FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
As I pointed out to you elsewhere, this is true if and only if "a woman is anyone who calls herself a woman" is the only statement about "woman" that you will ever use, with no connection to any other statement or issue allowed, ever.
This sort of hermetic formulation is not what people generally expect from a definition, and pretending otherwise makes it difficult to take you seriously. And this is why people with more at stake than you hem and haw and rely on squid ink when asked in the real world: they can't just retreat to forum anonymity when asked to apply or extend their definition in even the simplest ways.
For the same reason that I don't think we should have laws requiring Church attendance. Christianity's first-order ends cannot be achieved by coercion. Christian charity is not enforced by law; charity enforced by law is not meaningfully Christian. See my post here for more elaboration of the argument.
What would the argument in favor be?
We had laws that imposed significant restrictions on immigration. People who disagreed with those laws could have abided by them until such time as they could change them. Instead, they organized at a national level to simply ignore them. What you are seeing now is the destructive downstream effects of that decades-long policy.
I stopped believing in naive "rule of law" some time ago, and for what seem to me to be solid, objective reasons. I fundamentally do not believe that we have been operating in an environment of rigorous rule of law, which Trump is now violating; rather, it seems to me that Trump is simply playing the game the way it has been played for decades now.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I could see arguments either way, but I lean pretty hard toward "no".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
These seem like reasonable definitions.
I know neither the Christians you've met in your life, nor the Progressives. Maybe the Christians were really awful, and the Progressives really saintly. I am curious as to how you see the Progressives "loving the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind"; what does that mean to a non-Christian observing non-Christians? Likewise "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
My suspicion, perhaps unfounded, is that you are rounding these principles to "is a progressive". Perhaps I'm wrong, and there's more to it.
Do you believe your experience generalizes? Moving beyond Christians and Progressives you've personally met, I presume you'd agree that we can observe Christians and Progressives in society generally, and identify notable examples. When drawing from a reference class that broad, we ought to see extremes both ways. I can certainly find cases of Christians interacting with Progressives where the Progressives are acting in a significantly more Christian fashion than the Christians. Would you agree that there are identifiable, individual cases of Christians interacting with Progressives where the Christians do in fact seem more Christian than the Progressives?
Take the cake shop guy versus the trans activist; does it seem to you that Phillips was acting in a more Christian fashion, or Scardina?
Would you agree that the simplest, most obvious solution to the wage gap and indeed every other politically significant, statistically-measured gender gap in existence is for all men to say they are women?
That is to say, "whoever says they are a woman is a woman" is indeed simple, in atomic isolation. It is also completely incoherent with, at a minimum, the entire edifice of Feminism. When people say that the progressive position is not simple, they do not mean that the definitions offered have too many words, but rather that the position is evidently incoherent, and that this incoherent state is only maintainable in a safe space and with an ocean of squid ink.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Is your argument that it is obvious that Biden was the one who signed the order? If so, I would disagree.
Is your argument that it is obvious that regardless of who signed the order, Biden was mentally competent enough that he clearly understood and approved of the orders being issued in his name? If so, I would certainly disagree, given that we appear to have at least one observed case where Biden had no awareness of one of his own executive orders.
Is your argument that it doesn't matter? If so, I strongly disagree. I am not willing to accept "presidential power" being wielded by unknown staffers on behalf of a mentally-vacant president. That would seem to be straightforward fraud. It is true that I probably cannot prove that this is what happened in this case, but it is at the least a live possibility, and forcing the issue seems like a good way to actually address the extremely large and extremely damaging conspiracy to conceal Biden's incapacity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Every progressive I have met in my life has espoused the tenets of Christianity more than the sum total of Christians I have known in my life.
What are the tenets of Christianity, as you understand them?
I can think in my 20+ years of living two Christians that met the minimum definition of a Christian, while I can think of plenty of atheist progressives who have gone beyond the minimum.
What is the "minimum definition of Christianity", in your view?
Even granting the framing that progressives are anti-Christian and MAGA are bad Christians, I'm not sure where that implies that Christians shouldn't challenge MAGA bad Christianity, attempt to drag it towards better Christianity, or even simply warn Christians against imitating MAGA?
What's your evidence that they aren't doing any or all of these three things?
Christians can be in a tactical alliance with MAGA while also needing to maintain a sense of why MAGA is bad and they must not become MAGA.
The chain of inference here seems quite long. Is Musk MAGA? When he claimed that massive "skilled" immigration was a good thing and got immediately hammered by the grassroots, were the people hammering him rejecting MAGA? Is MAGA bad, and if so, why?
From the inside, the proper way for Christianity to interact with politics is a very interesting question. Let's presume that "MAGA" stands for right-wing politics not explicitly guided by Christian principles; that seems to be your general intent here, though if you'd disagree I invite you to offer a more fitting definition.
Christianity tried right-wing politics explicitly guided by Christian principles during the Bush administration, and it seems to me the result was disaster, even from a Christian perspective. The reasons for this disaster seem pretty straightforward to me: first-order Christian ends can't really be secured by Government power, second-order Christian ends mostly can't be secured without social consensus, and the Christians (along with everyone else, for the most part) were sufficiently blind to the realities of their situation that prudence in the exercise of power never materialized, and their political capital was entirely wasted.
As I see it, Christianity's interaction with MAGA has abandoned pursuit of first- and second-order Christian ends through the exercise of Government power, and are aiming exclusively for prudent exercise of power. That is, Christians are spending their political capital in an attempt to prevent rule by people who hate them, to secure some modicum of political and social stability, and to attempt to preserve and maintain peace and plenty. The hope is that if prudent exercise of power can be obtained, first- and second-order Christian ends can be pursued outside the arena of political power, as individuals and as churches.
Let's leave aside MAGA for the moment. What does "Challenge Bad Christianity" look like? To me, it seems like this involves preventing people from pushing non-Christian values and positions while claiming the mantle of "Christianity". An obvious example would be Pope Francis's various shenanigans. But neither Musk nor Trump are making any credible claim to be Christian, nor indeed any claim to speak for Christians. Both are very clearly pagans, and never made any notable attempt to claim otherwise. And indeed, this is how most Pro-Trump Christian discourse has gone: Trump is compared to Nebuchadnezzar, say, a pagan monarch with no claim to righteousness who can nonetheless serve as God's instrument. There hasn't been nearly as much discourse on Musk, but I'd expect it to evolve in a similar fashion.
I see no evidence that Christians have endorsed the paganism of either Musk or Trump. What I see is Christians accepting the evident reality: we no longer have the power to impose our values through law, even were it desirable to do so, and we no longer have the consensus necessary to impose our values on society, even were it desirable to do so. We cannot compel, but can only attempt to persuade, and those unwilling to be persuaded will do what seems right in their own eyes. Our fight now is centered on what Christianity actually is within itself, not on how best to impose Christian values and rules on the pagans without. It seems to me that people arguing for a Christian broadside against Musk's or Trump's paganism come mainly in one of two varieties: Christians who haven't grasped the scale of the change in our society and of Christianity's position in it, and non-Christians who for reasons of mental habit or momentary expedience prefer the Christianity of the past to the Christianity of the present. Neither, it seems to me, really has a coherent argument here.
If people actually want Christians to start policing non-Christians again, they should present a general case for when and why this is desirable, and also for why the desirability of such policing was not evident in the past. Absent such a case, it is difficult to take their arguments seriously. "Family Values" as a going concern died with the introduction of ubiquitous internet porn; people appealing to it now as though it were a live political entity are either deeply confused or lying.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Just wanted to say that I appreciate the offering of actual data on a question of fact.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
There is no evidence that he was looking for stuff to steal, and to my knowledge no evidence that he had stolen in the past. The "citizen's arrest" was very clearly illegal, resisting it was a reasonable response, and shooting him for resisting was not self defense and was in fact murder.
It would have been trivial for the men involved to call the police and follow him at a distance if necessary. By chasing him while brandishing firearms, they gave him reasonable fear for his life and invalidated any claim of their own to self-defense in the ensuing altercation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
And even if they were, they don't have some magically independent power to conjure life-screwing facts out of thin air.
Kavanaugh was an example of life-ruining facts literally being conjured out of thin air. They didn't succeed, but that was due to notable external factors.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
This is a pretty good example of a low-effort "boo outgroup" post. From the rules:
There are literally millions of people on either side of every major conflict, and finding that one of them is doing something wrong or thoughtless proves nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
I think I have heard the name "Lomez" before. I have no idea who they are, or why they are a good representative for the "Right Wing" generally, or why this meme tweet is indicative of "Right Wing Life Advice". I think it's probably possible to describe a coherent category of "Right Wing Life Advice" and describe central examples of that category; I do not think "not going to college, working at the nail factory, marrying an 170 pound woman, dumpster diving for yogurt, and not getting vaccinated" would be a reasonable summation of that category, but if that's the argument, you should put some effort into proactively providing evidence to support it.
...and due to my "e" key being broken, @self_made_human beat me to it. Consider his warning seconded.
[OP is breaking the rules by deleting top-level posts, removing context from the discussion. Here is their post's original text]
Richard Hanania with a new article: Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks to Lobotomize.
Basically, something has happened to Musk in the last two years that has caused his brain to haywire and now he appears incapable of separating truth from fiction. For example,
Last month, a fake news account claimed, based on no evidence at all, that Zelensky had a 4% approval rating in Ukraine. This was Community Noted, which led Elon Musk to lash out and declare that the system was “being gamed” and in the process of being fixed. It was becoming increasingly difficult to see how real time factchecking could last on X when it was constantly making a fool of its owner, who has decided to take a very hands-on approach to using the platform to shape discourse in his preferred direction.
Similarly, "savings" reported by DOGE are often incorrect and need to be revised.
Increased drug use is one suspected reason, but I think it might just be brain rot from being on right wing twitter too much. It should be noted that left wing social media contagion has similarly destroyed rationale thinking in the last ten years.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
Yup. The arguments in favor of the guys attempting a "citizen's arrest" involving chasing a man on foot in a car while brandishing longarms never made any sense.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
You appear to have deleted your OP post. You've been specifically warned that making and deleting posts is egregiously obnoxious, as it removes context from the subsequent discussion. You asked if you could have an exception out of unspecified concerns over "privacy", and were told that no exception would be granted.
It's a shame, because while I strongly disagree with the positions you take in this post, I think it was an entirely fair post and it seems to have generated good discussion. I don't know why you are determined to keep engaging this way, but we are not going to allow it. I'm setting the ban at a week; other mods feel free to adjust up or down as seems appropriate. If you continue this behavior, the bans will escalate rapidly. If on the other hand, you're willing to abide by the rules of this forum, we're happy to have you and hope you will continue to contribute in the future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
Is this an example of the introduction of aesthetics into political life? How about this? I'm pretty sure I could provide additional examples, but let's start with these two.
Setting aside Benjamin's socialism, it seems to me that the important aspect of this definition is the dislocation of politics from materiality, and its fusion with aesthetics.
Could you lay out a general case for what the "dislocation of politics from materiality and its fusion with aesthetics" means? My understanding would be that politics stops being about concrete facts and rational analysis, and instead becomes about nebulous, likely irrational beliefs. Would that be accurate?
Put another way: Trump just says shit that he thinks will sound good, and then the ideological apparatus that's grown up around him rushes to rationalize and actualize it, even when that makes no fucking sense.
It seems to me that this perfectly describes a large majority of politics for as long as I've been paying attention, which is decades, plural at this point. I strongly dispute the claim that any of this is a novel creation of Trump or his supporters, and assert that the reason you are noticing it is some combination of less-polished execution and a more acute situation.
I understand that my claim here is isomorphic to a low-effort dismissal, but that is not my intention. To the extent that this is an accurate description of a real problem, the problem did not even remotely stop with Trump, and it certainly will not end with him.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
I don’t understand what you mean by “consensus on these points”.
You listed a bunch of bullet points for specific policies. Your argument seems to be that most people, or possibly everyone, will converge on opposition to these policies were they actually implemented. When TB above argues that actually he supports your list of policies, your answer is that their belief that they support such policies is mistaken, and in fact they would oppose such policies, correct? And this is a general claim that least a supermajority of people actually do not really want these policies implemented, even if they currently mistakenly believe they do, correct?
But I believe a dive into the logic behind why they believe so will reveal they, in fact, are.
Would you care to do such a dive, at least for a hypothetical person if not for TB themselves? I think it would be interesting and useful to lay out the chain of logic as clearly as possible. The claim as I understand it seems pretty implausible, but if you're going to make it wouldn't it be useful to lay out why you believe it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
Norms are still dropping, monotonously in sequence. It's entirely possible that Trump and the MAGA movement will fail. If they do, it doesn't seem likely to me that we simply return to the status quo ante.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
To the extent that "maintaining public order" is compatible with normalized widespread criminality and the dispensation of justice becomes more and more evidently an afterthought, one notices that the justice system's capacity for performing this function declines precipitously.
It seems at least possible that sustainable maintenance of public order necessitates a lot more punishing bad people than we're currently doing.
Yet he did not start any new wars, and actively worked to withdraw from existing ones, with the deep state likely violating black-letter law to successfully resist those efforts.
Increased military spending is almost certainly necessary, because it is increasingly evident that our military is clapped out and obsolete. Our navy in particular appears to be in a particularly dire state.
And since Trump has pretty thoroughly rejected the Neocon agenda, most (all?) of the prominent Neocons have found themselves unwilling or unable to support Trump. They instead support the Democrats, who have largely signaled willingness to adopt their policies. I remember people claiming that John Bolton's involvement in the first Trump administration was proof that nothing had changed. And yet, Bolton got no policy wins that I'm aware of, and now he has written a tell-all about how Trump is a monster and everyone should vote Democrat. There is a proverb about judging someone by the quality of their enemies; this seems to be an example of that.
If you disapprove of the neocon agenda, then the fact that the Democrats are inviting the Neocons in should worry you. If you support the Neocon agenda, then by all means say so. Claiming that Red Tribe is still aligned with the neocon agenda, though, is simply not factual. Again, you may not like how that turn happened, and you may even think it was dishonest to change policy without explicitly admitting error, and it is at least arguable that you would be correct. None of that changes the fact that Trump is by far the least warmongering president we've had since at least Clinton, and likely much earlier, and that this lack of warmongering is in fact one of the things his base explicitly endorses.
Would you say your argument is that there's a consensus on these points, even if a few people disagree?
I think another answer can be that people think they aren't infuriated by those things but, in fact, are.
What's the logic here? Are you arguing that people like @TitaniumButterfly are lying when they claim to not be infuriated? Is it some form of false consciousness that would be dispelled were these bullet points implemented locally?
A teacher lines students up to use the water fountain:
"Line up by reverse alphabetical order this time. ...Aaron, it's reverse alphabetical order, you should be at the back." "I've decided that I'm called William, actually."
What should the teacher do?
Again, "people are called William if they want to be called William" is likewise not a problem if and only if no action or statement ever depends on or is connected to this definition in any way. When we try to actually do things with this information, allowing the data to be completely arbitrary breaks whatever we try to use it for. We do not, in fact, generally allow people to arbitrarily change their own names; to the extent that we allow name changes, we do so through legible processes, because names are important in a lot of ways.
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