FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12hr ago
The founders mostly died expecting their experiment to fail in a big and obvious way
The Civil War seems like a pretty significant point of failure. Otherwise, there's a lot of ruin in a nation, and especially one as fortuitously positioned as the United States. Give it time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12hr ago
Consolidating responses to a couple comments here.
From your post above:
But this isn't actually a good way of dividing up different ideologies. It's essentially a non sequitur. It's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side, while he got to stay on the other side.
I would strongly disagree with all three of these statements. I think we can agree that "left" or "right" are essentially meaningless, but whether human beings are naturally good or evil and the locus of control seem to me to be extremely important questions. Likewise, where you see Hlynka latching on to something to put all his enemies onto one side, if his method allows him to sort friends from enemies in a consistent fashion, that is straightforwardly and obviously useful to him and to anyone who shares his values. I use similar logic to sort friend and enemy, and to make predictions about where current ideology will lead people, and this seems like an obviously useful and relatively uncontroversial method of reasoning.
At a minimum, you should consider that a categorization system that you don't find useful for your purposes and values might still be useful to people with different purposes and values.
It also just misrepresents the basic facts about what different groups believe, particularly in the DR. As HBD advocates, they believe in a relatively static human nature that cannot be reshaped by social institutions.
Would you concede that, under the framing you're employing here, Eugenics was straightforwardly an attempt to reshape "human nature" through the mechanism of social institutions? Do the DR types believe that Eugenics was a bad idea or doomed to failure? Like, there's obviously a serious miscommunication happening here, because you are conflating "bad genes will always produce bad people" with "regardless of nature, regardless of nurture, the line between good and evil will always run through every human heart." These are not remotely equivalent statements.
I have and will argue that intelligence is orthogonal to morality, and that there is no reason at all to believe that even highly intelligent people are in any way more moral than dullards. Arguments to the contrary, from what I have seen, rely on a model of "morality" that rounds off to crime statistics, as though a person who never commits a crime, much less never gets caught committing a crime, is therefore morally perfect. Likewise, there is no reason to believe that those who commit crimes are necessarily less moral than those who do not, and that is even ignoring the part where immoral people can give their immorality the force and imprimatur of law. The logic that would argue otherwise is absurd for a whole host of reasons, but near as I can tell it is actually what a number of HBD enthusiasts I've encountered seem to be explicitly arguing.
Likewise, is Walt Bismark a reasonably representative example of a DR thinker? When he says:
I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich and anyone who supports me in this battle is a fellow-fighter for a unique spiritual—I would say divine—creation... In the Midwest I encountered a different kind of white person that honestly seemed quasi-Asian to me. They had no will to power. They were not Romans. They seemed more like the Chinese of the Ming era, or like modern Europeans. But there wasn’t a Faustian spirit to be found anywhere... ...My experiences taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my volk in any meaningful sense... ...They have no destiny except under the caligae.
...what part of that passage would you describe as a recognition that human nature is immutable and immune to manipulation by social institutions? Would you argue that subjugating people wholesale is not a form of manipulation by social institutions? Do you understand that, completely separate from any charged keywords or references to specific identity groups, the core logic evident in that passage marks the author, to me, as the most mortal sort of ideological enemy? Someone with whom no cooperation is or likely ever will be possible?
And Yarvin's Hobbits and Dark Elves essay is much the same, though he maintains a far more diplomatic approach; his core logic marks him firmly as an enemy.
Nor can their position be reduced to "white people inherently good, everyone else inherently bad"; they acknowledge that whites have a higher genetic disposition to violent crime than East Asians, for example, and that this would persist regardless of social arrangements.
You might as easily quote Bismark above, who clearly argues that not all whites make the cut. But as I understand it, the core objection isn't that the DR believes "white people inherintly good, everyone else inherintly bad", even though I have seen plenty of examples of exactly that sort of logic from what I thought were adherents to the DR here. It seems to me that one of the actual core objection is that they believe they can sort people into the good and bad bins by population-level metrics, when in fact they absolutely cannot do that.
But this ignores the diversity of views about human nature you find on both the far right and the far left.
Diversity is infinitely fractal. Focusing on specific commonalities that seem of primary relevance to one's own model is not "ignoring diversity". Relevance to the model at hand is the whole question.
The dissident right already has an essentially Hobbesian view of human nature, as far as I understand it. And even on the far left, things are not so clear. Followers of the more psychoanalytically-inflected strains of Marxism stress that there can be no final end to history, no ultimate reconciliation of the individual with the collective.
As above, I think of Bismark and Yarvin as examples of Dissident Right thinkers. Both seem to share a view of human nature that fits much better with Progressive ideology than with my own. Likewise, when we've discussed psychoanalytically-inflected strains of marxism, it seemed that the examples you offered argued for no final end in the sense that an asymptote has no final end.
I do not think Bismark, Yarvin, or the the psychoanalytically-inflected marxists could engage with the fundamental truth of "the poor you will always have with you."
That is an underlying assumption on both sides that if only all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down, utopia would be achievable. This is straightforwardly false. The dissident right does not believe this.
How would you characterize Bismark's call for a "thousand year Reich", aiming for "divine creation"? But let's say you're correct, and the DR doesn't argue that Utopia will be achieved if all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down. Would it be fair to say that they believe things will get a whole lot better, if they can simply remove most of the silly barriers keeping them from exercising unrestrained power to reshape and organize society?
Maybe they don't. Yarvin seems to, and Bismark definately seems to. Maybe they're not representative?
I suspect that what he wanted to say, but shied away from, is that there are ultimately two camps: those who believe in the Christian God, and those who don't.
I can say that I personally am very confident that this formulation is incorrect; belief in the Christian God is not required in any way. What is required is an understanding that we are not in control, that we are inside the box looking out, not standing in the lab looking in at the world in a box. Such a worldview is compatible with Christianity, in the sense that cooperation and productive coexistence between the two are possible, and the opposite worldview is incompatible with Christianity. That's the connection I think you are twigging to. The hubris required to assume that one is fundamentally in control is the same hubris necessary to believe that "rational Christian" is an oxymoron, and so the two correlate strongly; there is a reason Bismark claims that building his hoped-for society is a spiritual, even divine act of creation. Further, I find that one can argue persuasively against this hubris from entirely within a rational, materialist framework, provided one is sufficiently rigorous in their materialism.
Noted atheist Sargon of Akaad just put out a video more or less on this subject. For fictional/vibes examples, I thought Glen Cook's The Silver Spike and Shadowline were interesting attempts within the bounds of genre fiction. Kipling himself seems most of the way there.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22hr ago
What do you think the missing "common knowledge" in question is?
The short, inadequate answer would be something like "What rules are and how they work" and "what values are and how they work". The Founding Fathers had no context for Postmodernism, for the fully-developed concept of a "Living Constitution", or for the reality that human values could be incoherent at scale. They mistook local values-homogeneity for universal features of human nature, and they assumed that legible rules could meaningfully constrain human Will. They lacked a deep understanding of "manipulation of procedural outcomes" and rules-fragility.
That's my understanding, anyhow.
I am not Hlynka, but I did debate with and eventually alongside him for years, and as I understood his arguments, I continue to believe he was simply correct in the large majority of them. As a vociferous proponent of what one might term Hlynkism, here is a compilation of discussions that seem to me to be good examples of the core idea that usually gets this label. It's a large chunk of quotes; I recommend collapsing it if it doesn't seem useful.
I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?
These two revolutions occurred a mere 13 years apart. Both societies were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideology, and consciously sought to recast their social structures according to the precepts of that ideology. On the other hand, the interpretations, implementations, and ultimate outcomes differed vastly between the two. Clearly the divergence was significant, and it seems reasonable to presume that one diverged further from the root ideology than the other. By describing our understanding of that divergence, we can give a clearer picture of what we see as the Enlightenment's core nature, while being kept honest by the historical record of its commonly-accepted champions.
[...]
And yet, I see people who I'm quite confident would not self-ID as white identitarian, people who I would not argue are white identitarian, people who have been democrat-voting progressives most of their lives but who now have grown progressive-sceptical, lamenting that Red Tribers have "wasted" political capital preventing poor black women from aborting their babies, because HBD. I don't believe that perspective is coming out of what people commonly understand as "the Right", and I certainly don't believe it's coming from the zeitgeist of Red Tribe. It's a fundamentally Blue Tribe perspective, a progressive perspective, an Enlightenment perspective. And it's pretty trivial to see how integrating HBD into their worldview got them from a normie-progressive viewpoint to what most normie progressives would consider an abomination without ever leaving the general Progressive worldview-space.
[...]
The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree.
[...]
I think there's a significant and irreducible difference between the two formulations, and a way to try to begin describing it would be to say that "A" presents itself as on the inside looking out, and "B" presenting as from the outside looking in. I would say further that the former is better than the latter, because there is no "outside", and presenting as though one is "outside" is fundamentally dishonest. In this way, the passage shows that the way one talks about something reveals the way that one thinks about something, and that some ways of thinking are better than others.
[The above is part of a longer conversation, which continued in the following thread:]
I believe that "We know how to solve all our problems" is a brief, common-language encapsulation of the core thesis of a specific ideological movement, and that this ideological movement is best understood as the central example of the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment this movement did not exist, and post-Enlightenment this movement has been overwhelmingly dominant throughout subsequent history. I think this movement's axioms are both very wrong and very dangerous, and further believe that its dominance is rapidly approaching an end, for reasons directly related to how this movement was formed and how its ideology predetermines its tactics. [...] Compare the phrase "the poor you will always have with you" to the conceptual bundle represented by the declaration of a "war on poverty". One flatly states that the problem of Poverty is unsolvable under mortal conditions. The other assumes that the problem of Poverty can be defeated through coordinated human action, right now and under present conditions.
[...]
Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time. Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
[...]
"Consent" is necessary but insufficient. That is very different from it "not mattering". You want fornication with fewer consequences for men and worse consequences for women, the radfems want fornication with fewer consequences for women and more consequences for men. I think you both are awful for basically identical reasons, and would not willingly live under either of your regimes.
[...]
When you design a better microprocessor, that does not give you or your culture additional moral value. Technological advancement does not, cannot, and never will imply moral value. It doesn't matter if I'm knapping flints and you're building star destroyers: our moral responsibilities to each other remain entirely unaltered. To think otherwise is to fatally misunderstand both morality and technology on an extremely basic level.
[...]
He's putting them in the "left" box for the same reason I put them in the "Enlightenment" box: They're secular materialists who believe that they know how to solve all our problems through the twin powers of meticulous sociopolitical theorycrafting and permanent removal of all the Bad People. They have a number of qualities they share between them, and our argument is that those qualities are vastly more consequential than their differences. These similarities are not a recent development, and go back all the way through the history of hard-left and fascist movements.
[...]
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The American Revolution was, by most accounts, based on the principles of classical liberalism; principles that I imagine Hlynka and his fellow travelers would endorse wholeheartedly. Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution?
I've argued yes in the past, and would do so again. Likewise I've argued at some length that the "principles of classical liberalism" are fundamentally flawed, and they've failed in the ways we observe for clear, predictable reasons.
Does it have to be denounced?
More or less. More precisely, it should not and probably cannot be repeated, and its problems were identified early on. The ideological amalgamation of the American Revolution was a one-shot thing; it worked as well as it did the first time around due to ignorance in the form of an absence of specific elements of common knowledge. Now that those specific elements of common knowledge exist, large portions of the project no longer work and cannot be made to work again.
Were the founding fathers necessarily committed to a certain "top down rationalist" view of human nature that true Red Tribers would have to reject?
There was a strong element of this, yes. It was moderated by contrasting, competing worldviews that were absent in, say, the French Revolution, and I believe that these moderating influences explain why it worked as well as it did for as long as it did. The French Revolution provides excellent contrast, as I've argued previously.
I argued this point with Hlynka back in the day, and my recollection was that the dispute came down to semantics; IIRC we both agreed that it came down to Hobbes vs Rousseau, and what label you apply to each of them. Likewise the argument I just linked: The American and French revolutions were very, very different, such that if both were "Enlightenment" revolutions, we should be able to say which was the more "Enlightened" than the other. It doesn't really matter which a given person picks, because the point is that if the term covers both perfectly equally, the term is actually meaningless, and by choosing, one reveals one's own definition. The American Revolution did contain a heaping helping of "top-down, rationalist" thinking, and the structures that resulted have failed us badly, and failed us the worst when we approached them from a top-down rationalist mindset.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
A significant portion number of such people were willing to support or at least accept extrajudicial execution for being an insurance executive or a trump supporter demonstrating in the wrong city.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Officially he got banned for antagonism and boo-outgroup posting.
This is in fact what he got banned for. He was an extremely valued commenter, but he eventually decided that he was no longer willing to abide by the rules here, and over the course of a number of repeated and very obvious rule violations presented the mods with a choice between the rules as a credible institution or his continued participation. They chose the rules.
@HlynkaCG remains my all-time favorite commenter here, and my interactions with him were, by far, the most constructive and formative of all those I've had here. I maintain to this day that his notable positions and arguments were simply correct. I myself have experienced fundamental conflict between the opinions I wish to express and the rules of this forum, and there was a stretch of time where I fully expected to receive a permaban, not because the mods were unfair in some way, but because I straightforwardly perceived my own intentions as fundamentally contrary to the forum's mission. It's something I and others have written about before: it's entirely possible for good, thoughtful, well-intentioned people to find themselves incapable of further participation here, because what this place requires, often enough, isn't goodness or thoughtfulness or fine intentions, but a peculiar sort of ice-cold abstraction.
To my knowledge, the behind-the-scenes mod drama consisted of mods arguing with him in private that he had to either stop breaking the rules or be banned, and the top-level ban announcement was to increase visibility for the people who had been arguing that him not being banned proved that the rules were fake.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
I think conservatives are pretty unanimous that FDR was a problem for America.
Their concerns were ignored for generations. They tried to soldier on in any case, but ended up entirely discredited as FDR-descended systemic changes continued to snowball. And now they are effectively extinct, politically speaking. If their political perspective was valuable, perhaps those who now consider it valuable should have put more effort into preserving it when such effort might have born fruit.
Alternatively, once Trumpism has entirely run its course, secured all its victories, crushed all opposition, and set the bedrock rules for the coming century, there will probably be many who will agree that "We should never have another Trump."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
The failure mode of the US left is the French revolution, where every day the radicals will find their enemies of the state so that the guillotine baskets will be full by nightfall, while the failure mode of the right would be fascism, where party loyalty prevents any insiders from speaking out against crazy ideas.
The left does not seem very good about speaking out about crazy ideas either. And in fairness, I do not think the Right is immune to filling baskets with heads. I'm not sure this distinction works either way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
-Socrates, or so I'm told.
Can these perspectives be reconciled?
There is no health as such, and all attempts to define such a thing have failed miserably.
Is there a good as such? Have not all attempts to define such a thing failed miserably?
...I think this argument relies for its persuasive power on either ignorance of or a peculiar axiomatic commitment to its evident results. I have in my life "enjoyed" variant and deviant forms of "health" at some length. Once upon a time, I did not care much about conventional notions of health, because I quite consciously did not particularly wish to live to advanced age. Now I contemplate that I am rather unlikely to live to hold my grandchildren, and rather likely to leave my wife a widow, despite all promises to the contrary, and I wish I had not been so foolish in my youth. I wish further that others had not been so cruel as to encourage my delusions.
Only then would it be timely to reflect on the health and illness of the soul and to locate the virtue peculiar to each man in its health - which of course could look in one person like the opposite of health in another.
Concrete examples would be really ideal here, and given the language, the higher-contrast, the better.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I couldn't really be a psychiatrist if I subscribed to that notion, could I?
Consistancy is the hobgoblin of small minds, or so I'm informed.
I think "healthy at any size" is crap, and I say this as a member of the target audience. But in order to take that position, I'm implicitly making an objective claim that some states are healthier than others, regardless of what the people experiencing those states think. It doesn't seem to me that this sort of position is compatible with your critique of the naturalist fallacy above. The argument against obesity is that it's divergent from our natural state, from what we ought to be. But as you say, rabies, infant mortality, etc, etc, and it seems to follow that any downside to obesity could easily be framed as just a matter of insufficient technology.
I would argue that we should value the places where nature is consonant with our desires, and we should be skeptical of places where our desires require wholesale rejection of nature. To the extent that our desires potentially bring us into conflict with nature, I think we should favor the desires that are as concrete and general as possible, over the desires that are highly individual and unusual. I think doing so would allow us to pursue common ground for a supermajority of the population.
To the extent that values are sufficiently mutually incoherent that the rabies vaccine, reduced infant mortality, and prepubescent gender transition can't be distinguished, it seems to me that Dril rules are in effect.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Would it be fair to say that you view the word "healthy" to be meaningless outside of direct reference to atomic individualist personal preference? That is to say, the question of whether something is "healthy" begins and ends with their subjective opinion of their current state?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
For those not getting it, everything after "Did you read ymeshkhout's post?" is a contiguous direct quote from the article.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
There's a risk that when the Anti-Woke seek to abandon the tactic, that they'll have accustomed the normies to the idea that college kids can suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable.
Things that have already happened are not risks. College kids already routinely suffer grave consequences for making people uncomfortable, and in fact such consequences have been deeply imbedded in longstanding policy. Given this reality, having these rules at least apply more fairly than they currently do is an obvious positive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
but I'm not aware of a single instance of a Twitter mob eventually snowballing into a genuine boycott from consumers at large.
Bud Light.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
You've been here a while now and have had a fair amount of interaction with other users. Can you point to a conversation you've had with someone who disagreed with you that you would describe as positive and constructive? You often seem unhappy with the engagement you're getting, but it might help if you could give an example of what you're hoping to get out of your participation here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Did you see the original version of the text marked in brackets?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Like the confederacy there seems to have been a gentlemen’s agreement that we could all respect their martial accomplishments even if we’re glad they lost.
Has that changed? My interest in pointing out the savagery of the natives is limited to countering narratives that whites were the true savages. None of this is new.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Examples?
Operation Fast and Furious would be one example. Benghazi and the surrounding narrative shaping would be another.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
I cannot rise to your cynicism.
I don't particularly want you to. I am not writing the above as a way to say "others should think as I do". I am writing it to point out what I see actually happening in the real world, and to hopefully offer some building-blocks toward insight as to why it is happening. Unlike Kulak, I would strongly prefer moderation to win, for us to find a way to extend the peace and plenty, to keep the Belle Epoch running as long as we can. And even if it does not win, I am committed, at some personal cost, to rejecting motorcycle-warlord-ism and all its works.
In order for that to have any chance at all of happening, Moderates need to understand the fact that moderation is currently losing, and put together some workable model of why and what to do about it. Ideally this would happen before something breaks that none of us can fix and we can't actually do without.
I am glad that you are an ocean away, in a place where perhaps moderation fairs better. You have always come across as a fundamentally-decent person, and I hope your life remains a pleasant one.
"Reassessing the realities of the present situation" is a vague pronouncement, of the kind that is not your habit.
Vagueness is not my aim. Broadness is.
I've argued for years now that the Constitution is dead. By this, I mean that I personally do not expect the Constitution, as a codified legal document, to protect me in any meaningful way, either now or most especially in the future. This is not a novel perspective, but it seems to me that it is an increasingly common one, often tacitly and increasingly explicitly, among millions of my fellow tribesmen. Since we have no reasonable expectation that the Constitution will in fact protect us when we need protecting, we have no particular reason to accept appeals to Constitutionality when they are raised against actions we consider needful.
I used to be a fairly doctrinaire conservative. I certainly am not one any more. I am not particularly interested in "fiscal responsibility" as it is traditionally formulated, or in limited government as an end unto itself for reasons that might be summarized as "nature abhors a vacuum". I am increasingly skeptical of free markets, free trade, and economics as a discipline. I have neither interest in nor patience for wars abroad and large-scale military alliances. To me, the question "What has Conservatism conserved" was fatal to any allegiance I still held to the ideological pillars of my youth. Again, I do not perceive my political metamorphosis to be particularly unusual; much of my tribe has gone through the same.
I do not consider myself an American in any deep, meaningful sense. Largely, this is because I no longer perceive America as a coherent concept, much less a live, meaningful political entity. People appeal to a "Nation of Ideas", but the collective mind which contains those ideas is best modelled as a schizophrenic with dementia. I think America's political history is best understood as a succession of philosophical errors and misapprehensions which, once corrected by practical experiment, have resulted in the nation's accelerating dissolution. I do not believe that I share some core set of fundamental values in common with a supermajority of my fellow countrymen; in fact, I perceive abundant evidence that the opposite is the case. Ozy's magnum opus is valuable and should be read and understood because their views pretty clearly generalize to a significant portion of the population, Red and Blue alike. I am quite convinced that Red and Blue tribal values are mutually incompatible and incoherent, and I do not believe that this mutual incoherence is in any sense temporary or amenable to reconciliation. Blue Tribe values are both deeply alien and deeply repugnant to me, and I am entirely aware that large and growing numbers of them feel likewise about my values. I do not trust Blues to rule me fairly, and I do not expect them to trust rule by people like me, or to acquiesce willingly to it. I do not believe that coexistence is likely to work out well for anyone involved; our differences are irreconcilable, and we need a national divorce before our growing mutual hatred gives birth to large-scale tragedy.
When Crooks' bullet missed Trump's brainstem by an inch or less in Butler, PA, a significant portion of the American population experienced acute angst and disappointment. Likewise when Rittenhouse was acquitted. When Mangione murdered a law-abiding husband and father in cold blood, a significant portion of the American population experienced joy and elation. Likewise when Antifa publicly celebrated the cold-blooded murder of Aaron Danielson in Portland, as evidenced by the glazing journalists provided to his murderer. We are more than a decade past the start of our most recent wave of widespread, organized political violence condoned and facilitated by significant portions of our institutions and local, state and federal governments. Calls for the murder of Elon Musk are frequent and widespread.
I appreciate that much of the above is bitter and immoderate. It seems evident to me that our present situation is likewise bitter and immoderate. People who have not internalized that reality are not, I think, paying sufficient attention to what has been happening in the world around them. Appeals to "freedom" and "America" are not going to cut it, and I would never under any circumstances be so foolish as to deploy them in an attempt to persuade my outgroup. They are, at this point, a punchline, like Freeze Peach.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
They are not, in my case at least. I try to upvote people I debate with to counteract the downvote swarm, but it is a losing battle.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Conservatives are now pushing for random passport/citizenship spot checks as you’re walking down the street, that’s what “freedom” and america means to you?
Do you believe that Conservatism is a live political force? Do you believe America is a live political entity? The Constitution? In what meaningful sense would any of these be true?
I think you perhaps should consider taking a few steps back and reassessing the realities of the present situation.
At no point were human souls actually mutilated. At no point did disenchantment actually occur. At no point was even a single heart replaced with metal and wheels. And yes, I understand that you are speaking metaphorically here; I am speaking in the same metaphor.
The historical events and ideologies you are referring to in the first part of this sentence were not science in any meaningful sense of the term. The widespread belief that these acts and ideologies constituted a "scientific revolution" is the result of deliberate lies coordinated by specific, identifiable historical figures. Frued, Marx, Dewey, Watson, Skinner and so on sold humanity on "science" that was not actually scientific, and was in fact provably false.
The Enlightenment's core scam is to pretend that it speaks for and owns science in some meaningful way. That was absolutely not true for hundreds of years, and to the extent that it may have become true in the mind of scientists in our own era, science itself seems to have suffered as a result. The Enlightenment is a philosophical ideology. Many of the claims it is founded on are unfalsifiable, and many others have been falsified. It did not invent the scientific method, and it has never been particularly good at applying it.
The actual science, the part that really did deliver all the material benefits you are pointing to, has no actual connection to the ideology that has claimed credit for it.
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