FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Yet I see more FUD than I want to here. Somehow the whole profession is discredited by covid, even though quite a few doctors would happily tell you that the way the pandemic was handled was far from perfect.
We agree mistakes were made.
What follows? And then what?
One option is that people just straight-up stop trusting experts. You don't like that option, for what seems to me to be a number of fairly solid reasons. What's your proposed alternative, and where do you see it being implemented?
We're several years past Blue Tribe presidential candidates running on taxing religions they don't like. And of course, Japan successfully suppressed Christianity in the 1600s, Russia in the 1900s and China in the 1950s. In the more limited context of this forum, one of the things that beat the liberalism out of me was the multiple iterations of the circumcision argument, where my opposites argued that religions have conformed themselves to society before, and therefore there's no reason not to use state power to force them to conform arbitrarily in the future. Nor is my opposition to this attitude principled; I'm happy to argue on behalf of the Jews, but I would not be willing to extend the same toleration for the more extreme forms of female genital mutilation, much less Aztec blood sacrifice.
It is entirely obvious that there is no secular, materialist reason not to ban a given religion. We ban harmful things all the time, always have and always will, and there is no objective definition of "harm" for people to resort to in situations of disagreement. It is trivial to generate a definition where conservative Christianity (or drinking alcohol, or playing video games, or teaching women to read, & etc) are serious threats that require the power of the state to suppress.
More generally, tolerance is not a moral precept. There are many good contingent arguments why suppressing conservative Christianity would be a poor idea; Christians are pretty near the core of good citizens, at least under a standard of "good citizen" that has prevailed until recently, and also they are a very old and thus fairly well-understood phenomenon, so there's an argument to stick to the devil you know, as it were. Ultimately, however, toleration is a question of value, and values observably change over time. If your values have changed sufficiently that toleration of conservative Christians no longer seems like a good idea, that's sorta the whole ball game, isn't it? It's sort of like architecture: at the point where you have to expend constant effort to keep the building from falling down, it's probably coming down one way or the other.
Liberalism was built on the assumption that the values held by its founders were something approximating a universal constant, that all humans would hold something approximating those values more or less indefinitely. This assumption is false, and once that realization settles in, Liberalism becomes completely incoherent. Moreover, it is likely that its development and influence were necessarily path-dependent, that it only worked as long as it did because no one had really tried it at scale before, and so the results were unknown. The results now being known, it seems unlikely that it will persist, much less revive.
"God of the gaps" cuts both ways. The cached Materialist narrative has some very large holes in it that are bridged through unexamined axioms and predictions that never update when falsified.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
In that case, I think the term "porn-brained" is misleading, as it implies that men behave a certain way because of excessive porn consumption.
Urge to consume sugar, salt and fat is natural, cultural oversupply doesn't just make people fat and unhealthy, it makes people who think being fat and unhealthy is a good thing.
Urge to mate as much as possible with a variety of women is always there, cultural oversupply inflates this drive out of proportion, and some people think the overinflated drive is the natural state and a good thing.
In this matter, I speak from personal experience.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
My wife works in payroll. It's amazing how many people try stuff like this. I can't wrap my head around "I'm going to break the law in writing in a way that directly motivates people to report me."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
The specific claim was "men are bad at sex and women are better off pleasuring themselves", so that seems pretty constrained to the sex act itself. Broadening it to "general dissatisfaction with men" seems like goalpost-moving.
I think you're dramatically underestimating the bully power of a president with full regulatory authority over the corporations and therefore culture of the united states.
We have already had corporations coordinate economic warfare against Red States. We have already had the Federal Government use regulatory power to turn corporations into tools of repression against Red Tribe power centers and interests. What we lose in additional power used against us, we gain in legibility, in additional ability to coordinate common knowledge that we are, in fact, being repressed by unaccountable state power, and that we should escalate further until that repression is defeated for good.
I bet with my life choices, and my bet is that my side will win and my children will inherit a better world than the one we have now. You should do likewise.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Also nope, and "he started it" doesn't cut it. Four warnings in the mod log, no quality contributions, one note recently with "ban next time". This is next time. Banned for a day, and the bans will rapidly escalate if you continue to communicate in this fashion. Next time report and move on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Nope. Previous warning in the mod log for this same issue. Banned for a day, and the bans will rapidly escalate if you continue to communicate in this fashion.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
And this cuts both ways, as Bruen and Heller have demonstrated.
Forget our militaries , we are culturally unable to actually fight , and the Russian propaganda machine will have a field day destroying our democracies.
These sound like very serious problems. I would be in favor of trying to cooperate with Europe in trying to fix them, if Europe hadn't convinced me that they are implacably dedicated to the destruction of my society and my values. Given that they have done that, why should my tax dollars, the attention of my politicians, and the lives of my fellow countrymen go to propping up a system whose agents absolutely would see me persecuted by the full power of the state for exercising what I perceive to be core human rights of conscience and liberty?
We are able to fight, and we are not helpless in the face of foreign propaganda, or domestic propaganda for that matter. Maybe you should have done things differently somewhere along the line, if this is where your choices have led you? If you have nothing to offer Red Tribe but scorn, why should Red Tribe cooperate with you?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
And also control of the legislature and the courts doesn't count for much if laws and judgements can simply be ignored. Illegal immigration was always illegal. The federal government spent at least dozens of billions of dollars directly supporting and subsidizing violations of the law. Ditto for drug laws and many laws protecting the ownership of firearms and practice of Christianity. Ditto for Bruen and Heller and any other decisions Blue Tribe doesn't like.
Republicans could easily have looked for a solution that favored the power of the legislative branch (where they have a structural advantage) or the courts (where they'll soon have an incumbency advantage.) Instead, they gave the power to the presidency? Seriously?
We pass Federal laws and secure Supreme Court decisions, and Blue Tribe state governments, circuit courts, and large portions of the federal bureaucracy simply ignore them. Immigration and Guns are two issues where this pattern is more or less undeniable with a history stretching back decades; recently, we were surprised to learn that basic law enforcement was one of these as well. This has actually been a long-running conversation here on a number of threads, and is the reason why Red Tribe is currently doing what we're doing: We've lost faith in process as an impartial arbiter of outcomes, because we have, as a tribe, caught on to how "Manipulation of Procedural Outcomes" works.
This part I agree with. That's why I'm so confused: why are the republicans giving the democrats the ammunition they need to win the divorce?
We don't think the allocation of Ammunition works the way you seem to think it does. If you have five bullets and I have no bullets, and I pull a lever that gives both of us five bullets. there's a sense in which I'm "giving you more ammunition", but that doesn't make pulling it an obviously bad idea.
We already know that Blue Tribe ignores any law it doesn't like, and we already know that Blue Tribe is entirely willing to abuse power against us in lawless ways without significant consequence. Either we get to exercise meaningful power too, or the power should be denied totally. This is us attempting to exercise meaningful power. When Progressives get the Presidency again, we'll work on the "ignoring laws we don't like part". If it is not, in fact, possible for us to use power the way Blue Tribe does, we need to know that. If it is not, in fact, possible for us to ignore laws the way Blue Tribe does, we need to know that as well. We need legibility more than anything, and the current strategy does a good job of producing it, in my view.
In any case, the cumulative effect of this back-and-forth wrenching will not, I think, be a net increase in state capacity and control.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Prayer doesn't seem to me to be a necessary component. As I understand it, what is under discussion here is whether there should be some things where simply being silently present as a visible symbol of opposition should not be allowed, because it constitutes, in your words, "influence/harassment" of the people engaging in the activity. I'm asking which Red Tribe things are sufficiently sacred that when we do them, those who disagree need to keep that disagreement strictly invisible within a protected zone since expressing it there would be "influence/harassment".
In the US, of course, we actually tried a bipartisan solution to this: protest at Abortion Clinics and places of worship were placed under equivalent restriction. Only, the bureaucracy enforced the law zealously for those protesting abortion clinics, and notably refused to use the law for people protesting places of worship, so I'm not inclined to take it on good faith that there's actually a common principle at play here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Democrats are staring down the barrel of that right now and believe me, it is terrifying. You better hope republicans have a plan to rig every future election because otherwise that gun will be turned on you.
We were staring down the barrel of it previously, and this was the best recourse we could find. I personally would prefer the power not exist; actually using it as we see fit and Progressives resisting where they may is the clearest path to eroding that power that I can see. Under Biden, we already saw state-level defiance to Federal orders. We're seeing more now versus Trump, and we'll see yet more when the Progressives are once more ascendent. Either unified power will break down and durable Federalism emerges from the conflict, or we escalate smoothly to actual civil war.
But in the long term, I don't think they're going to enjoy what happens.
What you are seeing with MAGA is precisely "I don't think they'll enjoy what happens" for Blue Tribe in general. "I don't think they'll enjoy what happens" wasn't a restraint on Blue ambitions under Obama or Biden (or Clinton or Bush II for that matter). The escalation spiral is a very evident phenomenon. Why expect departure now?
The basic problem is that we can no longer agree on core values, on what the laws should be and how they should be enforced. All the formal structures of our system of government assumed baseline homogeneity of values. Without that, none of this works, and what will happen is what we have seen happening for decades now: irreconcilable values-conflict blowing out one conflict-limiting mechanism after another as the pressure for a resolution one way or the other rises over time. Either someone has to win, or we have to have a divorce. There isn't really a third option.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
I am a reasonably prolific poster who has argued for some time that Conflict Theory offers clearly superior predictive power. The difference between kulak and myself, I believe, is that I am capable of communicating on the spectrum this forum is designed for, and he is not. If you need an example of posters being "all in" on conflict theory, I think I'm probably one of the better picks. There are others, but most of the ones more extreme than me tend to get argued against and modded fairly frequently.
I think using my posts would work less-well, though, because I generally don't write unhinged rants arguing for ceaseless war of all against all, and I generally try to back up my arguments with solid evidence. Likewise, people who appeal to all the great old posters who used to represent Blue Tribe here tend to not remember how some of these pivotal conversations actually went on the Blue end. People don't remember the chronic advocacy for lawless violence, the defenses of the indefensible, the absurd behavior, and the blatant trolling campaigns when it's their side doing it. I miss the old days, and I'm dedicated to trying to keep the conversation running as long as possible, but if you think the breakdown is the fault of nasty right-wingers, I think you are mistaken.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Can you give some examples of things Blue Tribers wish to protest through silent vigil without signs or messages, where you believe a ban on such protest is similarly understandable?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
I view "porn-brained" the same way. Men have a remarkably strong sex drive, always have and likely always will. We currently have an environment that supercharges that drive to woeful effect, and some people like it that way and think it should be the norm forever, because they confuse single-factor, short-term gratification with Eudemonia.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
I find "pornbrained" is generally a bad-faith, loaded word used to demonize aspects of male sexuality that have existed forever.
A lot of Americans are fat. do you think their environment (cars, desk jobs, unlimited cheap candy and ice cream) might have something to do with that? Do you roll your eyes at "healthy at any size"?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
For some perverse reason, it cracked me up the first time I heard it, and every subsequent time since. The song came on in a playlist, and with zero context but the music and that line, I knew exactly what I was in for, and loved every minute of it.
There's no accounting for taste!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Golden Brown
One of my all-time favorite songs; the harpsichord is simply delightful!
Are you familiar with their Vladimir sequence?
"Thank you my fatherland, for helping me to be totally re-integrated and normalized."
Bonus:
"To the Advisory board for the development of cultural visits to sympathetic states: Dear Sirs!"
The Wayback Machine is your friend. I'm currently reading cached copies to my wife in the evenings. I also should mention that the audio books are excellent for long road trips.
What are you watching, listening to, and reading all the time?
I've pretty much completely stopped watching movies and TV shows. I've stopped reading American comics, and even webcomics, which used to be my jam, and most of my favorite artists have been canceled one way or another. I've stopped buying and playing Triple-A games.
We used to discuss the culture war fight over TV and movies; mostly we don't any more, but my observation is that looking back on those discussions, the critics of SJ have pretty much run the table. TV and Film have been reduced to bombed-out shells, with cratering audiences and cauterized fan-bases. How's The Witcher doing these days? How's Marvel? Star Wars? Star Trek? Disney generally? In the games space, we see former titans of the industry absolutely imploding; Ubisoft, Blizzard, Obsidian, Bioware, the list goes on and on. Comics aren't looking so hot, but I'll admit I mostly stopped paying attention years ago. My musical tastes are eclectic enough that I don't really have an opinion on how that field is going; maybe it's still rocking along in fine form? But in the fields I pay attention to, American culture seems dead as Dillinger.
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