FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr ago
Yes, Trump's grand move is to empower Desantis, the man who tried to kill the king less than a year ago
...Could you elaborate on your model here? Like, it seems you're positing that Trump and Desantis are enemies, and further that his supporters should consider them enemies and prefer conflict between them rather than cooperation. Would that be accurate?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
It was already permeating normie spaces, though. Trump was part of the inflammation response to the infection of Woke ideology. Fevers are necessary; it's the infection that's the problem.
this is true, for strict definitions of "normal" and strict definitions of "enemy". Al Qaeda was a political enemy, was it not?
...More generally, though, I think you're more or less entirely correct in this case. "Resist the Fascists" signaling is mainly signaling; there is not actually a way to hurt the outgroup much worse than previously without getting in too much trouble, and a lot of the signaling is being driven by at least a subconscious understanding that nothing is actually going to happen.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Just a few days ago I was reading multiple posts on this forum about how the $44 billion Elon spent on Twitter was worth every penny to the Trump campaign and now the Harris campaign spending $1 billion is a sign the big money is on the side of the Democratic Party?
Going by the numbers on Forbes, Harris spent 1.6 billion, to Trump's 1.1 billion to contest the 2024 election. Musk spent $44 Billion to contest the entire culture; the relevant frame here would be the amounts spent on, say, every other major media and tech company in the nation. So yes, the big money is on the side of the democratic party. Blackrock alone has somewhere north of ten trillion dollars under management, to give one example of a company aligned to Blue Tribe.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
This has come up a few times, and the best anyone could come up with is "distributed motte and bailey". Calling it that is obviously unfair to a person being held to account for an argument they may not have made, but on the other hand, it's pretty goddamn frustrating to get mutually contradictory arguments from people sharing a coalition.
There's probably no solution but to recognize that the discourse is fucked.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Am I the only one who likes discrete legible units in most of my games?
Nope. That's my preference too.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
I assumed someone wrote a script, had the AI read it and create a lip-synched video. Am I overestimating capabilities?
I'm having my first moment of AI-related epistemic crisis. I've been provided the link to this clip, and I legitimately can't tell if it's real or not. I'm pretty sure AI gen is good enough to generate a video like this, so the obvious first choice would be to search for other sources repeating the content and providing additional context. I've done so and found nothing, which raises my concern that it isn't real; I'd expect this to be everywhere if it were genuine.
Does it even matter? If it's generated, then who's it generated by: his supporters or his own campaign, as a way of field-testing proposals? Why not generate a ton of these and see which go viral, then simply do those? As a private citizen, why not generate these as a way to influence your leader, by demonstrating a possible avenue they could choose to take? Could we be on the cusp of AI-accelerated populism?
[EDIT] - nope, looks like it's genuine. Search failure on my part. Hot damn!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Dyson Sphere Project had a respectable pseudo-3d grid system, made somewhat annoying by the wierdness of mapping the grid to a sphere.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
and yet when people say that we shouldn't be doing it, the argument is that we've got to protect the poor Ukrainians. There's this maddening bullshit arbitrage between "protect the Ukrainians from the evil Russian Orcs", and "We should harm the Russians as much as possible, who cares what it costs the Ukranians."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
I have been repeatedly told by people arguing for support of Ukraine that our policy is and should be to drag the war out as long as possible to maximize harm to Russia. The fact that this also maximizes harm to Ukraine is waved off as Ukraine is volunteering for the honor. The fact that Ukraine is volunteering for the honor based on their belief that we will help them win, when in fact we have no intention of doing that is likewise dismissed.
And of course, actually providing them the resources needed to win, presuming those resources actually exist, risks escalating into direct warfare with a nuclear power.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
What is reality?
That which does not go away when you stop believing in it.
Who decides that exactly?
No one decides it. It happens regardless. If you do a bad job planting your crops, people starve. If you do a bad job enforcing the law, chaos and violence reigns. If you do a bad job protecting your borders, foreign armies victimize your populace.
How can you decide whether an institution , whether that is the police or whoever , did their job correctly?
For the police, you derive a general understanding of what their job is by examining the laws they're supposed to enforce, and their actual enforcement of those laws, measure it versus the costs of maintaining them and the general realities that add friction to the system.
Are you capable or even interested in judging each and every move they make ?
Random sampling and statistics help a great deal here.
Do you just use your judgement ( whether right or wrong) to fuel hatred and distrust? Because you are probably not using it to make a a practical change.
That is certainly a thing people can do. For example, the BLM movement spun out of a coordinated attempt by Blue Tribe to generate hatred and distrust by pushing misinformation about the actual performance of law enforcement, resulting in a very large and quite partisan disconnect between public perception of police misconduct and actual rates of misconduct. And the result is that tens of thousands of additional black Americans are now dead, and hundreds of thousands of additional Black Americans have been victimized by serious crimes. That was a practical change of the sort you are describing.
So what is it? What is the goal? The cornerstone of society is trust. Trust has to be blind up to a logical point.
Alternatively, one can do one's best to verify that trust, and to withdraw it when one perceives that it has been repeatedly violated. It is always possible that one has been deceived, though, so it's best to keep an open mind to new evidence when it arises.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Apparently she's already been the president, for a little over an hour when Biden was under for surgery.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
If democrats were forced to pick a 2028 candidate right now, would you advise them to pick her, or someone else?
Out of curiosity, have the election results changed your view on the general political situation in the US? Would you be less inclined to push the button, after a demonstration of the limits of Blue power?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Three reasons.
First, DIY tech is constantly improving, and it's already well past the point where guns can in fact be controlled. Gun control is a dead letter simply from a practical perspective. Crime is a major political concern and likely will be for some time, and in that time the Gun Culture will continue killing it on outreach to the youth.
Second, the Gun Culture will not accept new legislation, will not comply with it if passed, and is actively and aggressively eroding the existing laws. The AR15 has been thoroughly normalized. SBRs are completely normalized. Automatic weapons are effectively normalized, both in legal and illegal versions; I'm given to understand that you can 3d-print glock switches for example. What you're going to see is the legal full auto giving cover to the illegal, until outright defiance is completely normalized and any enforcement effort becomes a moot point. I'm hopeful similar things will happen with more significant weapons as well.
Third, technological developments are almost certainly going to moot the whole question within the decade. What people will be worrying about won't be guns.
Let me highlight the relevant part then: who his bodyguards studiously ignored until after he'd fired eight or so times.
Trump being alive right now is a low-probability event, and a significant part of the reason it is a low-probability event is conspicuous, inexplicable and extremely suspicious inaction on the part of federal agents in the face of a deadly threat. The events in Butler have not been remotely adequately explained, and one of the obvious potential explanations is that the deep state made a good try at having him killed.
(This being said, I also am waiting for the blackpill crew to update based on this new information.)
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Gun control is donzo. There will never be meaningful, effective gun control legislation ever again, and what controls exist are probably going away over the next decade or so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I've been arguing against the blackpill crowd for years now, but this is your reminder that Trump missed having his brainstem clipped by a sniper who his bodyguards studiously ignored until after he'd fired eight or so times.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Yup, repeating what I saw last night. Apologies for the confusion.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Red Pill and Blue pill originally derive from the matrix films. Red pill means accepting reality, blue pill means lying to yourself. People adapted this to other contexts, one of the prominent ones being the general anti-feminist backlash in the mid-2010s, with an additional resonance from "Red" being the conservative color and "Blue" being the Progressive color post-2000.
As the culture war heated up post 2014, and a lot of people perceived the world to be more or less falling apart around them, the "Black Pill" rose to prominence: Black in this case meaning despair, an acceptance of defeat, the belief that things can't get better, only worse. "Black Pilled" means you're despairing of the present situation and have little to no hope for the future. "White pilled" means the opposite.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
The Powers That Be, an old term for entrenched systems of power and the agents imbedded in them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
If there was an SJW consensus prior to Elon, all the same mechanisms and all the same incentives exist to create an equally false right-wing consensus.
Okay. Show the high-engagement Progressive accounts being banned from X through arbitrary application of platform rules. That's the mechanism that dominated prior to Elon, so according to you it should be the mechanism dominating under Elon.
Likewise, community notes didn't exist prior to Elon, and are a significant improvement to the function of the platform.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
This is of course completely ridiculous and an appalling misuse of scripture, but...
The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. 2 The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. 3 One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. 4 People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?”
5 The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise its authority for forty-two months.
Hrrrm.
But you understand that we, the base they both depend on for their continued careers, want them to work together, right?
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