FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I am not a Yarvin fan, but I'd offer this:
It’s not news that I believe the Cathedral is evil. And since it’s 2008, you’d expect evil to have not only a name, but a blog. And sure enough it does. Evil’s name is Timothy Burke, he is a professor of history (specializing in southern Africa) at Swarthmore, and his blog is Easily Distracted.
The great thing about Professor Burke is that he appears to have a conscience. Almost every post in his blog can be understood as a kind of rhetorical struggle to repress some inner pang of doubt. He is the Good German par excellence. When people of this mindset found themselves in the Third Reich, they were “moderate Nazis.” In Czechoslovakia or Poland they “worked within the system.” Professor Burke is nowhere near being a dissident, but there is a dissident inside him. He doesn’t like it, not at all. He stabs it with his steely knives. He can check out any time. But he can never leave. His position is a high one, and not easy to get.
The entire blog is characterized—indeed it could serve as a type specimen for—the quality that Nabokov called poshlost. Simply an embarrassment of riches. I am saddened by the fact that, as a new parent, I cannot devour the whole thing. But as a case study, I have selected this. The whole post is a treat, but I am especially tickled by the line:
I am drawn to procedural liberalism because I live in worlds that are highly procedural and my skills and training are adapted to manipulating procedural outcomes.
“Manipulating procedural outcomes.” My entire post—maybe even my entire blog—reduced to three words. If you want to know how you are governed, this is it: you are governed by manipulating procedural outcomes. It’s perfect. It belongs on someone’s tomb.
That was, to me, a penetrating insight and an encapsulation of exceptional utility.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
the dissident-right/alt-right/white-identitarian faction of twitter, which adopted Pepe the frog as their symbol back during the 2016 election race.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Your analysis seems to match up with the Onlyfangs guild leader's breakdown, which I've just been sampling. Most interesting, and a neat toy example of politics at play. Now I'm wondering if streamer solidarity is why Asmon gave such a positive take.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Some background: KnowYourMeme
Piratesoftware, a prominent streamer, participated in a World of Warcraft Hardcore raid that went bad and resulted in two of his guild-mates getting their characters perma-killed. People blamed him running away without supporting the other players for the bad result, and the internet commenced to arguing over whether he could have done something different that would have resulted in the two making it out alive, or whether he did nothing wrong. Prominent streamer Asmongold (notably a veteran WoW player himself) did a hour-plus video breakdown, and his assessment was that Piratesoftware bore no significant responsibility for the bad outcome, as all the serious mistakes were made by others.
This has been your entirely useless information for the day.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I agree that this is the most likely first-order outcome. It is also true that you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. What's the cost of ammunition?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
From Asmon's breakdown video, it looked like Thor did nothing wrong, and the accusations to the contrary were groundless. They messed up the engagement, the raid leader called "run", Thor ran, then the leader tried to un-call "run" while the tank screwed up his positioning and pulled an additional pack. I know little of WoW, but from the analysis, it looked like Thor more or less played it straight, while the people accusing him bore the large majority of the responsibility for the clown-show resulting.
You appear to be operating on the assumption that the rules enforce themselves. They do not, cannot, and never could. Rules can never constrain human Will; all they can do is coordinate the wills of the many to a coherent goal.
This would be silly if it had no chance of securing a significant political outcome, and if employment of the strategy were costly to those utilizing it. As things stand, there is no significant cost and the chance of securing a significant political outcome is non-zero. That outcome almost certainly will not be that the ERA becomes the law of the land; much more likely is some combination of eroded public trust in the courts that decide against the lawsuits, more talking points about right-wing lawlessness and judicial oppression, and perhaps local wins in blue-tribe areas that take years to overturn on appeal. Such outcomes would not be worth it if the attempt came freighted with a significant cost, but since they are effectively free within the decision-horizon of Blue Tribe, there is no reason not to employ them as often as possible.
[EDIT] - Let's try for some additional precision.
I think I'm exaggerating to say that lawsuits based on this are "inevitable." My assessment is that the person who set up and released this announcement percieves lawsuits as a likely-enough outcome to be worth the cost, which is very likely to be minimal to non-existent.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Michael Reinoehl was enforcing wokeness when he murdered a Trump supporter in cold blood on the streets of Portland following a pro-trump demonstration.
His allies were enforcing wokeness when they publicly celebrated their ally's murder later that evening.
Would you agree that these two examples are, in fact, people enforcing wokeness? If not, what would be your disagreement with that framing?
Who is "they"?
The Social Justice set. The people who think our main problems are caused by Oppressors organizing society to keep the oppressed under their heel. This set believes that they can bypass persuasion ("ordinary politics") and simply compel people to do things their way. Since they are not attempting persuasion, a legible label for their movement or their preferred tactics is completely contrary to their interests, so they actively and vociferously fight any label that starts to gain prominence.
We are talking about a movement that has dominated western politics for the last decade. To the extent that your confusion is in good faith, it is a testament to the effectiveness of this resistance to labels and analysis.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.
Nationwide riots seem like a pretty concrete result. Turning off law enforcement for a variety of crimes in major metro areas seems like a pretty concrete result. The title 9 fight in university campuses seemed like a fairly concrete result. Logan act prosecutions and the FBI spying on presidential candidates seems like concrete results.
As much as conservatives would like to view it as a symbol of capitulation to radical ideology, it's really just the cheapest, lowest-effort thing a company can do to make it look like they're changing the status quo.
...And if Social Justice encroachment into the business world had ended at pronouns in emails, this would be a valid argument. But it didn't. It expanded into bedrock corporate policies about hiring and firing, and into a metastasizing consultancy empire that existed to divert money from corporate profits to progressive activists. Progressives were injecting an ad hoc private taxation system into the corporate economy, with the threat of significant economic harm to any individual or organization who objected.
Firstly because it just kicks the can one step up — how you define “social justice”?
A set of interlocking theories emerging from the academic field of Sociology that share in common an understanding of society as dominated by oppressor/oppressed dynamics: Feminism (Men/Women), "anti-racism" (whites/non-whites), Queer/QUILTBAG (Heteros/Queers), Labor (workers vs bosses), etc. These theories coordinate support between their adherents and collectively demand a revolutionary otherthrow of existing social structures to achieve "justice". They also consistently fail to achieve any positive end, and then explain away this failure as due to them not having been granted sufficient power and control over Society.
...I'm skeptical that anyone thoughtful, at this late stage, actually believes that "social justice" is a nebulous or poorly-defined concept. It appears to me that the concept is well-defined, and the large majority of the remaining confusion comes from its adherents who perceive legibility to be contrary to their ideological interests, and so actively fight against any attempt to accurately label or describe their actions or organizations.
there are tons of woke NGOs and anonymous woke bureaucrats doing plenty behind the scenes, unheralded, to advance specific causes and to cause material legal and political change.
Unheralded to who? It seems to me that they herald themselves quite a bit to their fellow NGOs and bureaucrats, just not the public at large. They make Powerpoints, and present them. They hold conferences and publish papers and manifestos. They organize and coordinate around the ideology collectively, they capture policy and process, they manipulate procedural outcomes. All of these are social acts, thus prone to performance.
This action is "performative" because it so evidently degenerates into assessment by consensus, not real-world results. The proper practice of anti-racism means securing the approval of the anti-racist community, not the actual reduction of racism in any objectively defined or measured sense. Victory is nothing less or more than the approval of one's peers, and real-world results are entirely ignored.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
question from the peanut gallery: what is "system stuff"? I run across mentions of it frequently, but it's always in a context where everyone apparently already knows what it is, and I've never found the headwaters, as it were.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
For starters, I accepted the claim that the riot was notably violent, with the rioters killing six people including a police officer, and that the rioters were armed. This turned out to be a naked lie.
it's that refusal to criticize someone for their history of at least failing to avoid the appearance of authoritarian or corrupt behavior can be a tacit admission of fear that the person is, in fact, authoritarian or corrupt.
I fear authoritarian (especially in the anarcho-tyranny sense) and corrupt government generally. I think that Trump often does things that can be easily perceived and in some cases actually are authoritarian and corrupt. I do not criticize these things, and I argue against criticisms of these things by others, because I believe that such arguments are highly selective and will not be deployed against the authoritarianism and corruption of non-Trump non-Populist politicians.
I do not agree that critiques of Trump's authoritarianism and corruption are valid, not because he is not authoritarian or corrupt, but because I have observed that those arguments do not generalize, and do not believe this will change without significant disruption of the existing system. I am not going to cooperate with the coordination of Trump- or Populist-specific anti-authoritarian or anti-corruption measures. I am not going to cooperate with people who have a long history of defecting against my interests and are poised to do so again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
But what disturbs me is the extent to which the entire conservative movement has retconned not just the events of four years ago, but their own reactions to those events, such that these days, to be disturbed by them is considered some form of lib hysteria.
I had an in-depth discussion of the Jan 6th riots and my own reactions to them more or less in real-time. My assessment of the event has changed drastically since then, as the "facts" much of that reaction was based on have washed away by subsequent revelations. I do not think this change in my perception of the event is "retconning"; I know for a fact that I was lied to about significant portions of the event, and strongly suspect I've been lied to about many others. Subtracting the falsified and highly questionable portions of the narrative, and adding in the context that this narrative intentionally excluded, dramatically changes the nature of the subsequent conversation.
Memes like this (currently top on /r/NCD) pretty much sum it up.
I would really like to see this meme, but reddit linking is broken. Any chance you can post it somewhere else? comments here allow image posting, for example.
This is truly an excellent post, in any case. If I could sum up the general thus I get from it, it would be "Reality intrudes". You've noted the economic and military factors; and to me the cultural factor seems significant as well. The Culture War is in fact a war, and Canada (and the UK and Europe) chose to involve themselves in that war. They fucked with our politics, and now we're fucking with their politics right back. As I see it, the goal isn't to land the Marine Corps on Prince Edward Island, it's to communicate to Canada that involving themselves in the internal politics of America is a very, very bad idea.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Fixed, thanks. And apparently that image address consistently redirects. most odd.
And that's an entirely reasonable question. The answer I'd give is because most of us have spent several years discussing the "Trump is a fascist" thesis, and have concluded that it is garbage. A big part of that is that we used to have a lot more people who were willing to make the "Trump is a fascist" argument on specific grounds and under specific predictions, had their predictions falsified by subsequent events and subsequently went away. I've personally been considering a retrospective about the debates I had on Jan 6th-7th 2020 and the surrounding months, based on the grind of subsequent revelations.
Many of us, myself included, have a high tolerance for repetition and are more than happy for another round of the debate, if that's actually a debate you're interested in. I'm confident the facts are on my side, as they were the last several times I went round on it. Certainly your abbreviated position statements do not seem terribly revelatory. Just for starters, I'm greatly amused by
violence
given the facts readily available.
Likewise,
contempt for journalists and journalism
is most amusing. When humans act contemptibly, contempt is the appropriate response. the title of "journalist" is not a magic talisman against this obvious reality, and the modern journalist class is a trash disaster that beggars the concept of satire. Not all Journalists, of course. Just most of them.
And likewise
he's been elected to deploy the military domestically
but, shit, not like this or this, right? presumably this time it's a bad deployment of the military domestically? ...To speak plainly, the US Military has been "deployed domestically" for a variety of purposes, legitimate and not. Using the US military to assist with a large-scale breakdown in law enforcement is an entirely legitimate action of the President, has numerous examples in the past, and would not be necessary were it not for the chronic, lawless intransigence of the progressive coalition.
and he indicates he will expand the borders using the military
I'm confident that the US military won't be used by Trump to expand the borders of the United States of America, and that people worrying about it are wasting their time. I mean, just for starters, integrating Canada into the US would vastly increase the odds that Trump dies in prison, so he personally has every reason to avoid such an eventuality. It seems to me that he's running his mouth in a deliberate attempt to humiliate the Canadian government, which seems to me to be a reasonable action given the shit they've been pulling lately. Ditto for the UK, and Europe generally. Live by the multinational globalist coalition, die by the multinational globalist coalition; the Canadian, UK and European governments have taken an interest in the political process of my country, so I think we're justified in taking an interest right back.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Makes sense. On the OP's topic, I'm a fan of Tex Talks Battletech, a series of long-form history/lore videos for Battletech. If you're looking for something to try, I'd recommend his vids on the Charger and the battles of Twycross and Tukkayid. If those work for you, the Amaris Civil War is a fantastic longer-form treatment, and the rest of his battletech series are as well. The heaping helping of tangential silly memes is just the cherry on top.
and one (1) gallon of genuine iowa high-fructose corn syrup.
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