FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I do appreciate the reality check, truly. But I just don’t see Europeans and Americans acting like Congolese warlords, or permanently destroying their country’s economics.
Then it seems to me that you lack the necessary imagination and perspective.
The best estimate I've seen is that BLM killed ~8.5k black people, in addition to thousands more non-black people, in roughly four years. No one involved intended for that to happen, but it happened all the same. Most of the people involved will not be aiming to become Congolese warlords. I'm skeptical that their intentions will prevent the formation of lasting conditions where Congolese warlordism is an adaptive behavior.
From observation, violence > chaos > poverty > more violence is a self-perpetuating cycle, especially when the good people die or leave until those who remain are some form of bad person.
I am not arguing that American civil war means inevitable and eternal hell on earth. I am arguing that if you are contemplating a potential war, you are probably underweighting the likelihood and severity of the bad consequences, and you are probably not thinking about what it means if those bad consequences arrive for you, personally.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I observe a lot of civil wars do and have had these results. I note that more mild civil wars, like the English one and our own, happened a long time ago and under very different conditions.
If you think serious violence cannot happen here, I think you are badly mistaken. If you think that such violence can't get bad enough to kill the American economy or seriously compromise our national security, and possibly both, and possibly for the foreseeable future, well, you're much more optimistic than I am. It seems to me that there is a tipping point, past which gravity takes over and we are all along for the ride. Violence causes political instability, political instability crashes markets, market crashes create mass dysfunction, mass dysfunction begets more violence. Maybe I'm overestimating the feedback effect, but I observe that a lot of people are vocally enthusiastic about violence, and that this enthusiasm appears to directly result in actual violence being inflicted. I think it is the sort of thing people are really going to regret having not taken seriously when they had the chance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
You're the one claiming elsewhere in this thread that there's a literal government agency that exists to threaten people in this situation into making these sorts of statements. I'm inclined to believe it! I'm certainly confident that the victim's family is under tremendous social and likely legal pressure to toe the line.
That wasn't enough to get Rittenhouse convicted. It wasn't enough to prevent the J6 pardons, or to cause those pardons to have significant costs. It seems to me that neither of those outcomes were predicted by you or others arguing the "Red Tribe is powerless" thesis.
Violence is never the solution for the weak
This is true, if one arbitrarily declares that anyone who achieves solutions through violence must therefore have not actually been weak.
which is what the right is
Are we?
It seems to me that we've gotten to the position we're in by attempting to cooperate with defectors. That position seems to be changing rapidly now that common knowledge of the defectors is spreading.
If anyone who is right-leaning engages with violent methods, people will make an example out of him and you will see far worse kinds of censorship than 2021 but for decades.
One of the things that I don't think most moderates have cottoned to is that enforcement of this sort of thing might not be a viable option any more. For the last several years, we've seen a consistent pattern of long-standing, load-bearing social norms abruptly dissolve, and the way this has repeatedly gone is that Red Tribers achieve common knowledge that the "norm" could not be applied to their advantage, and so simply stopped applying it to Blue Tribe's advantage. We saw this with sexual misconduct accusations, with character accusations, with appeals to rule of law, and many others. I think we've seen the beginnings of this pattern applied to political violence with the riots, Rittenhouse, the j6 pardons and now Luigi and Karmelo. You'll know for sure when notable Red Tribe violence occurs, and Red Tribers simply reject the appeal to "norms" en-masse.
Do you think, in the current environment, Red Tribers won't celebrate if a Blue Tribe politician has his strings cut, after years of watching their friends and neighbors openly wish for and celebrate lawless murder of Red Tribers? If so, I'd say you're quite the optimist.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Human imagination is a wellspring that flows eternal. Can you point to actual cases of knife use against bullies, even non-fatally, where the knife-wielder was considered in the right?
Is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions without being modded for fedposting?
Lean heavily into is rather than ought. Describe the specific mechanisms that you see driving people away from political solutions, how this driving works, how you see this process evolving over time. Analyze how it might be prevented, and why you think those efforts to prevent it are likely to fail, if that's your conclusion. Make rational predictions on the expectation you'll be held to them.
And if you really want to do it well, do what I do and before you start, take a couple minutes and contemplate your closest loved ones burned to charcoal, flesh shredded by bullets and shrapnel, their skulls shattered and evacuated brain matter fly-blown in the afternoon sun. Meditate on it, try to capture the sensory details, the texture and smell. Imagine yourself poor, hungry, maybe homeless, in a world that cares nothing for you, scrounging for food while your children sit starving and hollow-eyed at whatever itinerant shelter you're squatting at presently. Imagine fear, bone deep and omnipresent, defining every moment of the remainder of your life. That's what "no satisfactory political solutions" very likely looks like in reality: the rule of hatred, terror, malice and immiseration on a scale unprecedented in the experience of you or anyone you know, and the permanent end of every good thing you have ever known.
This still seems to me to be the most likely outcome, given our present trajectory, but I for one am in no hurry to reach the end of this particular rainbow.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
If this works, it'd be amazing. I have no idea what intentional actions could be taken to make it more likely; the best I can think of is to try to highlight what seems to me to be the incredibly, horrifyingly dysfunctional relationship between the Black community and Blue Tribe, where Blue Tribe gains political support from the Black community by blaming all of their problems on Red Tribe, including those problems that Blue Tribe seems to be explicitly causing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
He appears to be referring to HlynkaCG's ban, and to my comments following it. Hlynka is probably my all-time favorite poster in any of the versions of this forum, I argued with and then alongside him for years, I credit him for having by far the largest impact on my own thinking of anyone I've conversed with here. I think he was right about most things, and miss him dearly. I also maintain that he decided that he wasn't willing to follow the rules any more, and so the mod team was presented with the choice of either invalidating the rules or banning him. Banning him was the correct choice. I also would argue that inviting a ban was the correct choice for him; he did not seem to need what this place offers any more, would be the way I would put it, and I can respect that. I've been near to that point a few times myself.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I would add to this that no one outside of the extremists have a credible plan for how to change this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
You’ve banned many people who did not deserve it.
If I've banned "many people who didn't deserve it", it should be pretty easy for you to point to examples. There's a search bar at the top of the page, syntax would be "author:FCfromSSC banned", feel free to provide examples.
You‘ve even banned what you called a major influence, a friend.
I presume this is a reference to HlynkaCG? Hlynka himself was quite clear that he understood that he was breaking the rules, and would not stop doing so. Leaving aside that I am not in fact the one who banned him; I certainly think it was the proper action for a mod to take, and would ask what you think we should have done, given a long and increasingly frequent history of him breaking the forum's rules?
Then judas gave a tearful eulogy. It was the most craven, two-faced, pathetic display of regret I ever saw.
Are you under the impression that Hlynka expected to not get banned, or that he resented his ban or considered it unfair or unwarranted?
You have invented a caricature in your own mind that has no relation to reality. I fundamentally believe that this forum is built on unsustainable contradictions. I see my job as a mod to be to try to help keep it running as long as possible. If you think I or the other mods are doing it wrong, we're open to arguments for how we can do it better. Sadly, most of the arguments we receive are based on the sorts of caricatures you're deploying here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
that is worth noting, but it's also worth noting that their fundraiser was allowed to operate, in contrast to those of, for example, Gardner and Rittenhouse. This is a concrete way in which our society observably treats red-tribe lawful self-defense as strictly worse than blue-tribe lawless murder.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
The liberal thesis was that there was some objective grounding to these concepts that people would naturally gravitate towards.
I think we can safely say at this point that the liberal thesis was wrong. "Consensus" is not a fixed, naturally-occuring attractor fit for anchoring a society. Values can drift without apparent limit, and mutually-incompatible value sets are not only possible but are routinely observed in the real world. Attempting to share power between mutually-exclusive value-sets is a fool's errand. The solution is borders; I pursue my values here, you pursue yours over there, and we do our best to leave each other alone. No level of language games is going to provide a sustainable workaround to this simple reality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Some people have an argument they want to participate in, and aren't interested in digressions from their mental script. It's disappointing, but hardly novel. The well-wishes are appreciated, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
It looks to me like you aren't getting the better end of this debate, and are looking for a way to make this my fault.
If you have an example of me using my mod powers in a debate, I'd certainly like to see it. If you think I'm lacking in morals, it'd be interesting to hear an elaboration of why.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Just above there’s a thread about karmelo anthony. Where does his murderous rage come from? What ancestral wisdom was passed down through murders like these?
At no point have I claimed that jealous rage is "ancestral wisdom." Jealous rage is an emergent property of human psychology; the ancestral wisdom is about how to prevent, contain, and clean up after it.
I do not know the details of why Karmelo Anthony felt it necessary to murder a fellow student athlete. My wild-ass guess would be that it came down to pride and perceived disrespect, and wouldn't you know it, our society also recognizes that these as legible harms that our social structures must account for. We have entire fields of law dedicated to punishing people for acting with different forms of disrespect. We have specific words that, when spoken to specific people, give those people de facto license to physically attack you. I am not endorsing these social structures; I am noting that they exist, and they exist because we recognize that disrespect and injuries to the pride of another will be percieved as harmful in a significant number of cases.
When you find yourself defending murderers, take a step back.
Perhaps when you find yourself repeatedly misrepresenting the arguments presented to you, you should do likewise.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
You use, excuse and legitimise an extreme minority of rage-fueled murderers to condemn everyone’s harmless daily desires. You've catastrophically misidentified who the healthy humans are.
Whether the daily desires are harmless is the question you are begging. I am pointing out at least one instance where those involved do not act as though they perceive them as harmless. I am not "excusing" or "legitimizing" anything. I am pointing to a phenomenon that has existed at least since the invention of written language, and which seem directly fatal to your argument. If sex is harmless fun, where is the rage coming from?
Nor is this confined to murder driven by jealousy. Long-term relationships being destroyed by infidelity is extremely common, and those who undergo it certainly seem to consider the infidelity to have been harmful, to the point that our legal system explicitly accounts for fidelity or its absence in the legal decoupling of such relationships.
Nor does it stop there. In the last decade we've seen a massively effective social movement aimed at rolling back huge parts of the sexual revolution from within erstwhile liberal feminism, driven by an explicit rejection of "sex is harmless fun" and a demand for a jugaad-ethics pseudo-traditionalism. This movement has very clearly been generated by the broadly accepted belief that in fact sex is not "harmless fun", that it is in fact fraught and requires serious safeguards to prevent serious harm. That their proposed solutions are absurd, unworkable and perverse does nothing to change the nature of the problem: Whether you like it or not, whether you recognize it or not, sex has serious consequences that cannot be effectively prevented or engineered around.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Because the harm is attributed to the person who chose to commit murder.
They're often choosing to commit murder because they are having what is commonly known as a significant emotional event. Hence the term "crime of passion". Such crimes have been a constant through all of recorded history, indicating that their emergence is not the result of particular social customs. It seems pretty clear to me that sex tends to be deeply emotionally significant for healthy humans, and that perceived violations of trust in these matters cause intense emotional reactions indicates that promiscuity can, in fact, cause significant harm.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Somehow the kids are having less sex and doing less drugs but no one who was upset about the kids having sex or doing drugs is happy about it.
I am happy about the kids having less sex and doing less drugs. I'm not happy about some of the things they're doing instead, ie either end of the OnlyFans transaction.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
The religious mind may consider harm and sinfulness to be inversely correlated (smoking vs promiscuity).
Speaking in generalities, we do not. On the other hand, regardless of what we disapprove of, whether smoking or promiscuity, it seems that the irreligiously-minded are always ready to explain how our disapproval shows us to be terrible people.
The latter is particularly unfair to the believers and offensive to the gods precisely because the sinners are having fun without repercussions.
It's pretty uncommon to see people commit murder over cigarettes, and yet they commit murder over promiscuity all the time and across a wide variety of cultures. This seems odd to square with claims that promiscuity is "harmless".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I am willing to listen to people who claim they understand how the universe works when their explanations allow me to make testable predictions, and those predictions are verified. This holds true even when only some of their explanations are testable; the testable ones increase my confidence in the non-testable ones.
Most people appear to do likewise.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
In that case we're all meatbags about to be ground to dust by an uncaring universe in which all conciousness exists only for a brief flash of hospitable conditions in between eternities of lifeless desolation and oblivion.
What testable predictions does this claim make? Is it falsifiable?
The usual response I get is that this is just Materialism, and materialism is science, and this claim lets us do science. Only, that is very obviously not true, because you can do science without this claim, and also this claim doesn't help you do science better; it has no actual connection to science. Further, if it makes no testable predictions and is not falsifiable, in what sense is it materialistic?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
After Psycho-Pass I had a brief "this man is a genius" phase, and tried to look up anything he ever did. Somehow Madoka Magica never clicked for me, and I ended up giving up after a few episodes.
My guess is that you quit roughly one episode too early. The series was recommended to me by a friend, I started watching the first episode, and thought, "okay, this is fairly standard magical girl stuff, I'm not even remotely interested", and then shelved it. He kept bugging me, so a couple months later I watched the first episode again, okay, nothing too crazy, watched the second episode, sure, whatever, watched the third episode... and I think it's episode three or four where the story is done winding up, and starts throwing punches.
It seems pretty clear to me that the reduced police presence over the next few years was a direct result of BLM, given that reducing police presence was an explicit goal of the movement. The increase in murders was an easily-predictable result of the reduced police presence. I am not claiming that BLM rioters directly killed 8.5k black people in the course of rioting. I'm claiming that they were bad at predicting the results of their actions, and their actions led very predictably to a lot of black people being murdered. Civil war would be much, much, much, much worse than BLM in this regard, not least because it is not obvious that it could be stopped once it got going. The direct violence would kill quite a few people, but it is easy to predict that the breakdown in social structure could easily kill a whole lot more, and in turn create lots of incentives for more ideological direct violence.
Lowering the minimum wage changes a whole lot of things, and it's hard to predict all the effects. Maybe it causes 10,000 bankruptcies. Maybe it also lets 1,000 businesses hire 10 additional workers each. How do these things balance out? Crippling the policing system is not like that; the effects are immediate and severe. Likewise for the economy. Likewise for the power grid, water treatment, food distribution, banking, the legal system generally...
I'm not sure why communication is failing here, so let me try again in simpler terms:
People like the idea of political violence because it seems like a straightforward solution to their perceived problems. They do not understand that while you may get to decide to start the violence, once it's started the other side has to agree to let it stop. They do not understand the fragile nature of our society, and how bad things can get on short notice if certain bedrock assumptions like "my job will pay me on time" and "there is food in the fridge and more in the grocery store" and "the lights turn on when I hit the switch" and "the police will come if I call them" no longer obtain. These assumptions are not derived from immutable features of the universe. The police can go away. The power can go out. The trucks might not show up to stock the grocery store. These things can happen. People can make them happen, if they believe it to be to their advantage, and a great way to convince them of that is to make them feel that they and their families are in danger if Something Drastic Is Not Done.
I did not and do not argue that all of this will happen. My argument is that it is much more likely to happen than people who talk about Civil War generally appreciate, and further that it is much more likely to happen to the talkers than they appreciate. It is, believe me, very easy to fantasize about your side putting the boot to the hated outgroup. It seems to me that such people, myself included, would be well-advised to spend a few cycles contemplating what it would be like to get the boot, rather than merely give it.
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