically. Either is a conscious act of the will.
If you choose not to do either, you can instead inspect the proposed belief critically. This involves comparing it to the evidence available to you. The consensus model is that you collect the available evidence for and against the belief, weigh the two groups against each other objectively, and allow yourself to be guided by the result. There are serious problems with this model:
- There is a very large, probably infinite amount of pieces of evidence for any possible question.
- For any given piece of evidence, there is a very large, probably infinite number of connections to other pieces of evidence.
- Pruning this infinite sea of data and data-connections to a practical subset involves collecting and assessing each piece and its connections for "relevance" and "weight". Neither "relevance" nor "weight" has any objective measure, and all but a vanishing fraction of the available evidence must be discarded. Consequently, there is no objective scale by which one pile of evidence "outweighs" or is more "relevant" than another. This process is irreducibly subjective.
When we examine a proposed belief critically, what actually happens is that we collect the evidence that is immediately convenient to us, prune it subjectively to the subset that seems weighty and relevant by our subjective, personal standards, sort it into "for" and "against" piles, and then compare the two to get a preliminary result. We then assess this result, and if we decide we like it, we keep it and draw a conclusion. If we don't like it, we go looking for more evidence. Either is a conscious act of the will.
Nor does anything require that this process ever terminates. Even if no "sufficient" evidence can be found to justify the conclusion we desire, we are free to assume infer the existence of such evidence from the conclusions we chose in previous iterations of this reasoning process. The end result is that we choose to search through a small portion of an infinite chain of evidence until we find the support we're looking for, and then we choose to stop.
But what if we wanted to go deeper? What if we wanted to try for something beyond subjective, piecemeal assessment of evidence? The last option is to reason about evidence by way of axioms. A given chain of evidence can fit within or contradict a given axiom, logically speaking. This process seems to be objective, or as close to it as humans can get. But all it tells you is whether a given chain of evidence fits or contradicts a given axiom, not whether the axiom is actually correct. There are still infinite evidence-chains, meaning that there are an infinite number of evidence chains that fit neatly into a given axiom. Choosing an axiom is a conscious act of will, and choosing which evidence-chains to compare it to is likewise a conscious act of will.
All consequential beliefs any of us hold are formed by one of the processes described above. All of these processes involve a conscious act of will. Therefore, all beliefs are arrived at through conscious acts of will.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
It looks to me like the main evidence is:
- Justin Trudeau looks very much like Castro did at a similar age, while bearing no resemblance to Trudeau Sr.
- Justin's mother and father were unquestionably sexually adventurous swingers who were legendary for engaging in coitous with their friends. Seperately, Castro was a close friend of theirs, who was likewise extremely sexually adventurous.
- Justin's parents were enjoying a honeymoon in the Caribbean and made a visit to one particular island whose identity they insisted on keeping a secret roughly nine months before Justin's birth.
- Justin's parents subsequently acted like Castro was someone they already knew when they supposedly met him for the first time on a subsequent visit to Cuba.
The first bullet point seems pretty decisive to me.
There is just too much of the Bible that is objectively false at this point that I don't know how a Mottizen would go about gaining faith.
I'm your huckleberry.
The popular understanding of Materialism is obviously bogus, and is protected from a rapid descent into absurdity by nothing more than irrational social consensus effects. It is exactly as ridiculous as flat-earth or young-earth creationism, for exactly the same reasons.
Note that the above does not apply to Materialism itself, which is an entirely reasonable position, but is considerably less attractive and persuasive. The difference between the two is that the popular version derives its force from a circular argument about the nature of epistemology, evidence and belief. The popular formulation holds that belief in Materialism is derived strictly from an impartial assessment of the evidence, and also evidence against Materialism can't possibly exist, so if evidence against Materialism appears to exist, it can be discarded without explanation.
Without this circular argument, Materialism is merely another faith-based argument that has retreated into the gaps of unfalsifiability. With this circular argument, of course, Materialism is obviously true by definition, and anyone who disagrees has volunteered for mockery. As long as people don't twig to the circular nature of the argument, the social effect is self-reinforcing. The many legitimate benefits Materialism claims to encourage, by contrast, are in fact equally available to non-Materialists, whose faith generally does not prevent them from designing rockets and microchips in any way.
"Objectively false" is an interesting phrase. I'm not aware of anything in the Bible that is "objectively false". On the other hand, I'm pretty sure everything Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is in fact objectively false, and yet people bought it entirely for a hundred years, and many people believe it to this very day. It seems obvious to me that Determinism is as close to "objectively false" as you can get, and many people here still believe it. It seems to me that belief in "objectively false" things is actually pretty common, and examining the phenomenon can teach you a lot about how human reason actually works and what its limits are.
The short version is that belief is not driven by evidence, but by acts of individual will. All significant beliefs are chosen. This is as "obviously true" as anything can be, but choosing not to believe it makes it easier to choose certain other beliefs that some consider desirable, and so those people generally do that. This is not to say that reality is as we wish it to be, only that our beliefs about reality are under our direct, willful control, and always will be.
Do what you need to do, sir.
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