FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17m ago
you must admit that a discovery that his true skill was makeup and wigs would only improve the farce.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21m ago
It's too bad they have political beliefs you disagree with, they're still American or English or whatever.
"Political beliefs you disagree with", cashed out into a succession of real-world outcomes, has historically been considered sufficient cause for the mass firebombing of urban centers.
Likewise the Cathars: "Kill them all. God will know his own."
And yet, fundamentally… it’s not true that conservatives as a group are working for the same goals as I am but simply have different ideas of how to pursue it. It’s not true that conservatives simply think that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy or that economic growth works better than foreign aid to help the global poor or that, as regrettable as it is for gay couples who long for children, children will be severely traumatized unless they are raised by heterosexuals. I would certainly prefer it to be that way. I want to have respect for all belief systems; I want to believe we’re all working for the same goals but simply disagree on certain facts.
But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.
Since reading the above piece several years ago, I have seen more than sufficient evidence to conclude that this description is roughly representative of the mindset of Blue Tribe in general. I have spent much of the last ten years arguing in detail specific examples of how this is a really serious problem that impinges on every facet of modern life, from education to taxation to lawmaking to law enforcement to the academy, national demographics, immigration, warfighting, industrial policy, economic policy, entertainment and putting rockets on Mars. And you are telling me that none of this matters, because the people doing it speak the same language as me, and heard the same bedtime stories as me, and share my ethnicity. Can I not see that we are as brothers?
You may recall that Cain and Abel were brothers.
That they are white people from those countries, descended from other white people also from those countries, who speak white people languages, and are members of European-descent cultures.
I agree that they are white people from those countries, descended from other white people also from those countries, who speak white languages and are members of European-descent cultures. So what? To the extent that they are ideologically committed to my destruction or immiseration, they are my enemies. In what specific ways does their genetics or their family history or the language they speak or the culture they grew up in make them less my enemies?
Note that I am not arguing that demographic security is an unreasonable goal, for either Americans or for Europeans. I am not even arguing that it is negotiable. I think that if a hostile political class mass-imports voters in a bid to permanently win the political game for their side, the proper response is to coordinate meanness against them until you are confident that they will never, every be able to do that again, while at the same time informing all the imports that they will immediately return to their points of origin or their blood shall be on their own head.
What I am confused by is your belief that the very people deliberately mass-importing foreigners for the explicit purpose of more efficiently stamping on your face are somehow less of a problem than the foreigners they are importing. If a bullet flies two inches past your head, is the problem the bullet, or the fact that someone is shooting at you? If someone is shooting at you, is it less of a problem if they speak the same language as you?
How many people have "Democrats" murdered in deliberate political violence since 2000 and how many people have Muslims murdered as deliberate political violence since 2000? Now consider the size of the denominator in each. Muslims are far worse.
How many deaths in America are directly attributable to Democratic policies? The floor of that number is at least four digits higher than all the murders and all the violent deaths attributable to Muslim policies in America. Can Muslims selectively nullify rule of law? Blues can, and have, repeatedly and with vigor. Can Muslims plausibly threaten political closure? Blues can and have through multiple avenues, and continue to do so. You may well be correct that Blue rule would be better than Muslim rule, though I absolutely would not concede such an argument given the history of Blue Rule over the last century. But it hardly matters, because Blues aim to rule now, and have a plausible path to securing that rule now, and Muslims are, at worst, a small and relatively ineffectual part of that plan. Blues do more harm, by far. Blues threaten more harm, and more plausibly, by far. And at no point have I ever seen the supposed racial or cultural or biological solidarity you repeatedly appeal to improve this situation in even the smallest or most insignificant way.
Your neighborhood has far higher chance of being taken over by immigrants.
How do they get here? Who is importing them? Who is dedicated to preventing all attempts to remove them?
Blacks are a declining demographic, there are billions of potential immigrants.
How would they get here? Who is demanding we let them in? Who has bent every organ of the state to facilitate their arrival? Who has undermined the actual laws we put in place to keep them out?
You don't share any ties with Lebanese Christians either.
If they are Christians in any meaningful sense, then I share more of significance with them than I do with the average white European Progressive. I can meaningfully appeal to the principles and values of Christianity to someone who is likewise a Christian. On the other hand, to the degree that they do not in fact share a reverence for the principles and values of Christianity as I understand them, then I have only mistook them for a Christian, and am open to being corrected.
If there is a way to meaningfully appeal to the average progressive, I have not found it in a decade of looking.
In Australia, the reason they have a problem with Lebanese Muslims was from the ZOMG BASED Lebanese Christians lobbying to let them in, not from white progressives. Bilal Skaf living in Australia is the fault of Maronites and Orthodox Christian Arabs, not of Australia's "Blues."
Let us be speak clearly here. Is your claim that the majority of non-European immigration Australia has experienced has been driven by ZOMG BASED Lebanese Christians, and not white progressives? What percentage of non-European immigration to Australia do these Lebanese Muslims represent, presuming that your account is accurate? Because you seem to be arguing that Christian solidarity would result in worse results than white "solidarity" with progressives... but if, as I strongly suspect, Progressives have in fact been directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of non-European immigration to Australia, that would make your argument pretty damn stupid, wouldn't it?
You mention Bilal Skaf, who I had previously not heard of. Why is he still alive? My understanding of Western values holds that he should be dead. Why is he not? Who made it happen that he is not?
The fact is, "Blues" and blacks generally have long-standing ties to our country and thus belong here, and immigrants don't.
This sentence has no meaning to me. "Belong here", specifically, is an empty phrase. I share no loyalty to Blues. I share no common allegiance with them. I share no binding history. I share no values, no traditions, no ties of brotherhood, no common sympathies, no aims or goals, no interests. There is, at best, a sort of inertia generated by trillions of dollars spinning in a circle that seems to be perceptibly slowing, and a series of scams that the slowest among us have not yet caught on to. It is difficult to say that there is even a "here" where one might meaningfully belong.
I don't know what the hell you're talking about when you say liberals want to murder you.
I gave you four specific examples of blues explicitly saying that they think people like me being murdered is a positive good, or in one case instinctively and enthusiastically celebrating a murder committed in front of them. There are many, many more where those came from, but we could also dig in to the colder policy side, where statistically-foreseeable, endemic murder is routinely treated as an acceptable cost for the pursuit of blue ideological goals. It seems to me that if you don't see this, it's because you don't want to see it.
I spend a lot of time in a deep blue city and honestly I often say stuff like what I do here and people are generally pretty nice to me.
The blues I am around are pretty nice to me too, given that I am very careful to never, ever let them know what I actually think or value. I have heard personal friends and family speak favorably of blues murdering reds more than once. I've heard casual expressions of hostility toward reds too many times to count. But I'm not restricted to anecdotes; again, I can point to lots and lots of examples of Blues wielding both lawless and official political violence as a tribal weapon, and both securing their goals and suffering little to no consequences as a result.
Yes, the political situation in the country is terrible. I wouldn't deny that. It would also be a lot better if there were no immigrants here given that it would disempower the political faction you hate so much.
The fact that it empowers the faction I hate so much is exactly why that faction is so hell-bent on importing as many immigrants as possible. They hate me, and likely you as well, and they see mass immigration of politically-aligned third-worlders as a way to make an end-run around democracy. The fact that they believe this should make them your enemy. If you cannot grasp the idea that people dedicated to inflicting unlimited harm against you are not people you can cooperate with, I'm really not sure what to tell you. I would have thought that ethnocentrism and quokkadom were mutually exclusive, but perhaps the perversity of Man is truly without limit.
It kind of sounds like you're trying to make up a fake ethnicity of white people to hate so you can blame them without looking in the mirror at your own "tribe" or being "racist".
Blue Tribe is pretty clearly not a "fake ethnicity". You can go to any media organization, any academic institution, any school, any court, or indeed Bluesky or Reddit and see them, live in the wild. They are a highly cohesive socio-political culture, distinct in a variety of ways, and not even slightly shy about expressing their beliefs to the world at large.
I do not think Racism, the real, actual thing, is correct nor particularly useful. I also do not think there remains any meaningful social benefit to policing it, given the givens. Where I oppose it, I do so on the grounds that it is stupid and counterproductive in some immediate, obvious sense. Here, I oppose it because it seems obvious to me that your appeals to racial solidarity are going to make your opposition to mass immigration less effective, not more. Progressives want mass immigration because they think it is a path to durable political closure against people like me. I believe they are mistaken to believe this; we can, should and will coordinate meanness on a variety of avenues sufficient to bypass whatever closure they achieve. But the fact remains that they will never stop pushing mass immigration so long as they see it in their interest, and they will always see it in their interest so long as their ideology makes them implacably hostile to the traditions and values of the West. If you do not want unlimited mass immigration, Blues, not immigrants, are your primary problem. With the Blues out of the way, you can simply deport the immigrants. With the Blues in the way, neither deportation nor indeed any form of large-scale net-positive cooperation is possible.
The English people who enabled the rape gangs are just that: English people.
Yes. And they imported the rapists, and protected them. Why is that not at least as much of a problem as the rapes themselves?
And sorry but your kvetching about guns or Rittenhouse is exactly the kind of thing I am calling an ephemeral culture war issue. You and all of the other gun owners in America haven't done shit to stop immigration or advance literally any other right-wing cause besides gun ownership itself. That's fine, I like guns, but come on.
You sneer at Rittenhouse, but there is a strong argument that his actions were the single largest contributing factor to the end of the largest campaign of lawless political violence America had seen in generations. By standing and fighting, and doing so well, he forced the system that had heretofore oscillated between tolerating and encouraging the riots to finally begin shutting them down, for fear of things getting out of hand in a way they couldn't afford.
In any case, as I've mentioned many times in previous conversations, the guns are not actually the point. The point is the political coordination that the guns enable and multiply. And the fact is that the political situation is better for me in America than it is anywhere else in the Anglosphere or Europe, or indeed anywhere else in the world, and that political coordination is why. We are doing better at rolling back mass immigration than anywhere else in the world. We are less inhibited in our speech than anywhere else in the world. Red tribe has better access to meaningful political power in the US than anywhere else in the world. I think it is obvious that our political successes have dragged much of the rest of the world away from coalescing Progressive closure. And if we are indeed swallowed, I think we are capable of cutting our way out of the beast's guts.
I will fully concede that we have done a very bad job for a very long time. I note that one commonality of all our historic failures was that, over and over again, we cooperated with Blues and operated off the assumption that such cooperation would be reciprocated. That assumption is dying a death, and the cooperation with it, and we are now doing much, much better than we were following the policies that you seem to be arguing for.
What accomplishments do you claim, by contrast? What successful opposition to immigration can you point to?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
I am pretty sure the Janissaries are an example of people being compelled to become a different ethnicity; it seems like a strong argument against your whole line of reasoning here, in fact. Nonetheless, I will readily agree that it is, at a bare minimum, extremely hard to compel someone to be a different ethnicity; what I am asking for is evidence that you can compel people to stop being communists, because I cannot in fact think of any examples where this has successfully been done, and it is something I would very much like to know how to do. You are saying that it obviously can be done. I am asking for proof.
This is a totally bizarre way to think.
The same back at you. You say a white American or British or French progressive is still part of Western civilization. What does that mean? What predictions does this statement make?
Let's compare Muslim shit to Democrat shit.
Democrats will murder people like me, and will publicly cheer for the murder of people like me, and will discuss among themselves the fervent conviction that the murder of people like me is a good thing and they want more of it. Democrats also commit terror attacks. Democrats also bring political chaos, crime, and rape, and also enable those who do with a zeal such that the distinction becomes meaningless. Democrats will allow masked men to kick my teeth in or burn my house down, and they will ensure the police look the other way when this happens. Democrats will allow other masked men with guns to declare themselves my immediate rulers, and will likewise ensure the police look the other way when this happens. Democrats will deliberately foment nation-wide riots, protect the rioters, and harshly punish anyone who attempts to defend themselves. Democrats will preclude the possibility of broad social coordination toward net-positive cooperation, as they invariably infiltrate any institution so developed, destroy any pro-social function it achieved, and repurpose it as a war-engine for their ideology, or simply divert the money to the material support of their partisans.
And when I say Democrats will do these things, I mean that they have done these things and are, in many cases, still doing them at this moment. And if this were not bad enough, the only reason Muslims are a problem at all is because Blues have dedicated themselves, ceaselessly, to importing as many of them as possible, explicitly because they deeply prefer Muslims to people like me.
I genuinely do not feel very strongly about blacks and am a little confused why you brought them up.
Because they are a non-white demographic for which many of your criticisms likewise apply: long-term failure of integration, massive crime, social decay, etc, etc, and because I have seen many similar arguments about how red-blue differences are really not that important, and how it's really the blacks that are the problem, and I disagree with them for the same reasons I disagree with your argument here.
Moderately more aggressive law enforcement would be enough to solve most of the issues associated with that demographic.
Indeed. And how would this not likewise be true for Muslims? Cut off the massive, community-wide, trivially-detectable fraud explicitly enabled by Democrats, enforce the laws Democrats explicitly refuse to enforce, and why are they more of a problem than Blacks?
They are neither a growing demographic nor one that is displacing whites from the most important institutions in our society.
Affirmative action? Reparations? In fairness, the former would not have happened, and the latter will not happen, without the explicit support of Progressives, who continue to enthusiastically broadcasting that support in the clearest possible terms. It is true that Blacks are not, on the whole, displacing whites from the most important institutions; there simply aren't enough of them. But Blues have quite thoroughly displaced Reds from those institutions! The thing you identify as a potential concern has already happened, but you don't seem to notice it because both sides are "white". Which should I be more concerned about: the potential future institutional capture of hostile Muslims, or the actual, current, entirely cemented institutional capture of hostile Blues that has been steadily ratcheting up its hostility toward my tribe my entire life?
Do I want to live in a black neighborhood? No, but no one is trying to make me and there is no chance that my neighborhood is going to become one.
This has literally been done in the past! Multiple major cities were outright destroyed, All major cities were seriously blighted for decades and most have never actually recovered! The people who metastasized these harms learned nothing from the horrors they inflicted on the innocent, are constantly looking for new ways to inflict further such harms, and absolutely will try even the worst of the old methods again if given the opportunity.
But I have genuine, long-standing ties of kinship and cultural commonality with "Blues" that I don't with some "refugee" from "Lebanon".
I do not. How are those ties of kinship and "cultural commonality" supposed to help when Blues decide that my religion needs to be illegal, or that I shouldn't be allowed to have police protection, or that a mob should burn my church down, or that I should be charged with serious felonies for attempting to defend myself or even for owning the means with which to effect such a defense? How will they help when Blues flood my nation with hostile foreigners for the explicitly stated purpose of disenfranchising me and my progeny? How will they help when Blues steal my taxes and repurpose them to lock me out of political power, or, having accomplished this, to abuse me in every legible facet of my life?
I share no genuine, long-standing ties of kinship and cultural commonality with a "refugee" from "Lebanon", unless they are a Christian. But I likewise recognize no genuine, long-standing ties of kinship and cultural commonality with someone who literally grins at the thought of my children being murdered. What the fuck is "Shared civilization, culture, blood" supposed to actually mean in the face of that level of evident hostility? Rittenhouse was white; did that prevent Grosskruetz from attempting to murder him? I'd guess the prosecutor was white, so show me where the "shared civilization, culture and blood" kicked in when he tried to bury Rittenhouse under a jail. Where did it help Fields, or Keltner, or Gardner, or Finicum, or Danielson, or Perry, or Malinowski? I'd add Baca, but does he count in your book given that he's Hispanic? I'd bet money his attackers were white, should that increase my sympathy for them?
You are summarizing protracted, murderous tribal hatred as some "ephemeral culture war issue you are worked up about right now", but I am pointing to real cases with real consequences. It's true that Muslim immigrants perpetrated the rape gangs in England. Who brought them in? Who covered for them, out of fear of appearing "racist"? Who has been dedicated to importing more of them, and who has instituted naked two-tier policing to keep a lid on any possible backlash? White progressives did these things, and are still doing them. Please tell me exactly where and how the "shared civilization, culture and blood" entered the equation when those white progressives were turning a blind eye to rape and torture and slavery of white children, en masse. Be specific. Let's really dig into the details here, because goddamn would I not want to get distracted by "ephemeral culture war issues", that would be just awful.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
A white communist can be reasoned (or compelled) out of being a communist
What evidence leads you to this conclusion? When the communists massacred the flower of Poland in the Katyn forest, did the fact that the killers were white offer some form of consolation? Did a hundred years of horrifying Communist disasters inoculate Progressive ideology against Communism in some magical way that cannot be seen or measured but should nonetheless be relied upon?
Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that there is more than one way to be a really bad neighbor?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
I think MAGA or something like it was where the Republican party was always going to end up. I likewise think that Communism or something like it was always where the Democrats were going to end up. I would prefer we get the masks off and the cards on the table sooner rather than later; We, collectively, are in a better position to handle the present problem now than we will be in another five years of decline, and we will be in a better position in five years than we will be in ten. I'm not certain that sooner is better; maybe delaying might produce some unexpected, out-of-context perturbation that dramatically shifts the trajectory in a positive direction. But based on the available information, confrontation seems inevitable, and the sooner the better.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
As another data point, I currently use a $100/month Claude subscription, duck.ai free from the browser, and midjourney.
Claude was paid for and set up from work, and it is very, very good. I am an artist, and it is much better at coding than me, and is able to implement code solutions for the technical problems I run into integrating my art into my company's project. It is tremendously efficient and effective so far with all the tasks I've thrown at it.
Midjourney, I paid a hundred bucks for a year's subscription. I used it very heavily on a project, and got some excellent results out of it, but the project petered out and trying to apply it to other projects has not worked well so far. Mostly I've dropped it for the time being to work on other things.
Duck.AI I've found is pretty good at solving code problems, but more than that is very good at assisting in finding solutions to technical problems with complex art software like blender. It is much, much better than the old solution of googling questions, even before google search enshittified, because it generates topical summaries aimed specifically at the question presented rather than websites which contain keyword matches somewhere within them. I've been making really good progress in areas that were too frustrating to pursue previously, and it's frankly pretty great.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
It is said that the difference between Extremist and Moderate Muslims is that the extremist Muslim wants to kill you, while the moderate Muslim wants the Extremist to kill you. I observe that a similar distinction obtains for Blues. Not all Blues, certainly, but likewise not all Muslims, and the two are close-enough allies that accepting one is going to mean you get the other in any case.
It does not seem to me that Progressives consider themselves part of Western Civilization in any way I recognize. Given that their project has from its inception exhibited a radical hostility toward every part of Western Civilization they do not own and cannot seize, which has only grown more vicious over time, I do not understand why you think they are part of something they fervently declare their desire to destroy, nor why you should want them to be. I can understand that they emerged from western civilization; parasitic wasp larva emerge from caterpillars, but this does not mean they will develop into butterflies.
I am fine with living around Muslims, right up to the point where they start doing Muslim shit. I am likewise fine living among Democrats, right up to the point where they start doing Democrat shit. Past that point, I do not think living near either of them is a good idea. I reconciled myself long ago that Blue-controlled territory is not a place I am willing to live, nor even to visit if it can be reasonably avoided.
I have long noted that a fault-line within the right runs between those who would prefer to ally with blacks (or other non-white populations) against blues, and those who would prefer to ally with blues against blacks (and other non-white populations). Perhaps it might come down to an assessment of which alliance seems more plausible to you. An alliance with blacks seems quite unlikely to me, and getting less likely by the year, but it nonetheless seems profoundly more likely to me than any alliance with Blues. Many of the perceived grievances between Reds and Blacks are illusory, and much common ground exists even if it remains stubbornly unrecognized. But the grievances between Reds and Blues are very real and growing by the day, and the common ground appears to me to be non-existent; our values are far too incoherent and antagonistic for mutual coexistence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12hr ago
That is an optimistic assessment, and might even be true. I think it would be good to verify, because I've seen a lot of previous examples of unconscionable behavior on the part of Britain's law-enforcement establishment.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13hr ago
Does it seem to you that Muslim immigrants are more an enemy of western civilization than Blue Tribe progressives?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Coming to this late, but like @George_E_Hale, I find your thesis both persuasive and not, because you accurately identify the rot in academia and yet cherrypicking the worst and most woke activists to represent every single person who goes into academia for the love of history, literature, or journalism is rather unfair.
George asked about history and poetry specifically; poetry is more or less equivalent to art and similar critiques apply before even approaching the political and social questions, but History has a credible claim to being a serious discipline in our present context.
I do not think I am cherry-picking. My claim: the most significant output of historical academia in the last decade or so that I'm aware of is the 1619 project, and the runner-up would be the Kamloops mass graves controversy. I don't think it's unreasonable to describe both of these as serious sociopolitical events that had notable direct impacts on our society, and that both emerged from and depended on History Academia to do what they did, and that both are understood both within and without the Academy to be Capital-H History.
The claim here is not that the 1619 Project is typical of the average consequence of academic historians; I would guess that average academic historians have little to no perceptible impact on society at all. The claim is that if you ask what Society receives of consequence from its lavish funding of History departments society-wide, these are two of the most significant results. If you disagree, what significant results do you see emerging from History Academia with greater positive impact?
The solutions are both simple and obvious, and completely infeasible. Do I agree with you that academia should be "razed to the ground"? Well, I think we should still make space in the world for a few scholars of Anglo-Saxon poetry and ancient Greek pottery. But maybe not so much space.
Much like my language studies, I have found more benefit from online tutors and a bit of discipline in my free time than I ever got out of college classes.
It really is quite remarkable the extent that this is true. 2000-2016 was a true golden age, and seeing the proliferation of skill, knowledge and training was something that filled me with a profound sense of optimism at the time. Even know, in the shadow of AI, it's still not completely extinguished.
The argument I make to the academics in my life is that I love teaching. Education is a profoundly important part of human existence! From the moment we're born, we're learning every day, and the sharing and cultivation of knowledge and wisdom and skill is among the most valuable activities humans can engage in! The reason I'm so opposed to the current system is precisely because that system is doing such a fantastically bad job!!!
Again, I'm caught here between trying to avoid the appearance of a Gish Gallop firehose on one hand, and providing evidence for inflammatory claims on the other. I know an English Academic who teaches honors English classes. They routinely have students in the Honors English class who don't know how a paragraph works. This is in an extremely expensive private university! That student is actively, objectively being exploited by the university! No one cares!!!
...But ranting aside, congrats on getting into art! I've been on a learning kick off and on for the last two years or so, and heavily on for the last six months. Feels good, man! What're you aiming for at the moment? Got any pieces you can show?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Lost the first version of this, so it'll need to be a bit abreviated.
Although, we both seem to agree that illiberals have a tendency to be uncivil to the outgroup.
No,
What is your claim, that liberalism is worse than illiberalism because liberals sometimes turn into uncivil illiberals?
You seem to be treating Liberalism and Illiberalism as equal and opposite ideological poles.
My claim is that Illiberalism is more real than liberalism, because Illiberalism is the base state and liberalism is a superstructure necessarily built atop it. Liberalism is a luxury that exists only where illiberalism has created the conditions necessary for its existence. Further, Liberalism tends to degrade those conditions, and the more Liberal we go the faster the degradation. When the conditions degrade sufficiently, Liberalism collapses back into illiberalism, often without many of the Liberals even noticing the change. Liberals who turn illiberal in a crisis are simply expressing their ideology's internal contradictions, and "more liberalism" will not solve the problem, but rather accelerate it.
Civility is not a product of liberalism. Civility emerges when values are mutually coherent, allowing the recognition of common interest and common humanity, positive-sum reciprocity, group loyalty, charity and so on. Such an environment can be codified as an ideology, which is what Liberalism is. The problem is that Liberalism confuses its progenitor civility not as a consequence of illiberal social organization, but rather as a constant feature of human nature, and concludes that since civility and its own emergence coincide, more liberalism will lead to more civility. But Civility maintains its rigor through duty, obligation, debt, conformity, enforcement, none of which Liberalism is fundamentally interested in, particularly resonant with, nor capable of maintaining from within its own ideological frame.
Liberalism, unrestrained, always degrade civility and values-coherence, until it triggers a crisis too undeniable and too acute to ignore, at which point it will transition back into the harshest forms of illiberalism and resolve that crisis with a bloody hand. The only way to prevent this ideological boom-and-bust cycle is to moderate Liberalism, to accept that "More Liberalism!" is not a universal answer to the problems of living together, and sometimes what we need is less. Likewise, actual civility requires rules and standards, and punishment for breaking them, which in a limited context can appear quite uncivil. "It's all good, man" is not a general answer to the question of how to live together; sometimes it is not all good, and something must be done as a result.
But I wont deny this sometimes happens. Liberal societies can decay just as illiberal and pre-liberal ones can and have.
All societies decay. But our society went hard on maximizing Liberalism and then very rapidly decayed, and the most liberal portions of the population decayed the fastest. The Freeze Peach meme emerged and was rapidly propagated from the deepest-blue, most "liberal" parts of our society. And efforts at effective mass speech control and censorship. And attacks on presumption of innocence. And mass political violence as a live and effective method for pursuing social change. And severe violations of freedom of assembly and movement.
Yet illiberals can often turn into liberals.
Can you point to some examples?
And illiberals can devolve/schism into tribal violence for reasons that have nothing to do with liberalism.
Schism and tribal violence are an innate and irradicable consequence of human nature, and are perfectly able to express themselves under Liberalism and Illiberalism alike.
You should give a lot of thought to the problem of prediction. Because if you are going to reject liberalism and replace it with some illiberal ideology, then it would be nice to know that whatever you replace it with does not lead to worse failure modes.
One might turn this around and ask Liberalism to predict whether the outcome of its unlimited and yet oddly selective tolerance might not lead to worse failure modes. I can point to a long history of Western civilization that operated on levels of liberalism considerably below our current norms. Can you point to an example of how injecting population-replacement-level amounts of Muslims into sclerotic western democracies works out long-term?
In any case, I'm not sure what is to be gained by discussing the problem in the abstract; it's better pursued at the object level.
I may or may not disagree depending on how you determine whether something is or is not a core value (in a way that's not tautological)... What distinction between values, ideology, and temperament are you making here?
Core values are values people will compromise all other values to secure, because they are valued more than those others. Ideology is a story people tell themselves to try to encapsulate their value judgements into general rules; when they run afoul of reality, often they change. Temperament would be a term, perhaps poorly chosen, for general bearing, apparent attitude, politeness or bluntness, the register of one's voice, the minutea of how one generally communicates.
In Harry Potter, Professor Umbridge's temperament is unfailingly polite and mild. Her ideology is bureaucratic managerialism. Her core values are totalitarian power and control.
In reality, the ACLU's temperament and ideology were staunchly liberal, but in fact their core values were Blue Progressive, and when those core values came into conflict with their professed ideology, the ideology abruptly and seamlessly changed.
Oh are they entirely bankrupt? You have not remotely justified that lofty claim.
The failures of Liberalism as an ideology are self-evident. Europe has implemented a variety of blasphemy laws and has been busily jailing, fining, or otherwise abusing people for the words they say or even don't say, and the European and American consensus is that this is fine. America retains some narrow, formal protections on paper, but our government has proven perfectly willing to violate these protections in egregious ways, whether to punish or to censor, on a variety of pretexts. More damningly, the ideals necessary to maintain formal free speech protections simply and very obviously do not exist. A probable majority of Americans believe that speaking the N-word justifies physical assault; one jury was willing to apply this standard retroactively, acquitting a stabber because his victim responded with the N-word. Large pluralities and perhaps outright majorities believe that firing people for their speech is good and necessary. A large plurality of Americans are willing to endorse violence and even murder as solutions to political disagreement. And at the end of the day, are they wrong?
What is your defense of Liberalism? Show me how it works, where it fits in to the world around us. Show me where you think we are and how you think we got here. I claim that in our present context, Liberalism is as useful as a warm pitcher of spit. Why am I wrong?
We can just observe how quickly the illiberal right (ham-fistedly) reached for classical liberal defenses such as free speech when their preferences were being contested.
Who, specifically? Which "Illiberal Right" are you referring to, when and in what context?
I made such appeals when I was still a Liberal, watching the Liberal consensus collapse around me. The consistent failure of such appeals is why I stopped being a Liberal: evidence showed that such defenses didn't work, because they were built on lies.
My speech, my arms, and my vote is not protected because of the Constitution and Liberal ideals. It is protected by anonymity, numbers, and an advertised bloody-mindedness toward those who would infringe upon them. These are not perfect or perhaps even very good protections, but they handily beat Liberalism, which is very clearly no protection at all.
that is an indication that liberal principles are game-theoretically valuable in a way that will ensure their continuation.
The Liberal Game Theory argument is trash. "Don't restrict the rights of others, or they might restrict yours." But if I recognize rights for others when I am in power, and then I lose power and they gain it, they are completely free to refuse to recognize my rights. And then, having violated my rights, if they lose power and I regain it, Liberals will not agree that I should refuse to recognize their rights in turn, thus providing the consequence their "game theory" relies on.
“When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles” is a pattern Liberal "Game Theory" has no answer for, but Illiberalism can handle easily and honestly. We should not live by lies. Skokie Liberalism is gone forever, and pretending otherwise will not help you. Liberal Maximalism depended on a fundamental lack of knowledge of the consequences of its policies. We have that knowledge now in abundance. Lessons have been learned, and will not be soon forgotten.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
aaaah, GURPS, my truest roleplaying love. My transition to young adulthood was marked by switching from Battletech mech design to GURPS Vehicles 2nd ed and GURPS Robots, the former of which I wore out the spine on in short order. Truly, a more elegant game for a more civilized time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
sci fi lasers and particle beams are boring if they don't create a more exotic experience than slugthrowers, and if they create a more exotic experience, that means they exploit different niches and so don't replace slugthrowers. Also, the AR15 is a reasonable guess at what a slugthrower will look like 300 years from now, odd as it may be to consider. The reasons are complicated and interesting, but the upshot is that there's a feedback loop running popularity > market share > stacking iterative improvements > excellence for purpose > popularity, such that the AR15 pattern is steadily outcompeting and driving to extinction all other designs, and it doesn't look like this will change so long as we're using chemical slugthrowers.
I will say, if I were doing far-future slugthrowers, I'd at least go electrothermal and try to drive design variation that way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
A fundamentally curious person would read both The Diary of Anne Frank and the Turner Diaries, and they'd have already waded through all of the reports around the UK rape gang scandals.
What would you guess the proportion of "fundamentally curious" people is in society at large? My guess is that they're a statistical nullity.
Time is limited of course, and no one will ever have time to read or care about everything, but it would be ridiculous for me to say something like, "I'll give a fuck about Karl Marx's Capital, when Gulag Archipelago is required reading in public school", because it is obvious posturing.
I'll take the other side of that one. Indoctrination is a real thing and works. I observe that the culture around me has few to no antibodies to the hazardous memes of the Left, and something approaching an auto-immune disease against the memes of the Right, hazardous or not. In what sense is it "posturing" to think that perpetuating this mismatch is a bad thing that should be stopped?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Governments depend on low-level government employees to enforce their decrees on the real world. Your postulated "300k trannies" are low-level government employees, and the drone systems you posit they will use have to be built and maintained by low-level government employees to function. It is possible to coordinate a level of meanness against such employees that they will not be willing or able to do the jobs assigned to them, and guns make the coordination of that level of meanness a lot easier.
You claimed snipers won't work because drones and AI. I'm pointing out that snipers probably would work despite drones and AI, at least for the plausible futures where ASI isn't exterminating all humans rendering the question moot. And again, snipers are merely one extremely obvious possibility your model didn't cover. There are many, many more.
And yet, Obama didn't massacre the bundy standoff, and Biden backed down rather than fight Abbott over Texas border enforcement, and Rittenhouse survived and was acquitted. The media's ability to dictate social consensus has declined sharply; Trump was re-elected.
Even European governments will semi-openly tell you they're working on AI that can clock terrorists from a picture of their face (as in: predicatively, not just matching them to a known terrorist), and apparently they got pretty good results.
This is not a capability I'm familiar with. Are we talking gait analysis, or is this a physiognomy thing?
High-value targets will have much better security (CCTV, gated communities, armored cars, armed security, etc), especially if that sort of thing takes off.
Are the foot-solder drone operators high-value? Are their families and friends? And again, this is one step out. There are a lot more steps obviously available, and each step imposes disproportionate resource and complexity costs on the defenders. It's possible that AI will solve the general case of the problem in the future, but at that point, it will also solve murder and drug-dealing in the general case as well. Do you think we are 10-15 years away from solving crime?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
It’s a 20 min video I tried skimming it but I am not sure on your point.
The threat elucidated is a suppressed sniper rifle, fired from total concealment at long range from inside a disposable vehicle which immediately departs and then is abandoned elsewhere, potentially a hundred miles or more away. How are you going to "detect the sniper shot"? Thermal imaging probably won't do it, and how do you know where to put the thermal camera? How are you going to get ubiquitous surveillance, and how much does this surveillance cost, and how vulnerable is it? Every capability you pursue increases the surface area vulnerable to attack. And again, this is one step. There are a lot more steps obviously available.
How is solving this problem easier than solving murder or drug-dealing in the general case? Do you think we are 10-15 years away from a general solution to the problems of murder and drug dealing?
That can all be true and drones are still a force that revolutionizes the battlefield in a way that reduces the role of small arms.
Drones will absolutely revolutionize the battlefield and will likewise absolutely reduce the role of small arms. Reduction is not elimination, nor is it necessarily "reduce to a negligable amount". Guns provide a tactical and logistical capability that is likely irreplicable.
It might be more complicated than rock paper scissors but that's not really saying anything. The typical American ideation of a group of armed men resisting the US government relied on a set of priors that drones all but eliminate.
But I'm not sure where you intend to find Americans who have the guts and ideological firmament to resist like the Taliban did outside of Amish communities. But in that case the victory condition is largely neither guns or drones.
This cuts both ways. You assume those resisting are complacent and cowardly, but you also assume those imposing tyranny have infinite courage and resolve. They don't, and in the words of the poet, they have moms. A fight of this nature would not look like the Taliban, because America is not Afghanistan, and Americans are not Afghans. It would be worse for the government in a whole variety of ways. It is very, very hard to make a bullet hitting you in the armpit from a thousand yards away with zero warning a negligible problem.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Can you expound on the narrowness of my argument?
I would guess your model of "using guns against the government" involves something like a human-wave assault on a federal building by guys on foot armed with ar15s. This is about the worst possible mismatch, and it's still a threat drones cannot obviate now and may not be able to obviate in the future, given the continuous development of cheap, effective, man-portable anti-drone countermeasures.
Here is a scenario a single small step outside that frame. Leave aside the tribal shibboleths and focus on the material specifics: how would 300,000 autistic trannies and their drones under the Biden clone presidency effectively forestall this scenario?
In any case, that's all the illumination I'm comfortable providing on this topic.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
My main comprehension of the 2A purpose was to either war Britain invading the US or to go to war with US government. Guns don’t seem to have any relevance for that in 10-15 years.
If there is still a government comprised of humans in 10-15 years, guns will still be quite useful if it becomes necessary to fight it. My guess is that you think otherwise because you have a very narrow model of what it means to use a gun to fight the government. You aren't entirely wrong within that narrow frame, but outside it you are very wrong.
There is no plausible future where I would be better off without guns than with them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Ai Drones with guns are certainly going to outperform humans with guns in the medium-term, possibly even the short term. They don't outperform humans with guns at present.
Also, a gun on a drone is still a gun. Guns themselves remain useful because of their innate capabilities: low-cost standoff firepower.
Also, ubiquity: you may not have a drone, but you always have you. And guns are much, much easier to make and use than drones.
A white person can, in fact, hate other white people because they are white, with this hatred being their method of insulating themselves from such hate. This is in fact a moronic progressive idea about race, often inculcated through polemic, but that observably does not stop many of them from committing fully to their ideology.
Recognizing that this is, in fact, how they think, and that their thinking this way does, in fact, have serious consequences in the real world is not "basing one's own ideas on moronic progressive polemics about race". Nor is handwaving the beliefs they observably coordinate large-scale political action around as some sort of cutesy, irrelevant affectation a wise approach for dealing with reality. It may be stupid, but they really mean it, and they will smash an unlimited number of valuables trying to make two and two make five.
I think there are black people (or brown people, or Muslim people) with whom I can meaningfully cooperate in some circumstances. I think there are white people with whom I cannot meaningfully cooperate in some, perhaps even most circumstances. Does this seem implausible to you?
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