FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
The problem with Southern whites wanting to venerate a lie about Robert E. Lee
The statement was "myth", not "lie". Can you specify "a lie about Robert E. Lee" that Southern whites in general want to venerate?
I have been repeatedly told that the history of the Civil War that I grew up on was the "Dunning School", a deceptive attempt to hide the crimes of the South. I've never actually figured out which crimes were hidden from me. I was taught from the start that from the perspective of the South, the Civil War was fought explicitly in defense of Slavery as an institution, but most of the people bringing up the Dunning School claim that denying this was one of the central points of the program. So on the one hand I'm told I've been lied to, and on the other hand the claimed nature of the lie is either unspecified or, in my experience, itself straightforwardly false. I was taught that Robert E Lee was an honorable man who fought ablely for a bad cause, lost, and accepted the verdict of battle with dignity. Which part of that was false?
Which prominent figures on the Union side do you consider worthy of veneration? John Brown? Sherman? Grant? Lincoln? I'm quite fond of all of them, as it happens. Are you?
Now, I know the response to do this is something like, "well, MLK Jr. cheated on his wife" or whatever.
It's routine for me to encounter left-leaning people who venerate Lenin or Trotsky or some other august personage among the Bolsheviks, or who venerate people generations later who engaged in lawless violence in support of their cause. I encounter more who think these people were just rascally knuckleheads, and have precisely zero knowledge of the horrors they unleashed and championed. I think those people are straightforwardly worse than the modal Robert E Lee admirer, because the people and institutions they venerate were straightforwardly worse than the slaving South. And this, on the understanding that the South richly deserved to have a significant portion of its men ground into worm-food because of the evils they perpetrated. From where I sit, the left doesn't have the slightest claim to moral insight, much less moral superiority. A significant portion of politically-active leftists are isomorphic to actual-literal-and-not-figurative neo-nazis.
Lee wasn't even a good general.
My understanding is that his contemporaries disagree with your assessment. Certainly I have never heard of any of the prominent generals fighting against him claiming that he was bad at his job.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
That said, our country's most prolific rapist actually did rape hundreds of young men with the drug, so it has been used for that.
Yeah, it's a bit weird to read comments about how drink spiking is vanishingly rare, right after listening to the press conference about the P Diddler accusations. I'm pretty sure both are true, and it's pretty crazy to wonder what percentage of the chemically-induced rapes in the last 25 years were literally just Sean Combs and his associates. I mean, the number couldn't possibly be that high, but with something like three thousand accusers and what appears to be significant evidence of guilt, it really activates the almonds.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.
Speaking of Sweeney in particular, I encountered enthusiasm for her breasts by listening to the Critical Drinker's "Open Bar" stream while working. The open bar has some actual conservatives, but it seems to me that the core group is pretty clearly tits-and-beer liberals who have been left behind by the rapid advance of Social Justice ideology.
Is what you're seeing a shift in core conservatives, or is it a shift in the center as SJ evolution pushes an increasingly-broad spectrum of people into oppositional alliance?
Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.
I think this is pretty accurate, and I think I see it in a lot of other ways too. A lot of the old conflicts between Christian denominations have gone away, now that the central example of a doctrinal dispute has shifted from "what hierarchy do we answer to" to "does sin exist". Many such cases, as they say. Polarization is very, very real.
That quake hit about 3M people living in ridiculously poor and dense conditions. It’s a terrible comparison for the electrified, paved, American-standard-of-living Southeast.
This is an excellent point.
Is your general sense that the cleanup and rescue efforts are proceeding more or less as well as we could ask for? I've heard complaints, but I haven't seen strong evidence either way, nor had the time to track down the details to a level where I could be confident that I understand the actual situation.
On the one hand, partisanship obviously dominates from both ends; the people running things have every incentive to present everything as fine, and the people opposing them have every incentive to present everything as a total disaster. This is complicated by heavy bias in the media, so the default narrative is definately going to favor the people running things in the current situation; the flipside is that any complaints are going to come from the opposition ghetto, which observably has poor quality control.
On the other hand, this is a time-sensitive issue; the three days between your comment and this reply could have been quite significant. If there is actually a problem, it would have been imperative to identify and correct it as quickly as possible.
On the gripping hand, I have no expectation that this can actually be done in a timely manner in the present environment. I mainly want to discuss it now as a marker, and check back in a month or two as the facts present themselves. The problem there, as I snarkily alluded to, is that it seems to me that after-the-fact, sober assessments of what really happened don't actually penetrate, even here. They become old news and people move on, even if the weight of evidence falls hard on one side or the other. There are exceptions; Ymeshkout did what seemed to me to be a very good job hammering election fraud claims, for example, but exceptions don't seem like they're enough.
This is a serious post and deserves a serious response, which I don't have time to write tonight. But one thing I will say right now is that I put the disclaimer "Assuming the secondary sources about The Civil War are roughly correct" in for a reason.
Fair enough.
Grah.
The proper way to have a serious discussion is to get to know a person really well, and then have an intimate meeting of the minds. That isn't really practical in a forum like this one, so to a greater or lesser extent, I find myself building a model of the person I'm talking to, and then arguing against that model. I can update the model as the conversation progresses, but it's a lossy process at the best of times, and it's prone to bleed-through when having a very similar part of a conversation with multiple people.
I've argued this particular issue a number of times with a number of people, and it's entirely possible that I'm rounding you to positions you don't have. If that's the case, you have my apologies. If you want to continue this later, I'll be interested in reading your thoughts.
If you ever get the chance, you should watch "Civil War". It is one of my favorite documentaries, and I think it is an excellent example of actual "civil religion", in the sense the rationalists use the term.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Sure, maybe. Sometimes those things happen.
Sometimes they happen often enough that they foment irresistibly-large social movements demanding draconian top-down enforcement to prevent their failure states.
Neither chewing bubblegum nor consuming fentanyl guarantee doom. But there's a pretty large mountain of evidence that Free Love is closer to the Fent end than the bubblegum end, and thus, it seems to me, something people should generally steer away from. It's not close enough to the fent end that I'd advocate passing laws and enforcing them with the police, but it's close enough that I'm not really interested in expending significant effort to stop others from doing that, even when they're being quite dishonest about the nature of the problem. It's certianly bad enough to make an explicit point of the chain of causality between the Free Love narrative of "harmless fun" and the very real and apparently quite significant amounts of harm it has been causing for the last several decades. As the evidence continues to accumulate, hopefully people will learn to make better choices voluntarily, and those who do not can serve as cautionary examples.
They'd be no better than utilitarians at that point.
This is a fully-general argument against prudence in any form.
Communism involved large amounts of deliberate mass murder, and large amounts of mass rape and torture as well. Nor was this some aberration of Stalin or Pol Pot; Marx himself explicitly endorsed mass murder of "others" as a goal in the founding documents of the movement. It was, as you say, the explicit plan from the start.
Describing Communism as "taking cretinous well-intentioned ideas too seriously" is exactly the sort of thing the OP was describing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Aztecs killed far less people, but they remain strong contender to be more evil. Maybe in a quite tragic way as they actually believed own religion.
In what way are they "more evil"?
Similarly, nazi Germany is in my opinion more evil than USSR.
Why?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
How many of them lasted as long, or held so many in thrall, or caused so much damage, or brought us so close to much, much worse?
I stand by my original statement. The nazis lasted twelve years, and roughly the same for the Japanese empire. The communists held power for nearly a century, and ruled something like a third of the whole world for roughly two generations, killing and brutalizing an absolutely staggering number of people in that time.
Not getting married. Divorce if they do get married. A general inability to form durable relationships with a member of the opposite sex. No kids. Kids raised missing a father or a mother, with the attendant significant increase in poor outcomes for the kids. Acute misery from breakups and lingering psychic trauma from bad relationships. Generally decreased mental wellness, and/or chronic dependency on mind-altering pharmaceuticals. General dissatisfaction with the results of their life choices. Significantly decreased sexual satisfaction over their lifetime. Significant pain and regret.
Last I heard, trad life gave better outcomes in pretty much all of these, while also offering superior protection from STDs, out-of-wedlock kids and psycho murder as well. Still, it seems obvious to me that there's large amounts of less dramatic but still highly significant misery generated by Free Love leftovers.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Granted, I've never been a father, but I don't see why it's supposed to be automatically humiliating or horrible in some other way for a father to know that his daughter is having sex with dozens of guys.
Your model here is that your hypothetical daughter is having fun and no negative consequences accrue, right? She's being "safe", meaning there's no babies to take care of and no STDs to treat and she's not getting murdered by a psycho, so everything should be fine because those are the central examples of bad outcomes from sexual activity between humans?
One of those four was part of the Communist empire, and another allied with them to initiate wars of aggression.
about The Civil War are roughly correct, Ken Burns was a useful idiot of Shelby Foote.
...And PBS as well, of course? No one involved in the large bureaucratic government organization knew any better?
Burns was not a historian, and was not aware that the Dunning School history he had learned in high school was largely bogus. So when Foote basically recounts the high school history Burns is familiar with added military detail and colour, Burns doesn't feel the need to consult a second historian.
...Like the black historian prominently featured in the series, who talks at length in multiple segments about the black perspective on the war and its surrounding events? Further, my understanding of the standard Dunning School narrative is that the Civil War wasn't actually fought over slavery, that slavery wasn't actually all that bad and so on. My recollection is that PBS's The Civil War very explicitly claims that the civil war was fought over slavery, and is very explicit about the many ways in which slavery was barbaric and horrifying. So what exactly is the "largely bogus" history they're supposed to be communicating?
I think both Burns and Foote would have preferred to make a film that treated the Civil War as a series of battles between two groups of martially virtuous men with no underlying political causes, but obviously you can't do that and have it make sense.
And the fact that the series they actually produced heavily engaged with the underlying political causes leads you to this conclusion how? Certainly they did not cover all the intricacies; just for one example, they portray John Brown as an honorable man driven to extremism by principle, glossing over the part where he and his companions engaged in straight-up terrorist murder of innocent civilians. Nevertheless, having read deeper into the details, it seems to me that their account does a good job of capturing the essence. John Brown was, in fact, a murderous terrorist, but he was also driven to extremism by recognizable principles, and his actions are understandable for the same reasons that, say, a person car-bombing a Blue Tribe office building over abortion would be understandable: at some point, the blood of the innocent must be answered for.
And by the same token, I can extend sympathy to the Confederates for the same reasons I can extend sympathy to current Blues: the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. No one is simply "evil", and the misery of humanity is not simply the fault of "bad people". We all have it coming, one way or the other, and we should at least consider valuing mercy over swift justice, because swift justice means not an axe in our hands, but our head on a block.
If I could summarize the narrative of the series, it would be that our society's embrace of evil brought ruin on a vast scale, but through the conflict people found a way to both end some of that evil and to restore peace again. The bloodletting was probably unavoidable, and given that it resulted in the end of slavery, pretty clearly a net-positive. The people on both sides had many admirable and many deplorable qualities, but in the end the admirable qualities came to the fore, and peace was restored. The result was not a just utopia, or even a particularly good society; as in our own time, the price of peace was the toleration of considerable evil. Nonetheless, it's hard to argue that things weren't better at the end than they were at the beginning, and in the history of warfare that is in fact a fairly notable outcome.
To the extent that this is not good enough for you, I think you are quite foolish, but we all make our own choices freely.
Shelby Foote was unambiguously a supporter of treason (he said in 1997, "I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar.")
Hypothetical support based on "the circumstances" from a guy who, as you've noted, supported the civil rights act actually seems at least somewhat ambiguous; if he'd fight for slavery, why support the civil rights act? If he'd side with his state in a fight against the federal government over some actual present point of conflict, that would also be "similar circumstances", wouldn't it? Your entire case against him is that he has opinions on history and on hypotheticals that you don't like, not on anything of consequence he actually did.
Or perhaps I'm splitting hairs. Maybe you're right, and Shelby Foote was a Traitor. Presumably then, negative affect accrues, and we all join together to condemn his name and works, and to look with disfavor on those foolish enough to associate with him. Obviously this stance is principled, and not merely word games to exploit perceived vulnerabilities in those considered to be intellectual inferiors. So, just to be really clear here:
Bill Ayers: Traitor, or not? Worse than Foote, or not?
Angela Davis: Traitor, or not? Worse than Foote, or not?
It's hard to escape the impression that you are using "Traitor" and "Treason" as a conditioned call to obedience, as though you can apply the label and conservative types like me will fall in line because The Rules Are The Rules and we're All In This Together. It's an appeal to a system we share, and of course, you'll totally have our backs when the shoe is on the other foot; it's our turn to tear down the properly designated Bad Person, and of course, unquestionably, you also will do the same when we apply the label to someone in your general vicinity, because The Rules Are The Rules. This labeling-of-bad-people process is a thing we mutually share and respect, right?
Right?
Do you believe that a significant portion of Reds still recognize some degree of binding loyalty to your tribe, such that a concept like "treason" is meaningful? Do you think if a plane hits an office building in New York tomorrow, Reds are going to be lining up at the recruitment offices to avenge their "murdered brethren"?
After the Civil war, there was a "We" again. We made peace, and slowly, painfully, we tried to make a better society together. We weren't perfect at it, or even particularly good; I wish the southern Blacks had been armed en masse, and the KKK had gutted itself on organized community defenses rather than being allowed to dwindle into a jobs program for federal snitches. On the other hand, we actually made some pretty good progress, and The Civil War does a reasonable encapsulation of how we did it: we accepted that people in the past were neither saints nor monsters, and we tried to mourn the bad and move on with the good. And after much struggle and conflict, and after no small measure of injustice, things were legitimately pretty good there for a couple decades, Confederate statues and Confederate flags and all.
And now, because of arguments of the sort you're advancing here, the confederate statues and flags are gone, and all it cost us is a few thousand extra black people murdered every year for the last four years and continuing indefinitely into the future, a price that was predicted in advance, and that Blues here appear to find more or less acceptable. Respect for the valor of a defeated opponent wasn't killing massive numbers of black people, but deliberately spreading lies about how our whole society is based on "white supremacy" absolutely has. Blues needed a scapegoat for their own failures, and they didn't much care who got hurt so long as they could keep portraying themselves as the good guys.
For this and similar reasons, there is not really a "We" any more. Things are much worse than they were a mere decade ago, and they seem likely to continue to get worse for the foreseeable future. Another massive bloodletting is a distinct possibility. Like last time, people can see it coming, but cannot figure out a way to avoid it, or even properly understand the mechanisms of its arrival.
I, like you, blame Traitors. We would probably not agree on who they are, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
do the bannings interfere with actually using the engine, or is this mainly a social media thing?
Using the word 'hypersonic' is not exactly accurate and may be a little misleading, better just call them balistic missiles.
Are these not Kalibur-style cruise missles? From the video, it looks like they're burning till impact.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
It was renamed in 2023. You don't think it takes a while for this name update to course through the public consciousness?
I was not aware that it was renamed, but at least one of the people @MadMonzer linked to was very clearly aware, as they made an explicit point of refusing to use the current name.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
That's pretty close to how I see it as well.
From the link:
In addition, a total of 550 National Guard personnel were deployed to the region to assist first responders with search and rescue missions, delivering supplies and working to restore infrastructure to the affected areas.
From a naive perspective, 550 NG personnel seems low. commitments from the other states list three helicopters with 17 crew. Again, that seems kinda low.
Since it's the comparison people are drawing, here's the numbers for the 2010 Haiti earthquake:
The response included personnel from all branches of the military.[3] The U.S. Navy listed its resources in the area on 19 January [One week after the event] as "17 ships, 48 helicopters and 12 fixed-wing aircraft" in addition to 10,000 sailors and Marines.[4] By 26 January, the U.S. military had 17,000 personnel in and around Haiti.[5] Between the beginning of relief efforts and 18 February the US Air Force had delivered nearly 6,000 support members and 19 million pounds of cargo while evacuating 15,000 American citizens and conducted aeromedical evacuations for 223 critical Haitian patients.[6]
Naively, it sounds like they're sending ~1/10th the resources, and that does seem a bit surprising. Maybe the state and federal resources have things under control, so there's no need for NG resources, but that's not what I would expect for a very large and highly unexpected natural disaster.
Either way, I imagine we'll know the truth soon enough: either they'll handle the situation swiftly and in good order, or this will become another insignificant event not worth talking about.
They own the word "racism", and they define it as they please. That definition will never, ever favor Reds, regardless of the circumstances, and regardless of the facts.
If you have concerns about how black people or whoever are treated, that's fair enough. Decide for yourself what is right, argue your points with others, do what seems right to you. But if, in your mind, winning involves getting to apply the label "racism" in what seems to you a proper way, you have already lost.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I haven't seen it. I have seen a bunch of clips from it. I have thoughts, and I'm curious how accurate they are.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
So do I. My desires are outputs of a function incorporating my history and a bit of randomness. Nothing mystical about it.
Assuming "function" here means some sort of mechanistic/deterministic process, what direct evidence do you base this claim on?
"Free will" isn't required to model humans as organisms with intrinsic drives and memory that respond to incentives.
"Free will" is the data provided by observation. We evidently have it in all senses and in all ways that we can empirically test. That doesn't preclude it being an illusion generated by some hidden process, but if so, all that can be said is that we have no direct evidence of that process.
Sure, but there's a pretty strong case for post-big-bang materialism.
With the exception of free will, sure. But now we're at two really important things that Materialists predicted their approach would explain, and those explanations failed without apparent recourse. "Materialism answers all our questions, except the questions we ignore because Materialism can't explain them" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
To put it another way, we have two very important phenomena that cannot be explained by empirical materialism. If empirical materialism itself is forced to resort to non-empirical explanations or to "material" that cannot be observed even in principle, then it has no grounds to object when other philosophies do likewise, does it?
This question vexes me, but seems independent of consciousness and experience and so on, which we can explain using physical laws given the singular prior that something indeed exists.
We can't explain either consciousness or experience, though. Like, at all. We can tell a story where they're the outcome of vague, undefined processes, and we can insist that these processes must be materialistic even though we can't rigorously define them or explain how they work, but that is not in fact an "explanation".
Demonstrate either mind reading or mind control, and I'll concede that you have explained consciousness and experience. This doesn't seem like an unreasonable request, since many prominent scientists have previously claimed that they could totally do either or both, and no small number of materialists still insist it should be possible, occasionally claiming it's arrival as soon as the next decade.
Can you elaborate on these falsifications? To be clear, I'm not talking about naive functionalism. Human actions are not merely the result of immediate inputs. We have state. We have an internal history. We can introspect.
Sure, but all these things were equally obvious to epiphenomenalists, Marx among them, who concluded that thought was essentially meaningless and the brain was a simple machine to be engineered to our preferences. Likewise Watson and Skinner and the behavioralists, who claimed that they knew how to arbitrarily shape minds as they saw fit. And certainly, in retrospect, it's obvious that all these claims were very stupid, and that the people making them were being absurdly overconfident. But it evidently was not obvious to either those making the claims or to their contemporaries, and that fact should give us pause.
I'm merely asserting that parsimony suggests we treat this reflection as a computational process grounded in the material world.
It doesn't seem to me that parsimony can be validly applied in a case where you know that significant data is missing.
Treating the mind as a computational process grounded in the material world will be reasonable when doing so allows us to either make testable predictions or engage in engineering. Right now, it does neither. "Treating the mind as a computational process" enables only speculation and philosophical discussion, and it seems likely to me that this will not change in the near future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Could you define "free will"?
I want to do things, and I do them. I don't want to do other things, and I don't do them. Neither other people nor other things can directly override either my apparent individual motivation, nor my individual ability to manifest that motivation into action. Every conscious experience of my entire life serves as evidence of this apparent capacity, and every functional system humans build or interact with is based on the assumption that this apparent reality is how things actually work.
I agree with the argument from parsimony that you've presented in that I don't see a need to admit anything beyond physics to explain our experience, including our perceived sentience.
"Don't see a need" is an interesting phrase. I'm pretty sure you don't have an empirically-verifiable explanation for what caused the Big Bang, so there's at least one experience, the physical world around you, that physics as we understand and can test it pretty clearly can't explain. Nor is there empirical evidence that we can see behind the Big Bang even in principle; all the evidence we have indicates that we will never be able to. This does not mean that there might not be some deeper version of physics inaccessible to us that is, in fact, seamlessly complete, only that we have no access to any such deeper physics, and thus appeal to that deeper physics is is strictly unfalsifiable.
To the extent that you are satisfied by appeals to the unfalsifiable, I am as well. The difference is that I assert that what we see is what we get: we see apparent free will, and so I assert that free will exists. Your position is that what we see is an illusion, caused by a completely different process, which only appears to be free will in every single way we can observe or test. Notably, your general position is the end-state of a decades-long retreat into a Determinism-of-the-gaps, as much stronger and more falsifiable Deterministic claims were in fact consistently falsified.
Claims that Free Will is parsimonious are exactly backward; to the extent that Determinism must be true because Free Will breaks Materialism, the strong evidence of Free Will's existence and the consistent falsifications of testable Determinist theories are in fact significant evidence against Materialism.
Show me a person of influence who made this case when the George Floyd video dropped.
I do not believe anything the Russians could ever say or do could hold even a flickering candle to the gigaton flare generated by the actual words and deeds of genuine Americans.
More options
Context Copy link