FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
Do you believe the "permanent structure" can survive, say, the next decade, regardless of who wins this election?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
Bush also had a unique disgust factor, as did Romney, as did Reagan.
I am not persuaded that there is anything in the Blue response to Trump other than outrage over explicit resistance to their agenda. He was not the polite loser increasingly-extremist Blues expect from their Republican opposition.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
There's also the part where Congressional democrats had been trying to pass a bill to strip Trump of his Secret Service protection. But none of this matters. Nothing matters unless the Press wants it to matter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
25d ago
Why do that when not doing that works just as well, and conveys additional advantages that doing that does not?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
25d ago
That pretty clearly isn't supposed to matter. If it does matter, the fact that it matters should be made as legible as possible, to remove as much misunderstanding as possible from what follows.
To be explicit, you believe that the US government can extend or withdraw protection from foreign laws as it sees fit, more or less arbitrarily, that this power is likely to be used to reward domestic allies and punish domestic opponents, and that this is the normal state of affairs we're currently living in, such that Musk's arrest shouldn't cause an update.
Specifically, you believe that Musk being arrested for first-amendment-protected behavior would be fine, provided it's not the US government arresting him, and despite the fact that it is entirely within the US government's power to prevent his arrest.
Further, you believe this reality to be common knowledge.
Would that be accurate?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
25d ago
And sometimes the US is not fine with it, as we saw with Brittney Griner. That arrest certainly affected the status quo. What elements of the situation would make Musk's arrest by a US ally over twitter moderation less disruptive to the status quo than Griner's arrest by an enemy for narcotics possession?
my assessment is that this is an example of the regime laundering nakedly illegal abuses of the criminal justice system against law-abiding dissidents through the cutout of a close ally. I do not believe the existing harassment happens without regime approval, and certainly an arrest would not. I think the regime should be held directly responsible for such harassment. does that seem wrong to you?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
27d ago
Art Update ...I've been working on an art pass for the freighter, working on normal-map detail and actual texture. Work's been busy so this has been slow going, but I'm hoping it will snowball more and more as I get a better handle on freespace's art pipeline and build up more of a working library of art assets.
Now, as to why this kamikaze or automated hyperspace trick isn't used regularly, no idea. I'm sure there are EU authors somewhere scrambling to find a rationale. I could probably think carefully and come up with a few myself if I had the motivation, which I do not (not out of any dismissal of your question).
I can think of a lot of potential narrative fixes that could work, if they'd been integrated properly into the movie we all saw. Like, they're in a super-weird region of space with anomalous hyperspace physics; they didn't want to go in there in the first place as the localized threat of hyperspace collisions makes it near-suicidal, but they had no other options and the imperials are arrogant enough to follow them in. Or the super-cap imperial ship has some sort of experimental, super-powerful hyperspace jammer and hyperspace ramming is a unanticipated side effect, or when they infiltrate the supercap they tweak its hyperdrive to create a resonant frequency with the cruiser, allowing an otherwise impossibly-precise ram jump to be programmed, etc, etc... But the common thread of all these is that they establish an explanation for why this is going to be a one-time thing, because it really, absolutely has to be a one-time thing or else all space combat in the setting breaks forever.
The problem is that the movie that we actually got does none of these, nor does it really leave room for anything like them in the story as delivered. I like to think I'm something of a storyteller myself, and technobabble is a thing I've done before. I don't think the issues raised by the holdo manuever can actually be technobabbled.
I suspend disbelief, as the saying goes, willfully. Until I don't.
Authors can make that suspension easier or harder, though, based on what they write and how they write it, and this is a big part of the difference people perceive between good and bad writing. There's a degree to which "I suspend my disbelief willfully, until I don't" is a fully general answer to any complaint about any element of any story, no matter how incongruous or poorly thought out.
Give me a scene where the whole focus is on the tragic death of one of the main characters, and then two scenes later they're suddenly alive again and the story carries on as though nothing happened, and this is never explained or addressed again. Maybe this is some super-subtle 3d-chess thing where the death is supposed to be read as metaphorical, or maybe the author is intending this as a demonstration that something else is going on behind the scenes; maybe the world is actually a simulation. Funny Games did something like this by injecting blatantly incongruous, nakedly-unjustified cartoon logic to abruptly reverse a pivotal character death, very clearly on-purpose and with an obvious narrative intention. The problem with the holdo manuever is that it's very nearly as disruptive to the story and setting as a character literally re-winding another character's death with a VCR remote, and the disruption is never addressed; there's no evidence the authors even understood why it would be disruptive. To the extent that "bad writing" is a meaningful category, this is about as central an example as I've ever seen of bad writing. It makes suspension of disbelief hard enough that there doesn't seem to be a point in trying; if I'm going to have to rewrite the whole story in my head anyway, I might as well do that from the start and just write my own from scratch.
So we've moved from you talking about facts, to you talking about your feelings, to you engaging in overconfident speculation about my feelings. This does not seem like a promising progression. With due respect, I do not particularly trust your assessments of what a "reasonable person" should think.
I do not, in fact, feel safer now. I found religion, which means I'm willing to commit to rejecting the hatred that used to motivate me, and it means I'm willing to contemplate dire outcomes with a greater degree of equanimity than I used to possess. That is why the tenor of my comments has changed; I don't hate Blues less, but I am attempting to feed and express that hatred as little as possible.
The other part of it is that four years ago, I believed that the coordination problem was fundamental, and that Blue Tribe had a probable path to victory unless Red Tribe could find a solution to it. I no longer believe that.
*I could discuss at length the Holdo Maneuver, as it was eventually called. I would suggest that that scene didn't undue any previously established canonical point. Many other parts of the sequels did really irk me but that wasn't one of them.
I'll bite. When I saw that scene in theatres, I grinned like an idiot at the visual for roughly ten seconds, and then immediately thought "this breaks every other Star Wars movie forever," and by the time I walked out of the theatre I'd already decided I was done with Star Wars as a franchise. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the plot and writing of TLJ, but that part in particular really stood head and shoulders above the rest as being completely, egregiously incompatible with the entire setting before and since.
Why didn't they use hyperspace ramming against the Death Star, or against the imperial fleet at Hoth? Why aren't hyperspace-ram missiles the standard anti-ship weapon for every faction in the setting? It can't possibly be a matter of expense or scarcity; hyperdrive-equipped fighters and light transports are ubiquitous throughout the setting. There doesn't appear to be a countermeasure, and she didn't appear to be unusually lucky in her execution. In every subsequent viewing of a space battle, as soon as the situation becomes tense, I'm going to be asking "why aren't they solving this problem with a hyperspace ram missile?" And why shouldn't I?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
It appears that you've moved from statements of fact to statements of emotion. Would that be fair description?
To answer your question, yes, I feel significantly less safe than I did in 2020, and I felt less safe then than I did in 2014 when all this mess kicked off. I think this feeling is the result of an accurate assessment of the evidence available, given the events of the last decade. Things are a lot worse now than they were before, and there are a lot of solid reasons to expect the trend to continue.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
We saw the largest single-year increase in violent crime ever recorded immediately following the Floyd riots. The violent crime rate has since declined somewhat, but is still massively elevated over the pre-Floyd baseline. There's good evidence that the elevated crime rate extends to other categories as well, given the effects on major business chains. That seems like good evidence for "mass lawlessness" from vectors other than Fox News.
She doesn't seem like a killer, nor even a particularly serious person, just someone who does all her fun social chatting in a bubble where "yay murder" against the right targets is an applause line.
To a first approximation, there are no social bubbles where "yay murder" against the right targets isn't an applause line. Social homogeneity minimizes the friction created by this element of human nature by ensuring that those far away in values-space are also far away in physical space. Rapid values change means that social homogeneity goes away, and we lose the necessary protection of distance.
What is the difference between the division between, say, France and England or the Christian and Muslim worlds and Pillarization? Division is the large-scale social norm for humans, isn't it?
This is an extraordinary claim.
And yet, the impending increase in violent crime was obvious well in advance, only grew more obvious as we raced our way up the exponential curve, and is now completely undeniable. The chain of causality driving that increase is not obscure, and was likewise pointed out well in advance, tracing back to a specific set of politically-motivated actions that Blue Tribe collectively chose to implement and then maintain for a decade despite strong opposition and numerous warnings.
Their goal was not to increase crime. Their goal was to secure unassailable political power. To advance that goal, they intentionally and dishonestly delegitimized a massive amount of our law enforcement apparatus, destroying our collective ability to enforce peace and order. The massive increase in violent crime was an obvious effect of doing this, but it is evidently a cost they were willing to pay. They are evidently unwilling to take responsibility or show remorse for what they've done, and there is no reason to suppose that they won't do it again the instant it seems expedient to do so. Further cooperation only enables further harm.
All of this happened in public, and there are plenty of receipts available. I stand by my original statement: there is no basis for cooperation with the Democratic party or with Blues generally on law enforcement or the crime rate. They are not willing to follow or enforce the law impartially. There remains neither common values nor common interest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
30d ago
Well, no, I haven't, because it would never occur to me to propose such a non-starter of an idea, but I welcome the input of our pro-lifers here as to whether they would regard this as something they would buy into.
I would take that deal. I just asked my wife, and aside from some initial "what's the point", she settled quickly on "well, it's less abortions, so sure."
I suppose some people might say "Sure" with the understanding that they expect it to lead to an abortion ban for everyone.
That would be exactly why I would support it. It would be a significant expansion of abortion restrictions, and I believe expanding abortion restrictions is a good thing. It would also force the issue with Republicans who aren't actually on board; I could be persuaded that forcing the issue in this way would be tactically unsound, but I'm generally skeptical that compromise is really the correct avenue.
I would imagine the same logic would apply to guns.
So would your proposed "Gun ban for Democrats only" be fine with you if you know that those who agree with it are going to use it as a first step in banning guns for everyone?
Or a first step toward durable federalism, where we admit that Democratic rights and Republican rights can't be reconciled, and we should in fact have different legal regimes for different populations.
DIY firearms weren't practically stoppable once metalworking tools became widespread
You don't need metal. You don't even need plastic. You don't need a printer, cnc machine or lathe. You don't need brass or primers. You don't even need powder. Firearms themselves are entirely unnecessary; you certainly don't need "significant illegal arming" in the sense you are using the term. In fact, I'm convinced it is possible to shift the probabilities toward collapse of centralized authority by a two-digit percentage through the exclusively legal, entirely private and secret actions of between two and five individual people committing to a year or two of dedicated effort. This is speculative only in the weakest sense of the word; there are no pieces of the puzzle actually missing, they are all evidently on the table waiting to be assembled. We do not need to rummage around for a ball of sufficient greyness; it has already been drawn from from the urn. Gibson was correct: the future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet.
Maybe it won't have to be, but I don't see a plausible ending where Blue Tribe continues to advance without triggering distribution. The hope is that the fever breaks before that distribution is triggered. It is not an entirely unreasonable hope.
Apologies, I thought you were referring to gun-related rules specifically, and in fact, gun-related rules have indeed been rolled back, and others have been prevented.
If the question is about federal tyranny as a whole, it seems pretty clear to me that the last two decades have seen significant erosion of federal capacity, and the gun culture has been a crucial vanguard in that erosion. Social cohesion is decaying at a significant and accelerating rate, and with it the capacity of the federal government and blue tribe generally to impose its edicts on society as a whole. We are now seeing open, organized defiance to federal edicts from state governments, and the federals backed down. We are seeing a complete collapse in trust for the media, for the federal bureaucracy, for the federal courts, a deadlocked congress, collapsing trust in elections. The military is facing a severe recruiting crisis, serious readiness and procurement issues, most notably in the Navy, and a deep-rooted toward any foreign mission among its historical core source demographic.
You claim that gun owners are too fat and lazy to mount a rebellion. I counter that the federal government is so sclerotic, deficient and mismanaged that actual enforcement of actual laws against anything other that the fat, lazy and supremely comfortable is completely beyond them. They can, sometimes, make examples of unfortunate individuals, but even this capacity is increasingly failing, and each "example" they attempt generates significantly more defiance than it does compliance.
It is common for moderate Blues to opine that the tribes need each other, that the Conservative commitments to order and stability are a necessary counterbalance to the Progressive commitments to change and innovation. This makes sense if you believe that the old order was a good thing that should be preserved. But then, that same order is the tyranny that you're asking for examples of Gun Culture resistance from, isn't it? To the extent that Conservatives have done what moderate Blues claim to want them to do, you would be correct in accusing them of failure to impede tyranny. Only, those commitments have largely been eroded, haven't they? Red Tribe has in fact embraced Trumpism, abandoned fiscal conservativism, largely turned against foreign interventionism and the maintenance of the international order, become deeply critical and skeptical of the "free market" and of corporations, and is increasingly hostile to the concept of law and order generally. We are pretty clearly done being a moderating counterbalance, cleaning up your messes and paying the bills in an unreciprocated pursuit of an entirely theoretical "we". It is evident now that there is no "we", and likely will never be a "we" in the foreseeable future.
All this, over a period of relative peace and prosperity. It was often claimed that what we needed was a good external threat to pull people back together; we saw how that went with Covid, and now that claim seems to have been quietly retired. The stability and the unity are gone, and they are not coming back. Likewise the state capacity, and the orderly, instinctual rule-following it was built upon. What follows is an escalating conflict terminating in separation of one kind or another. There is far better hope for meaningful freedom in that breakdown than there ever could be in a federal government cementing unitary power over a population of pacified subjects.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
30d ago
The last time this came up, the proof was a case where a guy in NYC bought a printer and the parts, assembled firearms, took pictures of those firearms, and then posted those pictures on twitter; IIRC he also tagged anti-gun politicians with those photos. There is a big difference between "they can drop the hammer on people who openly advertise defiance of the law in one of the deepest-Blue enclaves in the country" and "they can drop the hammer on this activity in general."
I can entirely believe that the federal government is tracking correlated printer and gun purchases; they should not be doing this, and their power to do this should be destroyed. But they have not, in fact, demonstrated a capacity to substantially impinge on DIY production of effective firearms. Based on my own knowledge, they can't. It's not a matter of political impracticality, but rather physical impossibility. DIY tech isn't a potential-maybe-someday thing that might or might not happen at some point in the future; it's multiple decades of technological overhang that is already in freefall, only the first pebbles of which have hit the ground in a way that most people have noticed, because most people have not spent five minutes with a piece of paper and a pencil thinking about the matter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
30d ago
In the last 80 years of federal government overreach, how many federal attempts at imposing more rules were successfully resisted by gun owners?
The 90s assault weapons ban sunsetting seems like an obvious example. They definitely wanted to keep it, and we definitely killed it. Likewise holding the line on bump stocks and braces. But the framing of your question elides much more significant advances: normalization and proliferation of concealed carry, suppressors, automatic weapons, the standardization of the AR-15, 3d-printing and DIY tech, and general cultural penetration are all monumental achievements that have greatly eroded the control landscape. The general level of defiance is steadily improving, from "comply, guys," to "I lost them in a boating accident" to "I didn't lose shit," and this correlates with general defiance throughout Red Tribe and the steady collapse of capacity in Blue Tribe institutions.
American gun owners are too fat and lazy to mount a rebellion.
I think this assessment is wrong, but time will tell. The coordination problem is, in my view, largely a red herring, with pernicious effects on both sides of the debate, in extremely unwarranted confidence in the security of their position from blues and equally-unwarranted black-pilling and despair from Reds.
Edit: Though this has nothing to do with the correction that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns, and claims that it does are wrong.
Sure. You've established that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns, I'm trying to get to what they do have and how to describe it. What's the optimal encapsulation of the socio-political position of firearms in UK society?
First, the value of the Second Amendment is not that AR-15s prevent government oppression via Sic Semper Tyrannus. To be clear, it almost certainly can do that if it has to, but it's very expensive and avoiding it is strongly preferable. The value is that the Second Amendment and the AR-15s it protects form a coordination mechanism for resistance to government overreach generally, and that this coordination provides better protection for liberty than many, many actual shootings of tyrants. The existence of the Second Amendment has decisively shaped the form and nature of our society's ongoing collapse, and thus what is likely to emerge from the wreckage. My assessment is that it is strongly preferable to any plausible alternative.
Second, from a Red perspective, there is zero reason to seek any common ground on the subject of criminal violence under present conditions. Nor is there any reason to entertain any argument about whether gun control might or might not improve rates of violent crime. The correct response is to make it clear that there is no grounds for any discussion on this subject at all. Blue Tribe deliberately generated the largest increase in violent crime ever recorded, explicitly in pursuit of partisan political advantage. There is no plausible mechanism by which any practicable amount of gun control could outweigh even a fraction of the harm they caused. They have accepted zero responsibility for the vast and appalling harms generated by their deliberate and protracted campaign of social vandalism caused, and to the extent that they are now attempting to use the crime wave they created as an excuse to strip Red Tribe of its rights, the correct response is, at the most charitable, contemptuous silence.
To the extent that Blue Tribe may be able to unilaterally impose destruction of Red Tribe human rights, the correct response is to destroy the social mechanisms that allow such illegitimate impositions. Either we control federal law, or there is no federal law; this is the evident position of Blue Tribe, and it should be our position as well. Defiance and nullification are the correct stance; either they will be sufficient to solve the dilemma, or we will need to escalate further.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Do you believe that the UK has a functional right to self-defense?
I wonder how many guns involved in crime are originally purchased by shady elements versus upstanding citizens who turn into shady elements.
This question seems malformed.
My understanding is that the large majority of guns involved in crime which begin their involvement in crime immediately after purchase are purchased by either criminals or by the criminally-adjacent for those criminals, and that almost no guns are bought by upstanding citizens who then subsequently turn to crime with their legitimately-purchased firearm. But this excludes the guns that were purchased by upstanding citizens for legitimate use, used legitimately, and are then stolen or otherwise transferred years or decades later, unwittingly, to criminals for use in crime.
Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist."
This is not appreciably different from Stalin's view of "socialism", or Mao's, or Pol Pot's, to my understanding. I've seen no historical examples where theory was actually load-bearing in any sort of grand sense. Like, there's nothing actually in Marx that requires lysenkoism or any other specific evolution. Stalin beats trotsky and bukharin not because he has a better understanding of Marxist theory, but because he's crueler, more paranoid, and more vicious, and these are in actual fact the traits that Marxism rewards. The theory is word-game Calvin-ball; you can get from Das Kapital to whatever arbitrary power-structure you prefer, there are no actual constraints beyond momentary, relative expedience.
To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.
"We know how to solve all our problems. Problems that aren't solved are the fault of specific people with names and addresses." It does not seem to me that "Class Struggle" is appreciably more real in any meaningful sense than "race struggle", and they both boil down to fixing everything by purging the bad people. That's the obvious commonality between the two, and between them and the French Revolution as well.
Trump wanted troops to protect his supporters at Jan. 6 rally - Rueters
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