FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Mm.
Suppose we have the following two statements:
"There's nothing wrong with these acts or the communities that celebrate engaging in them."
"These communities were ground-zero for a plague that has to date killed an amount of people roughly equivalent to a world war, and the acts they engaged in and their celebration of those acts resulted in a highly disproportionate amount of what we know term super-spreading, particularly in the early stages of that pandemic."
Are these statements compatible?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Pinging @Hoffmeister25, since he seemed interested as well.
Is that from Blindsight? Looks familiar.
Yup!
Anyway, I see what you (and @coffee_enjoyer) are getting at, but as a book nerd (and also a wannabe-never-was writer) I think the great Literature vs. Entertainment debate is a false dichotomy.
To be clear, I entirely agree! One of the things I learned as I got older and a bit wiser was that entertainment for its own sake is, ultimately, empty, and not even particularly entertaining. You can't extrude it by the hundredweight according to a set formula without losing the special something that makes the best of it so delightfully seductive in the first place, and part of that special something seems to be insight, something that echoes and accretes in the inner self, that leaves an impression where lesser matter washes in and away without consequence.
I am not sure if you are complaining about "literature" that seems pointlessly navel-gazing with no real message to it, just exercises in masturbatory wordsmithing, or literature that you think has a bad message (i.e., a weapon in the culture war). Both those things exist. But appreciation for literature doesn't necessarily mean being a Barnard English major sniffing one's own farts.
Both, certainly. Some of it definitely feels either pointless or juvenile, in a Wow-I-Am-Very-Deep sense. On the bad message side... I'd be hard-pressed to find an author with worse messages than Peter Watts, but he's still a treasure to me because even if I fundamentally disagree with his worldview, I still come away feeling like my perspective has been sharpened thanks to the clarity with which he communicates it. To quote another favorite, "here comes, thank heaven, another enemy". And it's not even about naïve enjoyment, either; his Rifter trilogy was horrifying in the most literal sense, did permanent psychic damage to me, and I don't think I ever will want to read them again... but boy, did they leave an impression!
But there's a lot of other stuff that's just sort of unreflectively, unrefinedly bad. On the recommendation of a Mottian, I read Middlegame. There was a lot I really liked about the plot and the characters and the style, and I really wanted to enjoy it. but ultimately, the villains were one-note caricatures of misogyny, and eventually they stopped being monsters to me, and just became cartoons. They weren't doing what they were doing for sensical reasons, but rather because it was Very Important that I Update My Opions About Misogyny Now. And it killed the narrative for me, not because I think misogyny is super cool and don't like seeing it attacked, but because trite sermons from someone else's religion are really boring.
...Your point about Madame Bovary is well taken. Here's the thing, though: why was it assigned to you in high school?
Suppose that there's this idea that books and humans interact deterministically. People observe that good books leave an impression on the reader, and that the best books leave an impression on most or even all readers, and they think hey, we can shape people into the sort of people we want by having them read the right Good Books in the right sequence. Only, it doesn't actually work like that for a whole host of reasons, not least because people are different, and what they're ready for and what's relevant to them is different, and we lie to ourselves or are mistaken about what actually leaves an impression and which impressions are valuable... and so the end result is this big, unpleasant, brutalist machine covered in grime and bloodstains with a sign on it that reads "happy fun good-things dispenser."
There's a wealth of wonderful creations out there, no doubt. But there's this mass in the middle of it, with an ossified narrative maintained by a sort of pseudo-priesthood, and I'm deeply skeptical of the whole edifice. I would rather talk about "I liked this because I got such-and-such" out of it, and they seem to think they're doing something much more involved and much more serious than that.
Does that make more sense?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
How might we test this theory?
"Technical truth telling" does not seem like a useful term to me. When a paper declares that Kamala is the border Czar, and then claims that there is no such thing as a Border Czar, and edits the old headlines and articles in an attempt to avoid embarrassment, is this "technical truth telling"? If so, I submit that all statements are true if we allow sufficiently "technical" hair-splitting on the definition of truth, so the term is a fully-general counterargument, relying on selective application for its utility.
Likewise, If the role of the media is to give the public a clearer understanding of the world we live in, and we observe journalists pushing a particular falsehood very hard, and then we observe the portions of the public with the highest trust in those journalists disproportionately believing that falsehood, does that disprove the theory? What if we can show that this has happened repeatedly?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
I'm not overflowing with examples because I actively avoid most of the stuff, but I can offer a few, direct and indirect.
Bless Me Ultima, a babbies first lit book assigned in an institution of higher learning.
Indirectly, Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy. A friend was enthusiastic about the book, and neither they, the wikipedia article, nor reading a few passages myself revealed why.
Bonus: the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Theoretically, these texts fit the particular shapes of some particular population's mind, sure. But when I try to engage with the people actually claiming to find value on what value they find, I am left mystified or alienated.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
What's you understanding of the role of the homosexual community (and also the hard drug community, similar arguments applied) in the emergence and spread of the AIDS pandemic? Wikipedia lists 42 million dead, among them something like half of the pre-AIDS male homosexuals in America.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
When I was younger, both I and my elder brother wanted to be writers, but we disagreed strongly on what made good writing. Probably the simplest way to describe it was that he liked art and I liked entertainment. We've never really resolved the disagreement, but I've spent a long time contemplating why I enjoy what I enjoy, and most of it seems to come down to one of two things; either the piece encapsulates a feeling, or it encapsulates an idea. Either way, these encapsulations are valuable in that they give one significant control over one's own mental state, and that is both pleasurable and useful in many ways.
I think a lot of my own bogglement with the general category of "literature" is that so much of the time, there doesn't seem to be anything useful being encapsulated. I can imagine that the encapsulations are in some incompatible format, but the general impression left is still...
Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.
You decode the signals, and stumble:
I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—
To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet—
They hate us for our freedom—
Pay attention, now—
Understand.
There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.
The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
The signal is an attack.
And it's coming from right about there.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Further, when you look at the teachings of Christian spiritual teachers, the point is very often that you shouldn't be praying for random things you want, you should be praying for God to do what he wants.
Just so. For myself personally, though, I think I've leaned too hard in that direction in the past, verging on a sort of fatalism, to the point that I no longer prayed for people to be healed, but only for what God wanted to happen, to happen. It seems to me that this verged on a sort of cowardice, where it became more about not asking for things because I didn't believe they'd happen anyway. On the other hand, I've found the faith to pray to God for things that seemed highly improbable, have in fact received some of those highly improbable things, and am very grateful for them. To a great extent, my life is now defined by those positive answers to specific requests, which inspires great thankfulness to God for granting them.
The rational perspective would point out that this is all just confirmation bias. I've chosen to believe in God axiomatically, and I interpret all evidence I receive according to that axiom. But of course, there is no other way to reason from incomplete data; Axioms are necessary precisely because they cannot be proven, and they are necessary because it is impossible to reason without them.
Agreed that Prosperity theology is radioactive trash.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Congratulations! It's an amazing experience, so enjoy every second of it. Get as much rest as you can now, you're going to need it shortly!
I’m all for a Deist conception of an inscrutable alien intelligence who created the basic rules of physics and then sat back to passively watch the simulation play out. What I cannot understand is a conception of a loving God who made humanity in his image, who intervenes positively in quotidian human affairs, and yet who allows, either through direct control or negligence, things like catastrophic natural disasters and anencephalic newborns.
Is it specifically the catastrophic natural disasters and anencephalic newborns that raise the objection, or is it in fact any form of suffering at all?
I observe that suffering is highly useful, even from a materialist perspective. We suffer hunger and thirst, and it motivates us to eat and drink. More abstract and generalized suffering provides the contrast necessary to recognize the difference between good and bad; if you agree that the "experience machine" is repugnant, that necessarily requires suffering and pleasure to be different from good and bad. From there, general acceptance of suffering, even of natural disasters and anencephalic newborns is not a large step: suffering is a reminder that there is a reality outside our selves that must be grappled with, and this is an insight we cannot dispense with.
Then what is the point of praying to Him?
The point of praying to Him is to build a relationship with Him. When we encounter suffering, we ask for his help, and when we encounter joy, we thank him for it. A similar process can be observed in the parent/child relationship; young children suffer greatly for reasons they do not understand and their parents cannot explain to them, but their parents mitigate some of this suffering and comfort them in the rest, and without gaining any insight into the causes or reasons for the suffering or indeed the reasoning of the parents, children hopefully learn that their parents are not its ultimate source, even when they are the proximate source. My eldest reliably starts screaming and crying when I turn off Cocomelon, but still lets me pick her up and soothe her until the discontent passes. So it is for me and the greater sufferings of pain and sickness and weakness and death.
There's a sense in which none of the above is rational, but then, rationality is a spook. Your rage and disgust at the evil of pain and suffering brings you no closer to solving them, and my acceptance of them produces no additional obstacle to fighting against them. Certainly sterilization or euthanasia are not general or even notably broad solutions to the problem. Humans will continue to live and die in pain no matter what you or I choose to believe or to do, short of complete extermination of the species. Nor does it appear that suffering is, in fact, in any fundamental way connected to material circumstances. Perfectly healthy, rich, comfortable people frequently demonstrate that suffering expands to fill the available space of one's psyche, regardless of material circumstances. The most concrete quantization of suffering available, the experience of physical pain, observably expands and contracts dramatically, and possibly without limit, based solely on how we engage with it, and particularly with choices we make when engaging with it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
he said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed:
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
This strategy is at the heart of Trump's approach to the truth. It presents the media with a difficult dilemma.
It is notable that Democrat lies do not present the media a similar dilemma, given that we can observe them simply backing those lies to the hilt, unquestioningly, no matter how brazen.
The idea that the media is in any way interested in the truth is, at this late date, entirely unsupportable, and I am not comfortable allowing it to pass unchallenged. The media has now normalized rewriting their own archived output to match Democrat talking points in real-time. Large, well-coordinated lies from the Democrats last decades, result in obvious, devastating real-world outcomes, and generate zero accountability for those responsible. Truth was never a part of this process, and I do not believe that you or any of the other commenters decrying this issue are actually interested in the truth any more than the media is.
Yes, in the early 20th century, many states implemented programs which resulted in the sterilization of women who had been institutionalized for mental illnesses, or who had criminal histories, or who had profound mental disabilities.
Okay. Given that this practice was carried out at some scale for a couple decades, what evidence convinces you that it had a clearly beneficial effect? Murder rate per capita would be my go-to here, and while I can't find a chart at the moment due to them all starting in the 1950s, I'm pretty sure the graphs I've seen doesn't support a story where the sterilization program provided an obvious benefit. How are you measuring the outcomes, and what are the observed measurements?
Given what I know, and the opinions of commentators I trust, it seems like price controls are generally a very bad policy, distorting the market and incentivizing massive corner-cutting in order to squeeze profits out of what is already an industry with extremely tight margins.
We're on the same page here. Obviously, we both recognize the idea of "coordinate effort to create positive value where none existed before" is generally a pretty good strategy. Naïvely, one might think that this general model would work for price controls too; the prices are "wrong", and we coordinate effort to fix them, thus creating positive value that would otherwise not be available to us. The problem is that the coordination doesn't work, because while effort can be coordinated, the information needed to determine how that effort should be spent to achieve the desired outcome is absent. As a consequence, the effort is wasted, and the result is a loss of value rather than a gain.
I think Eugenics has the same problem. I don't believe that I can define "good people" any more than I can define "good prices". I certainly don't believe that other people can do so, nor do I particularly trust them to even try. Absent the definition and trust, there's no reason to believe that the effort won't be wasted, resulting in loss of value. I certainly don't think "MOAR INT PLOX" does it; a lot of very, very smart people went in for Communism and the New Soviet Man, with results that seem very obviously dysgenic even from a steelmanned Eugenics perspective.
Table stakes for this idea should be a demonstration that "good people" can be reliably produced at a community level, and that these people remain "good" at least three generations down the line. There's no actual obstacle I can see to such an effort, and indeed I observe a number of people and groups who have tried this sort of thing in the past. The results I'm aware of don't strike me as promising for your thesis, and the best results I'm aware of come pretty much exclusively from the religious, not from the sort of Materialist Rationalism it seems you prefer.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Two questions:
Can you point to an example of intentional, explicit eugenics delivering clear benefits?/
Do you support price controls?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
"the aristocrats", horrible ravenous cannibal monsters that 1% of humans mature into.
Some story about an industrialist making a huge factory machine thing and feeding his workers to it because they couldn't unionize fast enough.
A rewrite of the "Chronicles of the Daeva", where the deava alternate history merges into our own, and it turns out they weren't a blood-magic slavemaster empire of human-sacrificing necromancers, but actually a peaceful, enlightened matriarchy and everything bad written about them was just an evil plot to convince people to keep them sealed away.
That last one was where I checked out. Chronicles of the Daeva is one of my all-time favorite SCP entries. Look how they massacred my boy...
...As Arjin notes, this was all years ago.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Seems like a pretty good strategy; I guess the obvious problem is the conflict with previous messaging, and trump appealing to his actual record in office versus kamala's record in office. still, a better suggestion than I think most of the strategists are offering.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Trump supporters are confused by this because there is no backup Trump, if Trump had turned right instead of left the entire policy platform of the GOP is up in the air. Kamala is 99% a like for like replacement for Biden.
If Trump supporters are confused on this, it might be because they took Biden supporters seriously when they argued that Biden was, in fact, meaningfully different from the rest of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, an old-school moderate who would tone down the crazy progressivism of post-2018 blue tribe.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
It's a good example too. State-level economic warfare by coalitions of major corporations is a similar problem. I'm just not sure it's actually decisive, whereas the system actually breaking down, whether through durable federalism or legit "things fall apart", seems pretty decisive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
If your online persona is screaming LGTBQ+ Adjacent Zoomer people are naturally going to read you in that light. If you want a cishet crowd to take your words seriously you need to account for that bias in your presentation.
This may or may not be true in a general context, but this forum has a higher standard. People are expected to communicate with charity here, whether or not they are cishet or their opposite sounds like an LGBTQ+ Adjacent Zoomer.
I think anarchists are bad, and I think Marxist communists are bad.
I believe you, for what it's worth.
It is obviously bad for Reds if turned against them, but it isn't necessarily destructive of the entire order, any more than the KKK was.
You appear to be claiming that KKK-style oppression aimed at Reds is bad for Reds, but that we survived the KKK so we'll survive this. The problem is that Reds have guns and no small measure of political support of their own, and that unlike the KKK, Antifa has at least the tacit support of Blue Tribe on a national level, in the sense that when an Antifa goon is shot, the average Blue arrives at the conclusion that he was an innocent protester murdered by an evil Red. The obvious first-order result is a steady stream of killings that operate like Shiri's Scissor to accelerate cultural polarization; this is already happening. The likely second-order effect is that Reds are encouraged to cease confining themselves to defense, and try some offense of their own, an eventuality that our society almost certainly cannot survive. It is not obvious to me why burning down an abortion clinic or a university facility is worse than burning down a police station or a church. You talk about burning police stations as a thing that, you know, sort of happens, and of course there are no shortage of examples of church fires also happening. If consequence-free arson becomes a equitably-distributed crime, do you think social stability holds steady?
When people kill or otherwise inflict great harm on each other, it's important that we as a society generally get on the same page about who was in the wrong. If we can't do that any more for some types of crimes, it becomes very, very important to prevent and to minimize those types of killings, because fundamental, systematic disagreements over justice lead to spiraling escalations. Society cannot survive a major faction gaining common knowledge that their political opponents have in fact stripped them of their legal and social rights, and intend to commit lawless violence against them without consequence. Once that common knowledge is established, cooperation is over, the opponents' political action becomes an existential threat, and people start supporting lawless violence of their own. That is what is massively destructive to the entire order.
Antifa normalizes and escalates political violence. There is only so much political violence a society can handle without falling apart. We are currently below that threshold because Red Tribe declines to commit their share. If that changes, I and people like me will not be in favor of enforcing consequences on the Reds, because we have seen that there were no consequences for Blues. The longer this goes, the more people like me there will be.
If I tell you, a hardline communist will take control of antifa (which would obviously have to include some amount of re-organization and purging) from say distributed Blue Tribe Bob's, do you think they will be less violent or more?
I don't think it would make any statistically significant difference at all. Their level of violence does not appear to be determined by ideology, but by enforcement or lack of enforcement by Blue authorities. If they confine themselves to mob-stomping innocent victims, property destruction and arson, the cops look the other way. If they commit blatant gun murders, the cops show up and shut things down, and occasionally even jail or kill them if the optics are bad enough. If a "hardline communist" takes over, they'll buck this system and the cops will promptly come down on them like a ton of bricks, and then they won't be a problem any more.
If you're being menaced by a vicious dog on a leash, is the problem whether or not the dog has rabies, or is it that a human has intentionally brought a vicious dog into your personal space? Whether the dog has rabies or not, he's not going to break the leash, and you can get a shot in any event. But the guy on the other end of the leash created this situation, and he has significant control over how bad it gets. He's the real problem, not the dog.
It's not an existential threat to the system. And the destruction of the system in a nation of 330 million people will be catastrophic.
There are other examples where it's gone worse, and it seems to me that there's a number of reasons to suspect that, in America, it will in fact be worse.
Of course this is the problem with communism.
I fundamentally disagree.
If all of the horrors of the USSR and red China had resulted in societies five times as prosperous as the US in material terms we’d all be communists now.
In the first place, if the USSR and Red China could actually produce five times the prosperity as the US, they likely would not have needed to resort to the violence. This is the basis of plausibility for "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism".
In the second place, I don't think torture, rape and murder can or will ever produce superior prosperity to their absence, so I don't think the question is actually meaningful. If we're going to chase the hypothetical, though, I'll happily reject the idea that economic abundance and moral justice are mutually fungible. It is not immoral to be poor. It is immoral to murder, rape and torture. This does not change even if the torture, rape and murder are enormously economically productive. Those who think otherwise and manage to make a go of it should be properly categorized as hostis humani generis. No mortal man is fit to prey on his fellows. Those who forget this should be reminded of their mortality.
The torture, the killing, the brutality, (I exclude the starvation, which is a direct consequence of communism as an economic failure state), that is all sadly very human, very common, very widespread (certainly until very recently) in every corner of the world.
I am skeptical that Communist Russia is actually typical in its rates of torture, murder and brutality. I think we can find other regimes that were similarly brutal, but those regimes are likewise unusual.
What is particularly communist is that on not one occasion did it achieve anything like the mass popular prosperity achieved in comparable nations under capitalism.
What is particularly communist is that it created notable brutality more or less out of whole cloth. We can accept that the Aztecs, in the end, gradually devolved into a society built on slavery and murder. What is surprising is that the Communists built such a society from scratch overnight, out of otherwise reasonably decent, peaceful human beings.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Even the Communist elites had it worse than Capitalist elites under Communism, and it's more of a common knowledge that Communism was bad for everyone in general. That's why it doesn't need as much suppression.
The notable problem with Communism is not that it made people generally poor. The problem is the vast amounts of rape, torture, hideous murder, rampant slavery, mass starvation, occasionally intentionally induced, and the general pattern of systemic efforts to mutilate the souls of those unfortunate enough to be held in its thrall. The fact that you have bypassed these to argue for common knowledge that Communism is bad because even elites weren't as rich as westerners rather underlines the point.
Communism is in fact a conflict theory. It is in fact predicated on making things good for Communists, and is explicit that this should come at the expense of non-communists, who are to be exterminated without mercy. It cannot even be argued that "non-communist" was a category one chose for themselves; communists routinely assigned the label on the basis of who your family was, and even on ethnicity when convinient.
I firmly believe that the left is evil, and am baffled that others are confused on this point. Certainly there has never been an empire more evil than Communism.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
If they are Marxist communists then you are at risk of a Stalinist totalitarian state. If they are anarchists they might want to tear down the state but do not want it replaced. They'll be happy to burn a police station, but aren't going to reintroduce the Stasi.
Then how do you explain the notable role Anarchists played in both the Bolshevik movement and in the construction of the actual Stalinist totalitarian state? I understand that they, like many of their Marxist Communist brethren, were subsequently murdered by the Stalinist totalitarian state that they had worked so hard together to build, but that doesn't change the fact that they did in fact build it, does it?
Likewise, you appear to be aware that Anarchists and Marxist Communists fight together here and now with the explicit goal of destroying our present society, and you appear to be explicitly claiming that we shouldn't worry about the Anarchists because if they're only active, dedicated allies of the people who want to commit mass murder, not planning mass murder themselves. I have zero confidence that even a pure Anarchist revolution would not generate mass murder, since I do not believe their ideology is even slightly coherent or grounded in reality, and I observe that utopian left-wing revolutionaries have a long track record of papering over the failures of their ideologies by killing the people they find most visibly inconvenient. Marxist Communism likewise had no history of mass murder until it actually won, and then the mass murders began immediately. Why should we suppose it would be different for the Anarchists, even if by some miracle they should manage not to simply empower another Stalin like they did the last several times?
The other part that I don't get is how you recognize that both of these groups are actively working to destroy the present peace, and then expect, should they succeed, for the results to somehow bifurcate based on which of the two is dominant over the other. Again, you seem to recognize that there is no observable separation between the two in their current actions, which are directed at destroying the relative peace and order of our present society. To the extent that they succeed in that goal, the next step is not that we get either an Anarchist or a Marxist Communist revolution, but rather Reds joining the political violence game wholesale, decisively ending peace and order for the foreseeable future. Avoiding that eventuality should be your priority, and in this there is no meaningful distinction between them. To the extent that you are willing either to tolerate either lawless violence from the Anarchists or the tacit support granted that violence by Blue institutions, it seems to me that you are, wittingly or not, endorsing Red violence as well. To the extent that you wish to forestall Red violence, it behooves you to forestall Anarchist violence and the tacit support granted to it in equal measure to Marxist Communist violence.
Is an elite clamp down on antifa proof of moderation or proof they are cleaning house to take over more thoroughly? Is it a welcome return to law and order or another Night of Long Knives? Without considering that antifa is not all the same, and understanding factionalism inside it, you will have no clue.
I disagree, because it does not seem to me that the nature of Antifa allows tight coordination with the authorities such that this sort of factionalism would be a concern. Antifa are thugs, and they are utilized as a deniable, arms-length tool by Blue elites. Their usefulness begins and ends with using violence to shut down and demoralize Reds, and all that the Elites provide for this is turning a blind eye. There is no plausible scenario where Antifa themselves actually end up in power. Their significance begins and ends with their ability to inflict lawless violence without consequence, and that significance is not altered by the ideological peculiarities of the various factions. They attack people Blues don't like, and Blues let them because Blues derive social and political advantage from the resulting chaos and dismay. The ultimate concern is the Blues running this system, and it is difficult to see how the differences between Marxist Communists and Anarchists register compared to the reality of the system as a whole. Likewise if one faction or the other were to be purged; the problem is the people in control of the system, not the pawns. Are they allowing lawless violence, or are they punishing it? If they arrest one faction and tell the other that they have to lay low, then they're not tolerating violence. If they arrest one faction but give the other free reign, they are tolerating violence. Which faction is doing or not doing the violence is irrelevant.
Now I am not arguing if you are caught in a dark alley with black bloc, it makes much of a difference, but socio-politically it really does.
Blue Tribe toleration of their violence can permanently destroy peace and order either way, and their differences don't materially impact that destruction in any meaningful way. So no, I don't think it really does, socio-politically or in any other way.
Plus, many states have been long dependent on massive federal funding grants, and threatening to pull those would politically kill any local Republican that becomes too uppity.
Why didn't Biden use this power against Abbott when Texas defied the federal government on the border?
...It seems to me that many such predictions vastly overestimate Blue Tribe's willingness to actually prosecute a fight, or to enforce their will in the face of significant opposition. They absolutely like dropping the hammer on isolated Red Tribers who they estimate they can destroy without consequence, but they do not actually seem to relish a fight that costs them casualties. Rittenhouse ended the Kenosha riots single-handedly, after all. The ATF will absolutely murder some isolated loner's wife. I doubt they will relish going door-to-door in Texas or Arkansas, and I doubt they can make the locals do it for them.
What kind of escalation you are talking about?
See here. In short:
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.
Perhaps that seems implausible to you. If you believed it were true, though, would it shift your assessment of the probability of success for the current Blue Tribe snowball approach?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Are you sure? How many are actually communist?
I suppose that depends on how one defines "communist".
Let's suppose I define it as "generally-left-wing revolutionaries drawing significant ideological influence from Marx and the leaders of the various communist revolutions, rejecting capitalism and the existing rule-of-law and embracing lawless violence against their opponents." It seems to me that this definition covers the vast majority of the black-clad thugs committing lawless violence in numerous American cities, and that these thugs enjoy significant institutional support even from purportedly law-abiding progressive elites and institutions.
In concrete terms, what does this definition cost me in terms of predictive accuracy? Does it harm my ability to predict who they will ally with, who they will fight against, who will provide them with institutional protection and cover for their violence, which communities will allow them to operate and which they will avoid, etc? If it does not harm predictive accuracy in these matters, where does the predictive accuracy start breaking down, and what salient misconceptions result?
If communism had even reasonable approval you would have an actually influential communist party, and Trump using communist as an attack against Harris, would not be worth doing (because people would not see it as bad), nor would she have to say she isn't in response.
And yet, Communist gunmen can publicly take over portions of American cities, threaten people, even shoot people, and the police, local authorities and media look the other way and refuse to enforce the law against them. And because the media is actively covering for them, the public doesn't appear to grasp that this has happened, or why it is a serious problem.
Do you think there's a straightforward way to ensure that the law is enforced against such violent communist gangs, going forward?
If not, how should people like me go about securing similar tacit approval for our own armed, public infliction of violence on the people we deem deserving?
If the latter does not seem practicable, would it be fair to say that violent communist thugs, as I've defined them above, observably enjoy greater leniency than law-abiding Red Tribe types?
You (as a nation) dislike Communism, but you HATE Nazis, because your own history is closer to almost becoming Nazis, than it is to becoming Communists.
I don't think this is actually true. It seems obvious to me that communism was much more popular and for much longer than Naziism ever was, especially with my nation's elites and leadership. To the extent that America was never close to Gulags and mass starvation as a punitive policy, it was likewise never close to extermination camps. To the extent that it approached authoritarianism, it is not obvious to me that this potential authoritarianism was significantly more fascist than it was communist. Then too, it does not seem to me that the communists were actually immune to persecuting and even exterminating large groups of people on the basis of ethnicity.
I also note that countries that came far closer to falling to communism, like much of Western Europe, and even countries that partially DID fall to Communism, like Germany, conspicuously lack the antibodies to Communism that your argument implies they should possess.
I propose an alternative hypothesis: my nation dislikes Communism but HATES Naziism, because large and influential portions of my country's elite have been broadly sympathetic to Communism, and have systematically downplayed its evils in the public consciousness. There is no principled reason why Communist Atrocity should not be its own film category, in the manner of Holocaust films. There is no principled reason why our history education focuses so much on the one and so consistently ignores the other. Having spent some effort to educate myself, I find I am capable of hating them both, and see no reason why my fellow countrymen should not share this capacity. I note that academia and the media seem obsessed with maintaining the hatred one way, and have a long history of hagiography for the other, from Duranty on down to the evergreen academic studies on Marx and Lenin and Mao as serious, useful thinkers.
(All stats are taken from polls commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation which works to try and educate Americans as to the fact that Communism/Marxism is as dangerous/more dangerous than fascism, so should if anything be swaying respondents to communism being bad.
What's their plan for changing attitudes on this issue? How does it compare to Progressive plans for changing attitudes toward, say, LGBT+ issues?
I've heard accounts from women who have an abortion, and then years later see mothers with their children, realize that could have been them, and experience significant and lasting regret.
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