FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
Ok but then every other war ever is due to religious reasons?
A considerable amount of the 20th century's murder didn't happen during wartime, and it's quite obvious that not all or even most previous wars were primarily or even significantly religiously motivated.
Rational Materialism was supposed to solve war and governance, and indeed the perils of human nature generally. That was the explicit claim of its adherents going into and for most of the 20th century. It instead resulted in some of the worst war and worst governance ever seen. The places where it delivered the best results were the places where it was given the strongest pushback from "irrational" Christianity, ie the anglosphere, which diverged markedly from continental philosophical and political trends.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19hr ago
What justifies the violations of freedom that allow that material control?
They've observably gotten a lot of mileage out of material inequality and various flavors of materialist apocalypse.
The question isn't whether race is their biggest, best wedge in the American context. It certainly is. The question is whether the giant hammering that wedge ceases if the wedge were to be taken away. I'm pretty confident it does not. They will find their next-best alternative, and continue swinging.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
To be clear, my experience with ordinary, working-class-in-the-sense-of-actually-works and middle class blacks has been that they know there's an issue with their culture, are often frustrated with African American Community Leaders and democrats for not addressing or acknowledging it...
I've had similar direct experiences. Unfortunately, I've also had direct experiences where individual blacks I knew bought the progressive racism/white-supremacy message hook line and sinker. There's a large section of the community that knows that at least a considerable portion of the problems are in-house. Aaron McGruder made a career out of shouting that message through a megaphone. But when push comes to shove, my observation is that the race-baiters win. Blue Tribe tells blacks that their problems are the fault of Red Tribe. Blue Tribe gets political power, Blacks get cheap hope and the avoidance of some really deeply unpleasant conversations. Until Red Tribe figures out how to make a better offer, it seems unlikely that this will change. And again, why should it? Red Tribe signed off on the promises too. Red Tribe politicians made all the same speeches about how education would fix everything. Red Tribe really does largely support and run the systems that coordinate meanness against individual blacks, at least if you're speaking in general terms. And crucially, Reds fundamentally do not have a better offer, at least from the black perspective, and at least in the short term. "we don't know how to solve this, and much of it is your own fault" is never going to beat "it's all their fault, help us beat them and we'll make you whole."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
how does that match with the Enlightenment, French Revolution, and Communist revolutions? Some of those were pretty pro-natal at some points. I guess China's a pretty stand-out example for fertility control, though...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
apologies, I thought it was well-known enough to not need the attribution. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I would describe that as pretty solid evidence for the Rotherham pattern. I'm now very interested in why they decided to drop the case.
your hatred of “the Blue Tribe” — a fictitious construct which, I maintain, exists more in your head than it does in the real world — verges at times on the atavistic.
Communism was pretty clearly a thing, and there's a reason it remains so disproportionately popular, even in America, given its history. That reason has pretty much nothing to do with Black people or America's racial history. More generally, I'm curious what you would consider an existence-proof of Blue Tribe as you perceive me to understand it. We've been in the middle of a steadily-escalating tribal war for several years now. This war routinely results in very public political violence, frequently of a highly organized nature, and this violence observably receives broad-based institutional and public support in large volumes. It's obvious that large percentages of the population actively sort their social context along the lines of the Red/Blue tribal split. The number of norms and institutions that have collapsed under the tectonic force of the Red/Blue faultline is quite long and rapidly growing, and most of the rest are visibly shaking.
You've got me on the atavistic hatred, though.
My perception is that the vast majority of Americans, though, are nowhere near as committed to hatred of those who vote for a different party, nor would they be so thoroughly filled with hatred and distrust of the other side in the event that the extremely live-wire issue of pervasive black criminality were removed from the everyday lifestyle calculations of so many people.
The vast majority of Americans have no significant commitments, to hatred or to any other ideological construct. They simply follow the crowd, as humans always have and always will. Most Russians in 1920 were not "committed" in any meaningful sense to the Communist project, nor most Germans to the Nazi project in 1938. Most Democrat-voting Americans didn't support rioting and defunding of police in 2016, and probably weren't all that comfortable with it even when it was happening post-Floyd.
In no way do I believe that issues related to crime and racial grievance are the sole motivating reason for political polarization in America; I simply believe that these issues have a far stronger valence than most others — at least for urban (and, increasingly, suburban) voters — given their intractability, the web of obfuscation and lies characterizing discourse about them, and the way that these issues reveal some vexing contradictions at the heart of the American individualist/liberal framework.
The model you seem to be applying is that there's a problem, and conflict over how to fix the problem is driving the split, and so if the problem were removed the split would heal. You don't seem to recognize a values-level split between Reds and Blues, which is presumably why you think the categories the split demarcates are in my head.
The model I'm applying is that tribes exist to coordinate and control power, as is necessary and proper for all large-scale populations of humans. Power exists to solve problems, and if one specific object-level problem goes away, another will take its place. Unfortunately, values-incompatibility is a meta-level problem, and past some level of divergence, solutions are not compatible with cooperation across the divide. Object-level problems, which is what our society previously perceived race to be, do not directly create values-level conflict, but rather are drawn into them as the tribes grope for leverage against each other. It seems entirely possible for race to rise to a values-level problem itself; maybe it already is one for our society, and certainly it is one for many individuals. Maybe that's the way we'll go. The fact remains that from my perspective, Blacks and their dysfunction is far less of a problem for me and mine than their white Blue-Tribe patrons. Blacks do not rule me, and I see no plausible path by which they could rule me in the foreseeable future, so the threat of their hatred is manageable. Blues can and have ruled me, and intend to do so again; their hatred is a much more serious problem, and it's hard for me to see how that would change regardless of the disposition of the race question.
I have 2/3rds of a reply to your comment on religion sitting in the hopper, btw. Always a pleasure.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I guess the difference is that I'm skeptical that black victimhood really is a central plank to Blue ideology. My perception is that the central plank in Blue ideology is the belief that they are capable of an arbitrary level of control over material reality, that they have the power to make the world as they wish it to be. "We know how to solve all our problems; if a problem isn't solved, it's the fault of someone with a name and an address."
It seems to me that the American Blue Tribe has existed since the founding, and they coexisted with explicit, legally-codified racism for a very long time without much of an issue. It likewise seems to me that many of their foreign analogues coexisted with deep cultural racism for even longer, and in some cases continue to do so right down to the present day. Blue Tribe's commitment to the racial justice narrative seems just as contingent to me as their commitment to Christianity or Bodily Autonomy. Blue ideology is explicitly built around facilitating rapid, fundamental social change; appeals to history and tradition seem to me to be rather badly missing the point.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
from my understanding via previous discussion here, "in the interest of justice" is stock language, and the dismissal of charges were announced by officials well before this viral incident occurred. I share concern that we're looking at the Rotherham pattern here, but if there's solid evidence for it, I haven't seen it yet.
Another way to frame this is from the Black perspective, as I understand it:
Blacks agreed to largely stop calling people racist, and whites agreed to end the legacy of racism. That is, Black Culture never understood the deal to be that the underclass was incorrigible and would be written off, but rather than education and social policy would dissolve the underclass and uplift all blacks together. They were willing to tolerate a considerable amount of write-off in the short term, but the public agreement (and it was a very public agreement in the late 90s - early 2000s) was that this uplift was happening and would continue until the problem went away.
From my own perspective, the fact that this agreement was based on a lie does not strike me as the fault of Black Culture; they mostly weren't the ones who built the ideological foundations of the Church of the Blank Slate. It's not their fault either for noticing that decade after decade, the results they were promised never materialize. They aren't the ones who bet the full faith and credit of our entire society on "social science" that turned out to be ideologically-motivated fictions. They are at fault, it seems to me, for many of their own pathologies; even accepting their framing that America as constituted was, is and likely will continue to be innately hostile to their culture, there's much better ways to handle such a reality than the strategies they've collectively defaulted to. But this doesn't change the fundamental nature of the situation: the problem isn't the blacks demanding impossible solutions, it's the whites who spent decades promising those impossible solutions, and are now desperate to skip out on the checks they've written and cannot cash. I remain baffled by the people, some of them commenters here, who seem to believe that if we could just sufficiently marginalize blacks, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe could lay their other differences aside and get down to productive cooperation.
I share your skepticism that any of this can be meaningfully rolled back to some more congenial prior state. We burned unbelievably vast and irreplaceable resources on a scam perpetrated by a specific band of ideologues, leaving us in a strictly-worse position.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...
We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Also, the same weapons and the same spirit that effectively precludes totalitarian domination also precludes domination by foreigners. Or in the vernacular, "welcome to the rice fields, motherfucker."
thanks much!
The thing about blender is that it's a fully-general tool, and there's a straight tradeoff between power and generality and ease-of-use. Think of the difference between a dollar store calculator and a ti-85. the basic calculator is very straightforward: six or so function buttons, ten number buttons, a clear button and that's it. the graphing calculator is completely covered in obscure buttons, many with multiple functions, and these are in turn connected to nested submenus. The calculator is a physical bottleneck to a vast ocean of capabilities, and it's so complicated because the designers are trying to surface as much of the functionality as possible.
Blender is like that but possibly worse, because the functionality is broader and much more divergent. From a user standpoint, it would probably be better to be split into a suite of ten or so different programs with strong interoperability, but probably that would create other problems. And since it's such a broad generalist program, the default interface is kinda trash for specific jobs, especially if you have prior experience with other packages. I'm working through a tutorial that puts a strong emphasis on hotkeys and custom keymapping to optimize the actual modelling workflow, and blender gets a lot more usable once you've got it set up properly and build up the necessary muscle memory.
The downside was spending two nights after the kids were down working on setup, only to realize that the folder blender was saving the settings changes to wasn't write-enabled, so all my setup was lost when I restarted my computer. not a good feel.
For those interested, this is a pretty good place to start for Blender specifically. Best advice is to open a google doc or similar and take step-by-step notes as well, and certainly write down all the hotkeys he covers.
I have been increasingly souring on Trump's mockery of the faith for a while, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. He clearly does not care about Christ at all, and only cynically signals his Christianity in an empty way.
This is a surprise to you? I've never seen him exhibit even the most basic form of contrition or repentance. I've never seen him admit fault in any substantive way. The man is a walking monument to the sin of pride. As for cynical signaling of Christianity, this seems the norm for modern presidents to me, with the exception of W and Carter, two of the worst presidents of the modern era. I don't disagree with your assessment, but I do wonder how any of this is new information.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
After years of modelling with a lightweight 3d package, I'm making a burn-the-ships switch to Blender. I've spent the last week in tutorial hell in the evenings, getting the basic workspace setup finished and digging into the modifiers and shaders systems. Current goals:
- overview of the node-based shader system - done
- basic setup and general modelling tools and modifiers - in progress
- rigging basics - barely started.
- UV/Texturing - just started, probably going to need to learn a secondary software package for this as well
- node-based geometry modifiers - no idea how deep this well is, but the goal is to use it to generate terrain and environments at first.
We'll see how it goes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
A good point, and my bad for not reading more closely.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
So here again there’s the idea that sexuality is just an instrument, and there’s no inherent value in physical sexual enjoyment itself.
Your claim has moved from "They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse", that's new age degeneracy" to something along the lines of "Christians are not hedonists". The fact remains that Christian teaching has in fact encouraged Christians to enjoy sex with their spouse, and has done so for quite a long time.
So I think it's pretty confusing under what circumstances you're allowed to enjoy yourself. As a byproduct mostly.
In what way is it confusing? Pleasure should not be treated as an end unto itself. We should derive pleasure in ways consonant with an ordered, faithful life, which is no great hardship, nor unduly restrictive; I have lived as a hedonist, and I can say from personal experience that the hedonic treadmill is very real.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I think it would be pretty fantastic if you actually dug into the logic underlying any of your frequent pronouncements on this subject, rather than acting as though your highly-idiosyncratic perspective should be straightforwardly obvious.
A few questions to help the process along:
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Is the parent-child relationship also obviously a form of prostitution for sociobiological reasons? If not why not? Or depending on how one drew the lines, is it more analogous to simping?
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How does the purported adversarial relationship with sex "emerge" in traditionalist relationships? Is this why their marriages observably last much longer, and why they report much higher rates of satisfaction with those marriages? How does this emergent adversarial relationship with sex interact with the consistent reports of higher sexual satisfaction among such traditionalists?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
LARP, Cargo Cult, Skin Suit, The Purpose of a System is What it Does, The Cruelty is the Point, Master/Slave Morality are all terms that are just used as boo-lights when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true.
I'd strongly disagree. All of these have utility in describing human individual and group behavior. I say this even though I strongly disagree with even proper applications. The concepts are coherent, and even if heavily misused, their proper applications are still relevant.
"The cruelty is the point" is a critique of the endpoint that starts with "be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness". Meanness, cruelty in other words, is the core of many social enforcement mechanisms. Pointing out that some action is "cruel" will often not get people to abandon that action, because to at least some degree they believe that "cruelty" is necessary. I certainly do.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
If not, where do traditions even come from in the first place?
Traditions start as innovations, then become traditions.
The problem here is the claim that one is not innovating when one RETVRNS.
One is not innovating when one adopts another's innovation either, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
The value of tradition qua tradition is in the Lindy effect, but if that's what you care about, a "tradition" that must be "RETVRNed" to is really no tradition at all, but a LARP.
My parents, and their parents, were part of a church. I was raised in this church. I decided in my twenties to leave this church despite my parents and siblings all remaining in it, and in my thirties I decided to, as you have it, RETVRN. Was the tradition broken, given that I left?
If I had stayed away, but instead my children decided to RETVRN, would the tradition be broken?
If there's a community of a hundred people forming a church, and 80% leave the church and 20% stay, and then we fastforward, say, three generations, would descendants of the 80% joining the church be LARPing? Would converts with no connection to the church at all be LARPing?
In short, can you join or adopt a tradition in any meaningful sense? If not, where do traditions even come from in the first place?
A laboratory allows for safety equipment and controlled experiments. An external force coming in and wrecking your shit, in contrast, is the law of the jungle.
Airborne troops dispersing unarmed, underage protestors with bayonets mounted to their rifles is... what? Is the crucial difference that they didn't use actual tanks? Is it that it didn't come to actual fighting (to my knowledge)?
They're not exactly "encouraged to enjoy sex with their spouse"
Yes we are.
that's new age degeneracy.
No it isn't. Have you read Song of Solomon?
It's better to abstain and pray according to the church fathers. But because humans are so weak, the married are supposed to occasionally close their eyes and think of canaan so their spouse does not engage in sexual intercourse with lucifer or other people, which would be like, so much more disgusting.
That is a blatant misreading of the quoted passage, which specifically states that sex should be a regular part of married life, and that a major goal of this sexual activity is gratification of your partner. The Bible contains numerous depictions of erotic love portrayed as a positive good, and again, there is an entire book of erotic poetry right there in the middle. You are quoting the one passage most conducive to your desired distortion and portraying it as normative, hoping that people won't notice that this passage is an outlier and that even as an outlier it still doesn't say what you want it to say. It's also ignoring the passage's historical context: whatever your thoughts on when and by who it was actually written, the text is explicitly framed as advice for people who are about to undergo an attempted extermination by the Roman state. Having a spouse and children doesn't make it easier to handle imprisonment, torture or execution for your faith.
Nor is it necessary to approach this question from pure theory; it's pretty simple to reduce this to an empirical question and just look at surveys of sexual satisfaction, in which conservative Christians score highly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
*Groomer discourse referring to straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”
What's your take on people using the term "groomer" to refer to a person in a position of authority who uses that position to secretly involve themselves in a child's sexuality?
A huge portion of the debate very clearly centers on authority figures lying to parents to hide information from them about what's going on with their kids. Surely you are aware of the many, many documented cases where this has been the center of the controversy? How can you frame teachers and administrators "teaching" kids about aberant sexuality, explicitly urging the kids to hide this information from their parents, and then lying to the parents when they ask what's going on, as a matter of policy, as parents "failing to teach" their kids?
is the car model fully UV-mapped?
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