FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
I will second the recommendation to read the entirety of Achewood, whether introduced casually or not. It is a monument of a more civilized age.
"Your endeavors shall not want for the horrors of the canine body."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Noted.
I think your analysis and predictions are mistaken, but I really, really, really hope you are right and I am wrong. Time will tell.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Time Braid is a controversial Naruto fanfic that tends to have a fairly polarizing effect in the social justice era. no idea what KuroBaraHime is, googling indicates possibly some sort of e-girl?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
If we have ships routinely paying tolls, and America does not resume bombing, will you score that as a loss for America?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Ok so you also didn't read a single thing said then, because the free press does not cite Letters from Leo. TFP was first. You got the basic timeline wrong, you do not even understand even the simplest elements of this story and yet try to dismiss everything about it. That doesn't suggest you're participating in good faith, if anything it makes me doubt if you even tried to read the Letters from Leo piece to begin with cause even in the pre paywall section he makes it clear that TFP was first.
Having gotten off work and gotten the kids to bed, I read this and was gearing up to snipe back, but decided to double check first. And you are entirely correct, the TFP article did come first, the LFL article mentions this in several places, all of which I was too busy looking for names of actual sources to actually take in. Likewise, the LFL article is claiming corroboration from its own sources; and for an additional bonus, I see now that I have not even now read all the LFL article, since an unknown portion of it is also behind a pseudo-paywall.
There's much more I'd like to say, but it seems to me that the best move would be to note that my own priors have shifted significantly toward the report being basically accurate, and apologize for polluting the discussion with basic factual errors. I will attempt to be more careful when posting in the future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
It was addressed to someone other than you, but I tagged you in it since I was discussing your previous post.
Actually, it is The Free Press and LettersFromLeo that are making such assertions.
You wrote:
It turns out Greenland/Denmark and Canada aren't the only friendly countries that the US has been threatening, the Vatican's ambassador to the US (according to The Free Press and Letters from Leo a Catholic focused blog) was given both explicit and coded threats of military force against the Holy See.
That reads to me like a person making a factual claim, and presenting evidence to back up their claim. The problem is that the evidence you've presented is "someone somewhere said it", and that you appear to be trying to frame the discussion as though you have no actual position to defend in it. The latter bit, in particular, I am very sure should not be tolerated here.
Bari Weiss is a pretty reliable centrist who is friendly to the Trump admin in many areas. I doubt she would be letting through blatant lies on her main journalism site right?
Bari Weiss is a journalist. Why would I conclude that she would not print blatant lies on her main journalism site? That is something that Journalists have been frequently doing since the invention of the profession. Further, whatever additional status Bari Weiss has for herself is attenuated by the fact that she did not write this piece, and I would be most surprised if she edited it in any meaningful way. Some guy I've never heard of wrote it, and Weiss's site published it.
I have just attempted to read the piece, but it is behind a paywall. Does the free press piece cite any sources other than the Letters from Leo blog? Has the Vatican confirmed the Blog's account? If not, my prior would be that this rumor was posted by the blogger, the Free Press journalist repeated it in his article with no further verification, and it proliferated from there through the rest of the press ecosystem. In which case, your attribution would be incorrect: if the Free Press got it entirely from LettersFromLeo, then it is just from LettersFromLeo, not from both them and the Free Press. Further, this exact method of laundering baseless allegations is the entire basis for the "journalists very rarely lie" meme.
Else Bari Weiss and her staff are risking all the good will they've built up for a relatively minor story in the grand scheme of things.
Show me an instance of a press outfit losing "all the goodwill they've built up" due to repeating someone else's lie uncritically. If this event turns out to not have happened, people such as yourself will simply say "well, they never said it happened, they only reported that someone else said it happened, which was entirely true!" I know this, because this is exactly what people like yourself have done in the many, many, many previous incidents where journalists were caught blatantly lying. Your apparent reluctance to stake a position for yourself on the claim's truth or falsity telegraphs the maneuver.
By making it "your assertions" like above, you hinge the entire credibility on me, an internet stranger. And not the established journalists who broke the story.
You, an internet stranger, have considerably more credibility than an "established journalist", in that I do not know for a fact that you earn your paycheck through professional dishonesty. Further, I can have a discussion with you about the facts of a matter, and I cannot do this with most journalists. Further, I can maintain a running tally of previous conversations with a person like you, which I generally cannot do with most journalists. You are part of the reputation economy here; you stand to lose much more from this being a lie than the journalist in question does. That makes direct conversation with you a much better filter than consuming journo-slop directly.
Sure but if they can't be bothered to even read what is there (like they missed a collective five references to the original story being from TFP)
In what sense does "the original story" belong to The Free Press? Did they investigate and present corroborating evidence? ...Have you yourself actually read TFP's article, or did you read one of the hundreds of free articles repeating the story uncritically, and attributing it to "The Free Press and Letters From Leo"? If you yourself aren't actually clear on where the "original story" actually came from, aren't @omw_68's questions warranted?
In any case, I would say that the point is to discuss what we believe and why. Hence my previous questions, and I think they're pretty good ones given your responses so far.
There has to be some sort of baseline before meaningful discussion occurs. I think "read the words that are on your screen and in the link" is the bare minimum.
There does indeed need to be some sort of baseline. One part of that baseline is to speak plainly, and a major part of that is to take an actual, personal position in the matters you discuss. Likewise, from the introduction at the top of the thread:
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win.
I aim to understand what you think and why. Digging in to how you evaluate evidence on an issue is part of that. On the other hand, neither your OP here nor your subsequent replies nor your previous participation here that I've noted indicates to me that you have a good grasp on what the point of this place is. Certainly it does not seem like you make a habit of arguing to understand, which is a shame.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
What's the point of a discussion if "I won't read" is the starting point?
You appear to be making assertions of fact. People ask you for your evidence behind these assertions. You say that they can look for evidence if they want to:
Perhaps Ferraresi and the rest of the TFP team have shared more details elsewhere, but I'll leave that to you to scour their social media if you want to know.
and they decline:
I've had enough experience with TDS that I'm not going to bother. The chances that it will lead to anything other than vague "sources" are just too low.
They do not appear to be declining to read. You do appear to be declining to back up your assertion beyond "these people said a thing".
These people did indeed say a thing. Do you believe them? If so, why? That is a discussion. If you believe you have good reasons to believe them, or other people have poor reasons to not believe them, than taking a position and explaining your reasoning behind it produces good discussion. Even if someone else is dismissive of your reasoning, making a solid argument is persuasive to onlookers, and this forum exists precisely to facilitate that sort of discussion.
I've asked you whether you personally believe this report, and if so, why. Do you think that question is a good basis for discussion? if not, why not?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Do you, personally, believe the event in question happened? What evidence leads you to your conclusion? Is your assessment of that evidence derived from general principles, or is this a case of any stick being sufficient to beat a dog?
Which alleged event do you think has a stronger evidentiary basis: Trump's underlings threatening the Vatican, or Biden raping Tara Reade?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
If America stops bombing Iran, and then six or even three months from now announces that we need to start bombing Iran again because otherwise they'll get a nuke, does your confident prediction commit you to arguing that they're lying and no bombing is necessary?
I care a lot about the idea of a "confident prediction". I would really, really like all of your predictions to be correct. But what is, is.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
It is true that Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones have large audiences, and that most of these audiences are Red Tribe.
It is also true that they are opposed to the war with Iran, and yet we are having a war with Iran, and at least to date that war is overwhelmingly popular with Red Tribe.
I do not see how it is possible to claim that Red Tribe is both taking Owens, Carlson, and Jones' arguments as authoritative, and also overwhelmingly supporting a way they vehemently oppose.
So let us speak plainly here: is it your argument that Red Tribe should be taking Owens, Carlson, and Jones' arguments as authoritative? If so, why do you, yourself, personally, think that would be a good idea?
Bonus Question: One of your more notable posts, in my opinion, was your extensive arguments that Red Tribe is increasingly converging on anti-semitism of the Fuentes/groyper variety. I believe I've previously noted that I consider this one of the worst arguments I've seen on this forum in quite some time, but have not yet had the time for engaging with the substance of your arguments in detail (or indeed with most other arguments, sadly.) Still, pursuant to such engagement, could you elaborate on your personal understanding of the nexus between Israeli government influence and Trump's decision to go to war with Iran?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
How can you be “wrong” about gay marriage? You can be for or against gay marriage, but it’s not a fact that you can be empirically right or wrong about, unlike global warming.
Briefly, gay marriage is a policy. Proposed policies have predicted positive and negative consequences, and supporters of proposed policies are staking a position that the positive consequences will outweigh the negative consequences. People are wrong on a policy if, when the policy is enacted, their prediction is falsified because the positive effects end up being outweighed by the negative effects. You can be empirically right or wrong about the consequences of a policy, including gay marriage.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Like how they “allowed” China to grow.
America had the strongest industrial base in the world. We made deliberate decisions to dismantle than industrial base, and to trade on generous terms with China in a way intended to help them build up their own industry and trade. We did this on the belief that Chinese economic prosperity would converge them toward a liberal, democratic "end of history". This was all public policy, debated in the open, and the effect on China's economic and industrial growth is obvious. Maybe (even likely!) they would have made good some other way, but absent specific actions we took, their ascent would have been considerably harder.
How are Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and all those other third world countries doing after your carpet bombing?
To my knowledge, none of those countries actually experienced "carpet bombing" in anything even approximating the way Japan and Germany did in WWII. We dropped a lot more bombs on Vietnam, but almost all those bombs were dropped on the countryside rather than being used to obliterate major urban centers. Subsequent wars, we haven't even dropped that many on the countryside.
The history of US military operations post-WWII is a long succession of attempts to achieve political ends without engaging in total war. Notably, the last total war we fought is popularly understood to be an overwhelming victory, and all subsequent, "limited" wars are popularly understood as stalemates or defeats, often humiliating defeats.
"Proportionality should be a guideline of war" appears, empirically, to be an excellent way to generate longer, bloodier, messier wars that we then go on to lose. And of course, the fact is that the firebombings didn't end the war, but the nukes, generally held to be even more horrifying, did.
The above is not an argument for securing all political desires through maximum brutality. It is an argument against "limited" and thus cheaper and more frequent war. Nor is it an argument that war should be all or nothing, that there is no place for limited strikes, raids or punitive actions. But if you are going to fight an actual, for-serious war, "proportionality" is very clearly a miserable way to do it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
The problems observably get worse faster than solutions can be coordinated. At some point, people might get desperate enough to get the solutions up to speed, but at some point solution power exceeds the binding force holding society together, and it's rather like trying to lift a one-ton block of jello with a forklift.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17d ago
He's a man who has devoted his life to the study of the American constitution.
The Constitution is dead. It has not protected me, it is not protecting me now, it will not protect me in the future. To the extent that power flows from it, it is because people with poor understanding allow themselves to be scammed by appeals to it.
This is the challenge facing the project of building a new American nationalism, you can't excise people like Amar without destroying much of what makes this country great.
I emphatically do not agree that racial descent is a workable frame for pulling together a nation out of the wreck, but that does not change the fact that most of the things that made this country great appear to be either dead or dying, and the appeals to a "creedal nation" were either useless to prevent this process or actively accelerated it. The basic fact is that we hate each other, and cannot find consensus on what the law is or how it should be enforced, and that is not a survivable situation long-term.
If there be a way to salvage something worthwhile from the wreck of America, it seems likely that it is going to involve more sacrifice than your arguments presume.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
I like to listen to podcast-type material while working on art projects, and came across this biography of a Royal Navy officer who specialized in fighting convoy protection and anti-submarine warfare in the second World War.
Frederick 'Johnnie' Walker - Gladiator of the Convoys
It's a four-part series, so a couple hours of listening time, but as a teaser, here's Walker's epitaph:
"In the day when the waters had well-nigh overwhelmed us, our brother here departed, apprehending the creative power in man, set himself to the task to conquer the malice of the enemy. In our hour of need he was the doughty protector of them that sailed the seas on our behalf. His heart and his mind extended and expanded to the utmost tiring of the body even unto death; that he might discover and operate means of saving ships from the treacherous foes. Truly many, very many, were saved because he was not disobedient to his vision. Victory has been won and should be won by such as he. May there never be wanting in this realm a succession of men of like spirit in discipline, imagination and valour, humble and unafraid. Not dust, nor the light weight of a stone, but all the sea of the Western Approaches shall be his tomb."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
23d ago
My memory may be bad, but it seems like a reasonable description of some of the posts I remember reading here at the time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
25d ago
Would you want to live in a world without Yugoslavia?
See, FC, I don't have the time, nor do I care to write a 5 million word polemic that addresses the irrationality of every single religious, sect or cult on the face of the Earth.
I didn't ask you to. I asked you to admit that, even accepting that we are deceived, different sorts of deception operate in different ways and have different consequences, on a purely materialistic level.
Unless I am mistaken, I have not ever attempted an argument with you in which I claimed God was real and you should believe in him. Every one of these discussions, from my perspective, has been about how logic and reason operate, and all of my arguments appear to me to work equally well if one assumes that there is no God at all. And yet, it does not seem that you have ever recognized this, so let me make it as explicit as possible: for the purposes of this conversation, there is no God and my faith in him is in fact delusional.
... Religion. Religion itself is the grift. Since you will obviously disagree...
I don't. See above.
What I object to is your apparent belief that my faith makes me irrational in obvious exploitable ways, which is why I asked you to explain what those might be. At no point have I argued that my belief is correct, nor do I do so now. You are certain I am irrational, and that is well enough and cheerfully reciprocated. But then you go further and claim that my irrationality is of the sort that imposes immediate, obvious, unnecessary costs. This does not appear to me to be true, and I do not think I am being unreasonable to point out that you are arguing well beyond your actual evidence to make such claims.
But once again, you enjoy the benefit of implication, without making an argument I can engage with it.
If my beliefs are irrational, they are irrational in a way that does not appear to significantly reduce my fitness even from a materialist perspective. Certainly it does not impose costs on me of the sort that you seem to be arguing are typical of religious belief. I do not fear salt curses, nor do I donate to tele-evangelists, nor do I join novel cults. I do believe in a two-thousand-year-old religion, and shape my life by it, but even assuming that I am deceived to do so, it is not obvious where this deceit cashes out in terms of concrete, material loss, in the way your examples center on.
Is that a sufficiently engageable argument?
I gave examples of religious exploitation you claim don't apply to the Christians you know personally on this forum. Therefore I've "failed to provide" an example of how their delusion could be exploited. Therefore my claim that they are deluded (in the same sense as my clinical examples) is indefensible. But this conflates two things that should be kept separate: exploitability and having been exploited. The exploit is diagnostic of the mechanism. The absence of the exploit from your specific history doesn't mean the mechanism isn't there.
It seems obvious to me that you have a firm belief that Christians or other believers, being delusional, must suffer significant material consequences as their delusions wreck against material reality, while those such as yourself who do not suffer from such delusions do not incur similar costs. Would you agree that this is an accurate summary of your argument?
Your definition of delusion:
an incorrect fixed belief that is immune to updating on empirical evidence. Of course, the sufferers from said delusion often will claim to have empirical evidence in favor, but said evidence is, shall we say, scanty.
You appear to have a belief that the religious, as a class, are delusional, and that their delusions make them particularly exploitable. You appear to believe that this is an intrinsic characteristic of all religion, such that I myself must be increasingly susceptible to exploitation. Even if I and (most? All?) others here do not appear to have been exploited in any specific way you can identify, this should not be considered contrary evidence to your claims, because your theory takes precedence over our reported facts.
Suppose I claim that a certain class of people systematically overestimate their driving ability - this is actually a well-documented cognitive bias where the majority of drivers rate themselves as above-average...
Sure. You can measure the people's self-assessment, and compare it to the accidents they've been in, and note the disparity. If 90% of people believe they're in the top 10% of good drivers, at least eight in ten of them are wrong. So what's the analogous measure of material outcomes for the relatively-intellectual religious mottizens?
If you say "people like you overestimate their driving ability", and I note that I think I'm actually pretty bad at driving, there's likewise a disconnect there, no? If I don't in fact overestimate my skill at driving, in what sense are these people "like me"? Alternatively, if I think I'm a top-10% driver, and can back it up with my actual driving record, there's a disconnect again, isn't there?
If you claim I or people like me are exploitable, the way to back that up is with examples of how we have or plausibly might be exploited, in the same way that overestimation of one's driving ability is demonstrated by comparison to population-level driving outcomes. If your claim is that we're exploitable despite not having been exploited, where do you think the conversation should go from there? If you've rejected empirical evidence, what would you prefer?
How exactly am I supposed to know if you've done anything stupid because of your particular, potentially idiosyncratic beliefs?
That is exactly the question I am trying to get you to engage with. You appear to believe that you can know that I've done, or will do, or am prone to do something stupid because of my particular, potentially-idiosyncratic beliefs. As I understand it, that's your entire thesis!
Atheism is the absence of a belief - specifically the absence of theism.
Atheism in its modern form has routinely and strongly correlated with a particular strong antipathy toward Christianity in particular, the exultation of "reason" that has consistently proved to be fantastically unreasonable, and support for revolutionary social and political changes that have proved disastrous. I'm pretty confident that Atheists as a population much more positive attitudes toward both Communism and Fascism than non-atheists of the same societies.
The Soviet state didn't murder people because atheism makes you susceptible to believing false things about kulaks.
Soviet atheism does indeed have been upstream of their mass-murder, as evidenced by their pro-murder arguments relying heavily on atheist moral frameworks; contemplate how the term "liquidate" came to be applied to large-scale murder. I would argue that the actual flow went Enlightenment principles/exultation of human rationality > atheism > mass murder.
Nor is insane mass murder exclusive to atheism, because... most of history.
Explicitly atheist states produced unusually concentrated forms of it, in sharp contrast to contemporary non-atheist states. Appealing to "most of history" doesn't get you around the unusually-appalling nature of ideological totalitarianism in the twentieth century, nor the prominent role atheism played in those ideologies, nor the prominent role the Religious played in opposing them.
So the analogy doesn't hold. One is a claim about behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit. The other is a claim about a structural feature of the belief system itself.
You are claiming that structural features of one belief system naturally incline it toward particular outcomes, even in cases where those outcomes can't be demonstrated. Then you are claiming that particular outcomes that can be demonstrated, repeatedly, at horrifying scale, are only "behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit." You know what a Russell's Conjugation is. I am pretty sure you understand that you are not drawing a rigorous line from first principles here.
My entire point here was that it would be quite bold to claim that atheism leads to mass murder, even with the ton of examples of atheism actually leading to mass-murder that we actually have, and even with the evidence we have that the atheism does in fact appear to have been a significant part of the causal flow. Even with that evidence, I don't claim all atheists are prone to mass murder because it's a whole lot more complicated than that. But you have no problem doing that the other way, on much weaker evidence. This is foolishness.
[EDIT] - I'll leave the below for clarity, but I think I can make things even simpler.
Here are three beliefs:
-
someone throwing salt at you is casting a lethal curse.
-
Some guy you've just met has had a divine revelation and now speaks for God.
-
Someone two thousand years ago was God, and we have a ~1900-year-old book laying out his teachings.
Let us presume that all three of these beliefs are wrong. Your argument, as I understand it, is that they are wrong in the exact same way, such that all three will result in essentially identical behaviors. Am I understanding you correctly?
The definition I'm working from is the one I laid out above: an incorrect fixed belief that is immune to updating on empirical evidence.
That seems like a reasonably good definition. You should apply it rigorously.
Must I imagine some? Very well.
Walls of text are unnecessary here. This is really quite simple. Based on the following paragraph, you pretty clearly believe one of the following:
-
That all Christians here are members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch, or are initial converts to mormonism, or both
-
That those of us who are not members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch or are initial converts to mormonism, nonetheless fall victim to similar forms of grifting.
Both of these examples appear very different from your salt curse example, being far more abstract and elaborate. But then, I'm fairly confident that most Christians you converse with here have never been initial converts to mormonism, and also have never donated money to a tele-evangelist or similar. Your position appears to be that we must be falling for some other, unspecified grift. Only, why not specify it?
The straightforward explanation is that you can't. You want to claim that we are delusional. You claim that our beliefs are exactly identical to an obvious delusion. I ask for examples, you give much weaker examples that do not actually apply, and then handwave.
I could elaborate further, I could do this all day, but you have a distressing tendency to vanish whenever I make an effort post calling out a bad argument you make, for n>>1.
I certainly agree that someone has a habit of making bad arguments. Sadly, I have much, much less time to write than I used to.
But here, specifically, you do not need to elaborate further, because you have not actually elaborated at all. Nor does God even come into the argument in any substantive way. I asked you for an example of how my delusion might be exploited in an obvious, empirical fashion. You have failed to provide one. This isn't some pedantic gotcha; you are making a very strong claim that is in fact indefensible, when a small amount of moderation would put you on much firmer ground. You appear to be doing this because you are failing to parse the details of your own statements in anything like a rigorous fashion.
Suppose I argued that Atheists are all bloodthirsty murderers, and when questioned pointed to the 75-100 million murders from atheist regimes in the last century, and claimed your beliefs were exactly identical to theirs. I do not think you would consider this a valid argument, but if there's a difference between such an argument and what you're presenting here, I'm not seeing it. Perhaps you could point it out? While both they and you were atheists, is there perhaps some notable set of differences between how their atheism and yours operated? If such differences can exist between their atheism and yours, why would you suppose that no differences exist between how my belief in God operates, and how the belief in God of first generation Mormons or African salt-fearers operates?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
You might feel like laughing at these silly, superstitious fools. Haha, they think witch doctors can hurt them!
If you (for a general you) are a Christian, or any other religious denomination, you are exactly as laughably deluded from my perspective.
Could you provide a definition of "delusion" that you're working from here? You describe people whose beliefs cause them to act in what appears to be a very silly, very irrational way when presented with a simple stimulus. If we're as laughably deluded from your perspective, what's the equivalent prank you can pull on us? If there isn't one, why do you believe we are exactly as laughably deluded from your perspective?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
There's also at least one "perfect heist" type movies where the meat of the story takes place after the money gets stolen according to plan, but for the life of me I can't remember the name.
The Great Train Robbery works this way, IIRC.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
However, on a more how-the-real-world-works level, war is less likely. Trump demonstrated quite clearly that the US military is far more capable and combat-ready than observers had assumed.
As one of those observers, and as someone strongly opposed to the previous foreign policy consensus, imagine the counterfactual world, where the US military was not in good shape, and we only found out about it after committing to a serious, high-stakes war with China, of the sort that has been generally assumed we were going to have within a decade.
One of the few silver linings to this whole debacle is getting an objective picture of our actual capabilities against a fairly serious opponent.
What does "mission accomplished" mean in this context? Who would be wanting to celebrate and who would be wanting to not celebrate, in their (or your) view?
This whole thing sounds very confused.
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