FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
To be clear, is the maximumally-cynical interpretation "reduced attack surface during a national election"? Because that's the obviously-correct answer to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
I do not think we are going to be invading the middle east under Trump. Would it be correct that you think we will, in fact, be "going on a crusade in the middle east"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
so if you are to shoot anything more than once a year on your birthday you better learn quickly how to do it yourself.
And one of the nice things about black-powder is that you can do it yourself. You can make your own projectiles. You can make your own powder. You can even make your own gun if you want! Taking a few steps back down the tech curve in one specific area opens up a whole wealth of possibilities that would otherwise be invisible to you.
I haven't bought any guns in a while, but a black-powder revolver is one of my "someday" firearms.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Who says it doesn't?
You've misunderstood me. I'm willing to at least contemplate the idea that there isn't really anything to be done about the cartels, that the present situation is roughly as good as we can expect and that we should just suck it up. What confuses me is when I'm then told that it's very important that we prosecute a proxy war with Russia on the other side of the world, and that we need to gear up for a Great Power confrontation with China. All the arguments for restraint and toleration of the Cartels likewise appear to me to apply even more so to China and Russia, who have nukes, actual armies, and significant nation-state resources backing them.
I'm not sure you're wrong, but I would really like to see your math.
You seemed to have missed FC's satire. Or did you think 'massacring dozens via drone strike' followed by 'release video evidence on 4chan while claiming it was totally jihadis' was a serious proposal from FC, when delivered with language like 'sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar'?
He replied before I edited in the ISIS false flag part on a whim. Also, that was not satire. Posting such a video seems like an obviously good idea, since the morale effect is the entire point. Claiming responsibility does not, and sowing confusion seems like it would be effectively free with no appreciable downsides.
You are not offering protection, you are threatening to murder people by the dozens and post it online if they do not comply.
Come now, of course it's offering protection, and in a way the principles involved would be entirely familiar with.
Not only is this attempt at a carrot undercut by the threat, the Americans are not the most bloodthirsty/intimidating people in this scenario.
It is not obvious to me why we can't or shouldn't be, or why refraining from being so is a net-positive. That is not to say that we should begin filming Funky Towns or cribbing from ancient Chinese law enforcement techniques. It is to say that we have access to resources dozens of orders of magnitude greater than theirs, that terror and horror come in many flavors and can in fact trade off with each other, and that this is a class of people who have pretty clearly placed themselves beyond most forms of moral concern.
That you have a very limited awareness of the span of objective evils and criminal enterprises in existence, and are quite willing to conduct your own evils on the basis of moral relativity.
I made a similar claim, so I'll butt in here. I think I have a fairly robust understanding of objective evils and criminal enterprises, but stand to be corrected. As for conducting our own evils, killing pirates, bandits, or other forms of hostis humani generis does not seem to me to be evil. The juice may not be worth the squeeze, but it is in fact very good juice if you can get it.
This is not an uncommon instinct, but the neocons were discredited not because their targets were not evil, but because the consequences of their advocated invasions were not only bad, but predictably so.
The neocons were discredited because they attempted nation-building. If our interactions with Iraq and Afghanistan had been conducted as punitive raids rather than indefinite occupations, it seems to me that things might have gone rather differently. Note that this is not the argument sometimes floated that the indefinite occupation could have worked if we'd just been willing to be more brutal. Rather, it is the argument that if your goals are limited to the things violence can achieve, violence can in fact achieve them.
Bad consequences are being predicted.
I'd be interested in the bad consequences you'd predict, but I have an inkling that they might be the same bad consequences I would predict, and that you might have some reticence in discussing them publicly. Or maybe I'm way off base.
That Americans should probably stop paying so much for drugs that it funds black markets dedicated to meeting American demand.
That sounds like a very hard thing to accomplish. Suppose the goal isn't to halt the flow of drugs, or even to get there to not be Cartels any more. Suppose the goal is more modest: introduce a significant incentive against notable acts of brutality. Maybe you don't run the splatter drones all the time. Maybe you just watch and wait most of the time, and then when they "make a statement" of sufficient repugnance, you "make a statement" right back, with zero prior warning or follow-on attribution, not even wreckage to identify the mechanism, zero communication of any kind beyond the bare fact of the resulting corpses.
What do you think the incentive will be as a result of your incursion? Will prices rise, or fall?
Ideally in this scenario, they wouldn't do either. The goal wouldn't be to kill the market, which you are correct to say would be impossible, but rather to modify the behavior of those participating in the market. Sure, they're willing to accept death for a chance at the good life; but maybe they can be persuaded that the sweet spot is actually a bit back from "public torture murder".
Underneath the theorycrafting and righteous vengeance and repartee, though, there's a more substantive concern: I don't think it's a good idea to foster the creation of a society where corruption and brutality are accepted facts of life. When I look at history, there's a pattern I think I see, where things go bad, evil is ascendent, and all the good people either die, leave, or are corrupted themselves. The results of this pattern appear to me to be very bad in the long term, and I worry quite a bit that this is what we have done to Mexico.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
I am all for plan A, even now.
One of the recurring arguments I've participated in over the years is whether we should ban circumcision. I'm circumcised, and on the balance I would rather not be. Nevertheless, I consistently argue that we should not ban circumcision, because while I perceive it to be a net-loss, I do not think it is a very severe net loss, and I observe that there is a significant population of my fellow citizens who disagree with my assessment and wish to retain it.
Usually, those arguing for banning it point out that it is genital mutilation performed on helpless infants. They point out that we ban female circumcision/genital mutilation just fine, and that there is no principled distinction for why we should ban one and not the other. Now, my understanding is that female circumcision is often much more damaging than male circumcision; I base this on descriptions of female circumcision on the one hand, and my own experience with being circumcised on the other. but beyond that, I note that there is not a large population of people practicing female circumcision deeply rooted in our society, so maintaining a ban on the practice is considerably less costly. I think we should tolerate the practices of our neighbors, and decline to make neighbors of foreigners with practices we are not willing to tolerate.
I think this is a pretty good way to look at things. My experience is that it is not a Liberal way of looking at things, and in fact Liberals will tend to object strongly to both ends of it. In my experience, they will argue vociferously that circumcision should be banned because it is a violation of human rights and dignity, and likewise that female circumcision should not only be banned here, but we should expend significant effort to suppress the practice abroad, since it is so obviously repugnant. They will then argue that there is no reason not to import large masses of people for whom female circumcision is a well-cemented custom, on the assumption that all that is needed is "education" to conform them to our standards. By doing so, though, they make those very standards and the enforcement of them far more fraught then they ought to be; if we're basically all on the same page, there's no reason for a massive centralized enforcement apparatus to ensure conformity, but once we're trying to mass-conform large numbers of immigrant Muslims, the same mechanisms can be turned to mass-conform Jews or Christians like myself where we run afoul of the issue du jour. And we will run afoul of it, because the "common sense values" that the centralized enforcement apparatus would be hammering people into observably undergo large-magnitude swings under timescales of less than a decade.
The standard Liberal position is that our political and social processes, things like voting, legislating, the courts, a free press, the "marketplace of ideas" and so on, are sufficient to handle arbitrary differences in values. I used to believe that. I very much do not believe that any longer. It is not enough to simply punt to "the system" to handle differences in values. "The system" is priceless, but it is in fact a fragile thing, and if we treat it like an immutable fact of the universe it will not be there to pass on to our children.
You send multi-million dollars worth of equipment into Northern Mexico.
You send stealthy long-loiter-time surveillance drones over mexico. You use them to ID organized Cartel activity, cross-referencing electronic intel from the NSA. When you locate a concentration of Cartel activity, a stealthy plane drops a container from 35,000 feet, which pops open at 30,000 feet and spills out a hundred small anti-personnel drones. These drones fly down to the target area and messily unalive selected targets in the strike zone, recording high-quality video of exactly who they splatter in the process. No hellfires, no demolished buildings; half-pound directional frag charges, with close range and wide-angle video record of exactly who was hit and what they were doing.
You might not even need the planes; I bet we could rig a tomahawk or a reasonably stealthy cargo drone to deliver the payload. Make a supercut compilation of the footage, slap on an ISIS flag gif at the front and back, dub in a banging nasheed medley and sprinkle in some Allahu Akbar's at appropriate moments, then upload the videos to 4chan and shrug and Who, me? when anyone asks. That's how I'd aim to do it, were I God-Emperor.
You're not thinking like a cartel. Or rather, you seem to think cartels are unitary actors who a singular 'they' can capture, as opposed to coalitions of autonomous rivals who often fight over profit share.
This is the actual problem, but the Cartels are sufficiently odious that cutting the grass, in the Israeli parlance, holds considerable appeal. Realistically, the goal would not be to eliminate all narcotics cartels forever, but to add selective pressure against their worst excesses. Make it clear that when they, for example, haul a bunch of people off a bus and make them fight to the death with sledgehammers, they and their bosses stand a significant chance experiencing rapid unscheduled disassembly as a direct consequence.
Maybe it's still not worth the effort. I am a fairly committed non-interventionist, and there is certainly a strong non-interventionist argument to be made here. But these are in fact some of the most vile people on earth, the harm they cause is considerable, and they're right fucking there. Maybe we really do have to just put up with them indefinitely as they rape and murder and torture and poison and corrupt both our biggest neighbor and our own citizens. But then why the fuck does this argument not apply to China or Russia?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
There are literally open air drug markets in major US cities! The US doesn't have the political capacity to do it, they don't have the legal capacity and the willpower to actually wage a war on drugs (as opposed to a pretend war on drugs).
A war on drugs is much harder to wage when you must at least nominally abide by constitutional protections of the legal rights of the enemy and conduct the war through the standardized channels of the domestic justice system. Hunting the cartels would have none of these restrictions; the NSA and CIA and other alphabet soup agencies could be off the leash de jure rather than merely de facto, and there would be no need for legal entanglements of any kind. This does not make such a campaign a good idea, but if it's a bad idea, it's for reasons other than these in particular.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
See the response here:
I am not willing to accept significant disparities in law enforcement breaking along the lines of partisan ideology. You have pointed to a BLM rioter who got a serious sentence for a serious case of arson. I would even be willing to overlook the many, many BLM rioters who did not commit serious arson, and agree that any J6er who committed arson should receive a similar sentence and a similar lack of pardon; only, there aren't any, are there? I would even be willing to agree that the person who planted pipe bombs in the capitol building should receive a harsh sentence and no pardon; only, the FBI seems to be oddly incapable of finding them, claiming that all the video evidence has oddly disappeared from FBI custody. I would be willing to write off any J6ers who shot people, or shot at people, or even who brandished firearms to threaten people, but it doesn't seem that there are any of those either.
I am not willing accept an equivalence between scuffling with the police and burning down a police station or shooting people or staging an armed takeover of a portion of a city. I have no idea why I should, but I'd be happy to hear arguments to the contrary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
What if there are no shared values, or not enough shared values to found a workable peace?
You could say "we all want to live", but I can point to suicide bombers to demonstrate that actually, no, "we" don't. The search for shared values can in fact fail. More often, the search for shared values can succeed, but return such minimal values-overlap that conflict is preferred on both sides anyway. The problem with Liberalism is that it assumes this can't actually happen, so when it does there's no plan B.
No, my point is that many BLM rioters that committed violent acts are still in prison right now.
This is true, for certain values of "many". I'm sure I could find at least a dozen examples of BLM rioters still in prison, and a dozen is certainly fits the general definition of "many".
Do you believe that most BLM rioters that committed violent acts are in prison right now? I would say that is certainly not the case, but perhaps you disagree.
What would be your estimate of the percentage of BLM rioters who committed violent acts and were then imprisoned? I would say less than .0001%; does that estimate seem in the right ballpark to you?
What would be your estimate of the percentage of BLM rioters who committed serious violence, like shootings, stabbings, severe beatings or arson, and were then imprisoned? I would estimate less than 1%. What would your estimate be?
Of those who committed serious violence and were then imprisoned, what percentage received notably lenient sentences given their crimes? My estimate is that most of them did, because that is how the large majority of the cases I followed at the time and in the aftermath went; what's your view?
Another way to frame it is that, roughly speaking, the overwhelming majority of BLM rioters who committed violence were not arrested, of those arrested a large majority were not prosecuted, of those prosecuted a majority were not not imprisoned, and of those imprisoned a majority received unusually lenient sentences. By contrast, it seems to me that J6ers got much harsher treatment at pretty much every step of this process. Do you disagree? If so, on what basis?
I am not willing to accept significant disparities in law enforcement breaking along the lines of partisan ideology. You have pointed to a BLM rioter who got a serious sentence for a serious case of arson. I would even be willing to overlook the many, many BLM rioters who were not punished for serious arson, and agree that any J6er who committed arson should receive a similar sentence and a similar lack of pardon; only, there aren't any, are there? I would even be willing to agree that the person who planted pipe bombs in the capitol building should receive a harsh sentence and no pardon; only, the FBI seems to be oddly incapable of finding them, claiming that all the video evidence has apparently disappeared from FBI custody. I would be willing to write off any J6ers who shot people, or shot at people, or even who brandished firearms to threaten people, but it doesn't seem that there are any of those either.
I am not willing accept an equivalence between scuffling with the police and burning down a police station or shooting people or staging an armed takeover of a portion of a city. I have no idea why I should, but I'd be happy to hear arguments to the contrary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
As far as I can tell this is essentially the entire reason the concept continues to even hang on at all despite the almost total lack of any meaningful use case outside of some niche video game crap.
FPV drone control.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Are you familiar with the essay Tolerance is not a moral precept? If not, I would highly recommend it.
But if the marketplace of ideas is truly an antiquated concept, it's only a matter of time until its corpse starts to obviously reek.
I would argue that this reek is what you are observing around you at this moment.
I don't think that going mad with political war every 4 years and winning half the time is sustainable.
No, it is not. The present arrangement cannot last. The highest-probability positive outcome is a collapse of centralized power leading to durable federalism. A soft separation, if you will, where Red States and Blue States get to do things their own way in their own areas without being able to impose their preferences on the other. In many ways, this is pretty clearly how things have been drifting for some time, with sanctuary states and state "legalization" of marijuana; Red Tribe is starting to dip their toes into similar efforts in nullifying federal firearms laws, and is likely to continue doing so with increasing success. As polarization increases and the tensions ratchet up, actually enforcing the law becomes increasingly impractical, and cooperating with the other side's enforcements becomes increasingly unacceptable. The path of least resistance is to just let people go their own way.
The highest-probability negative outcome, as you hint, is civil war.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Here's a thread on the subject from last week, with a bunch of people offering their own answers to that question.
What’s the likelihood that this just ALL flops back in 4 years?
You are describing a switch being flipped left, then right, then left. This is typically the way people talk about these things, because it is an orderly model of the sort assembled by orderly people living orderly lives. Or to put it another way, this view is constructed by people who have gone beyond taking orderliness for granted, and have moved to assuming that orderliness is axiomatic.
Our political system is not a switch, but rather a post in the ground. It is not "flopping" one way and then the other. It is being wrenched, back and then forth, and each motion travels further as the earth's hold on the post loosens. This "flip" is burning norms and systems that had stood for centuries. Those norms don't come back on the next wrench, or indeed at all. They are gone for good, and the next wrench will do more damage still, as the escalation spiral continues. Soon or sooner, the post comes out of the ground completely, and then we'll see what we see.
Alternatively, the culture war peters out. Maybe the Blues will give up! Certainly the Reds don't seem inclined to do so. The most likely positive outcome is that Federal authority decreases precipitously and permanently, and we have a go at actually leaving each other alone.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
There you go, ruining a perfectly good theoretical construct with your vulgar facts.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Broke into the capitol building in order to overturn an election?
It had been previously established that it was entirely acceptable for mobs to declare themselves sovereign from local, state and federal law enforcement, and to enforce this claim by burning police stations and courthouses, denying access to the actual police, arming themselves with rifles and shooting people in the street. When I and others like me stood appalled at the leniency applied by the government to such behavior, we were told that this lawless, organized and widespread violence was "mostly peaceful", that acting against these mobs would only "inflame tensions", and then that it was fine because they didn't actually achieve anything, ignoring of course the mass victimization of their fellow citizens and the mass intimidation of those who disagreed with them.
It seems to me that the same arguments apply here. The January 6th protest was in fact significantly more mostly peaceful than many of the leftist riots that preceded it. The protesters did not arm themselves with guns, did not shoot people in the street, and did not set the capitol building on fire. They scuffled with police, conducted an unscheduled tour of the capitol building, had an unarmed woman among their number fatally shot by security, and then left. To the extent that they intended to "overturn an election", it seems to me that numerous leftist protests involved similarly dire goals, and took far greater action toward achieving them to boot, and were given far more lenient treatment even when their crimes included serious violence with guns and arson.
Mobs have "mostly peacefully" disrupted government functions before, and it was not treated as insurrection. I see no reason why this should be treated any more harshly than previous mob disruptions, particularly given the violence allowed during the Floyd riots.
For national respect and social cohesion that’s so much worse than burning down a police station.
I disagree. My perspective on the riots is that Blue Tribe legalized political violence committed by their partisans against people like me within a significant portion of the country, and made it stick for the better part of a year. That is a profoundly corrosive action against any conception of "national respect" or "social cohesion". I now know for a fact that reasonable, thoughtful Blues are in fact willing to look the other way while my civil and human rights are violated and while lawless violence is committed against me or my family, because I watched them do exactly that, and I watched them argue at length that it was good, actually. That's the meaning behind "burning down police stations." January Sixth was not even close to that bad.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Gulf of Mexico is named from the implicit perspective of America. Gulf of America would be named from the implicit perspective of Mexico. Therefore, "Gulf of America" is actually highlighting a non-Amero-centric viewpoint.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
It's argued elsewhere in this thread that BLM rioters who attacked cops were given ~1 year sentences. Assuming that's accurate, why should J6ers who committed similar crimes but who have already been in prison four times as long, and at least arguably in significantly worse conditions, remain in jail even one day more?
Nor does it seem that punishing BLM rioters is still possible, given that they have in many cases served their sentences and have been released. Presumably your view is that this is regrettable, but we should stand for the principle in any case?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
The BLM rioters were, by and large, let off. But there was some amount of discretion shown and the worst were prosecuted. Can't say Trump returned the same.
"the worst" in one set are significantly worse than "the worst" in another set. BLM rioters murdered people with guns and burned down police stations. What is the worst crime that a J6th rioter committed?
Conversation below seems to indicate that the prisoners accused of committing violence have not in fact been pardoned. Rather, their sentences have been commuted, which means that they're still being treated significantly more harshly than the norm for left-wing rioters who attacked police.
I have not read Hegseth's book. Have you? Where are you drawing the idea that he is in favor of new wars in the Middle East?
Here he is discussing the war in Afghanistan. His critiques match my own well, and I detect no enthusiasm for further middle-east interventionism. This matches the interviews I've watched of him, and also matches the general attitude toward foreign wars that Trump has been hewing to since his run in 2015, which convinced me to back him. I am fairly confident that Trump will not be starting any new wars in the middle east, and I am extremely confident that he will start less wars in the middle east than Kamala would have.
I do not know where your confusion over Trump's intentions come from, but I do not share them. I've heard this sort of FUD during Trump's first term, re: John Bolton. Bolton got no new wars, and his political influence seem to me to have taken a precipitous nose-dive under Trump.
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