FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
What is the limit? How low can the republicans sink while the base stays loyal?
This current situation still appears better than the previous baseline.
Americans should do what the British are doing by abandoning the torries en mass
I would disagree. The UK can afford that better than we can because they are not as polarized; their current situation is a conflict within the local Blue Tribe analogue, with no significant Red Tribe to speak of. This lowers the pressure significantly, and allows maneuvers that are probably not survivable in our context.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
I think People's Front of Judea jokes make sense with regards to splitting hairs about who's a communist vs a socialist vs a trotskyist and so on, but your proper anarchists are not going to be interchangeable with the above.
Why not? Were anarchists not a core constituency of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution? Do Anarchists now not trace their lineage back to ideological progenitors who failed the Bolshevik test, just the same as the rest of the trotskyists and socialists and communists?
The truth, I think, is that the ideology is not and has never been load-bearing. Observably, where ideology has imposed unacceptable real-world tradeoffs, the overwhelming majority of leftist ideologues have ditched the ideology rather than accepting the losses. Ideology is a means to an end, nothing more.
Do collectives exist?
Can collectives do bad things?
If the answer to those two questions is "yes", then collective blame is a necessary concept.
If the answer to either of those questions is "no", then humanity and its history is rendered incoherent. What is war, without the concept of a collective? What is the Civil Rights era, without the concept of a collective? What is Womens' Rights? What is Communism? What is Islam? Christianity? Judaism, political parties, economic classes, modes of government, etc, etc?
If the answer changes depending on what is personally convenient to one on a moment-by-moment basis, then one is a liar.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
But much, much better than The Count of Monte Crisco.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
You did not believe Trump could win a second term, and argued vociferously that all was lost years ago. Is all more, less, or about the same lost as it was in 2024?
In any case, you have already concluded that I am a liar, and I have already concluded that you are incapable of being anything other than tiresome or dangerous, and that I prefer you tiresome.
But by responding straightforwardly and honestly, one can at least claim to hold principles instead of having to admit that they're calculating tribalists who make decisions based on tribal allegiances rather than principles.
What penalties do you observe for being a calculating tribalist who makes decisions based on tribal allegiance rather than principles? Do you observe these consequences to be uniformly applied? If I argue that being such a calculating tribalist is the correct response to the current situation, what would your counter-argument be?
And moving up a level, a tribe that accepts or even encourages its leaders to submit to such tribalism has to admit that it's a tribe that is merely trying to beat the Enemy because they're the Enemy, rather than following principles that they believe the government and society at large should follow.
By no means.
"Principles" are another way of saying "rules". To the extent that we use the term "rules", we use it to refer to legible rules. But it is not possible to construct a perfect, legible ruleset that covers all situations and contingencies, such that human judgement is obviated by a flowchart.
The point of society is to promote good things and suppress bad things. Values-coherence allows people to do this under generalizable rules which rely on those coherent values for grounding. When values are mutually-incoherent, this is no longer possible, and attempts at sticking to generalizable rules is signing up for exploitation without meaningful limits.
My perception is that the fact that there was even a single random blue-haired leftist who, when confronted with such a slogan, hemmed and hawed about dog whistles instead of straightforwardly and honestly answering, "OF COURSE it's okay to be white! I want white people to feel perfectly okay being white, and the principles and policies that I am (we are) pushing doesn't conflict with that in any way, so much so that if you or anyone else believes - incorrectly - that such a conflict exists, I will actively help you resolve that conflict, by crushing whatever might be making white people suspect that such a phrase is wrong" placed another chink in the armor that tribe was wearing.
How did this chink in the armor manifest, in your view? Obviously not only did a single activist do this, but it was the default response for Blue Tribe as a whole, with any dissent being exceedingly marginal and fringe.
People talk (foolishly, in my opinion) about Woke being dead. It is obvious to me that Woke did not "die" because principled moderates put it back in a box, but because Red Tribe burned many of its own principles to go all-in on tribal warfare, and turned out to have better terrain for it than the Blues. The moderates had more than a decade to fight, and in that time they accomplished nothing significant, fielded no champions, won no battles outside the context of Red Tribe treating the culture war as a war.
Trump will not last forever. A large portion of the Republican elite very clearly want to wash their hands of him and go back to the way things used to be. That is not an acceptable solution to Red Tribe, though, and every success we have had at securing our values has come from refusing to accept this exact sort of "moderation".
"It's okay to be white" was effective because Blues really do believe that it is not okay to be white. They could not allow themselves to let it stand.
"Stand if you disavow fascism" is effective not because Republicans won't stand, but because many of them will, not because they are notably less fascist than those who remain seated in any objective sense, but because they want the people making the demand to be nicer to them. In doing so, they weaken my tribe, and I hold them in contempt for doing so.
The basic fact is that at the object level, it is not the case that Blues have a problem with people being white in the same way that Reds have a problem with Fascism. The actual difference in tribal attitude and inclination cannot be handwaved, and while it is obvious that it cannot be agreed upon either, the current situation does not require agreement for things to proceed along their current trajectory. Speaking in broad generalities, it appears to me that Reds are not fascist to any significant degree, but Blues are actually quite racist against white people. Perhaps this perception is wrong, but if it is not wrong then it makes no sense to demand symmetrical responses.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
The article I linked is a list of holders for the office of high priest. The last entry vacated his office in 70 AD.
Near as I can tell, there is no valid priesthood and there has not been one for nearly two millennia. There are, if the genealogical records are correct, people who satisfy the genealogical requirement to be a priest, but IIRC genealogy is not the only requirement, and there are a bunch of rituals and structures that are required as well, but are not now possible because the infrastructure is gone.
As an outside observer, it does not appear to me that the Law is being kept, or indeed that keeping the law is in any way possible. Obviously, Jewish opinion differs sharply, and that is their right.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
As we've discussed at some length, I think they are badly mistaken in this assessment.
If Red Tribe needs the approval of the press to secure political victory, political victory is no longer a viable option and we will need to find alternative paths to securing our values. We have plenty of evidence of what results from cooperation, conciliation, compromise and capitulation to Blue Tribe. There is no road forward there.
Blues and "moderates" act as though if Trump could just be disposed of, all this ferment will go away. But the reality is that Trump is the moderate, mild voice of peace. If he fails, we will escalate until either we are destroyed or until we find a way to get the outcomes we consider necessary. Trump is an expression of the wicked problem of apportioning political power in a values-incoherent society, and not the progenitor of that problem nor meaningfully in control of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
I were a Republican representative, I'd have no issue standing to such a question because i don't self-identify as a fascist.
I don't self-identify as a fascist either, but the label has been abused to the point that it is self-defeating to cooperate with its continued use.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
my point is that believing a people are "chosen" isn't an argument for giving them whatever they want. What if they behaved badly to the God who chose them, and thus are being punished by him?
C'mon.
Wikipedia's article on the subject appears roughly two thousand years out of date, if you have information I do not. A quick search indicates claims that some group has announced that they've appointed a new "high priest" recently, but gives no indication why I should consider this appointment religiously valid.
Also, Jewish prayers refer to the sacrifices in the Temple even if actual sacrifices are not possible.
Why would references to non-existent temple sacrifices in a non-existent temple satisfy the requirements of a Covenant that explicitly specified actual sacrifices in an actual tabernacle/temple? For that matter, why haven't they just fabricated a tabernacle? Not that this would be valid either, given the absence of the ark and the spirit of God seated upon it, but it would at least be a step in the correct direction, no?
I'm sure committed Jews have many answers to such questions, but I am not a committed Jew, and I am not required to believe as they do. My understanding is that the old Covenant was broken irrevocably with the destruction of the temple and the end of covenant practice in AD 70. If modern Jews disagree, that is between them and God. Meanwhile, the new Covenant I believe I enjoy with God has a number of requirements, but none command political support for a Jewish nation. This is all slop-millenarianism nonsense.
Yahweh is not synonymous with Jews. Yahweh frequently demonstrates his supremacy by cursing and punishing the Jews, according to the Jews' own scriptures. As for the Christian perspective, "We must obey God rather than men", told to the Jewish authorities by the fathers of the Church. Nor, IIRC, did the early Christians defend Jerusalem from the Romans, and there's a solid argument that they were following Jesus's instructions when they declined to do so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
In Genesis God promises Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse".
Yes. How does this promise to Abraham overwrite the numerous subsequent and far more detailed formal covenants God makes with the Israelites throughout the rest of the Old Testament? It is you and Mike Huckabee who are not taking the text seriously. Those of us who do are not greatly troubled by this notion, and have not been for centuries.
Carlson says "Oh I, uh, don't curse Israel because Gold told me not too, I just don't think Netanyahu is a real Jew or Israel is the Israel mentioned by God."
There is no particular reason to believe that post-sack-of-Jerusalem Judiasm is a valid continuation of the previous religion. There is likewise no particular reason to believe that the modern state of Israel is in any metaphysical sense the valid successor to the ancient state of Israel. The temple is gone. The Ark is gone. The Altar is gone. There are no sacrifices any more. There are, as far as I'm aware, no priests. No holy-of-holies, and so on. You are attempting to justify a scriptural interpretation that holds up one verse and shoves down a thousand other verses, as though this one verse were the entirety of the bible. This is a very bad way to do scriptural interpretation, but again, your interest does not appear to be in accurately understanding the will of God or even the text as a literary document, but exclusively pushing your monomaniacal agenda.
He is pigeon-holed into this anti-semitic canards that don't get to the truth of it: that is hostile foreign propaganda-myth, it's not true.
So he's stupid for believing his sort of anti-semitism when really he should prefer your sort of antisemitism? Have fun with that.
Meanwhile, in the real world, serious belief in Christianity does not require one to be a Zionist. The prominence of Christian Zionism is a historical fluke emerging from a confluence of social factors, it has largely run its course, and it will not, I think, be coming back in the future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Leviticus 26 is Yahweh telling the jews that if they fail to obey him, he will punish them grievously. Your model is that worship of Yahweh requires worship of the jews, but Leviticus 26 demonstrates that Yahweh himself states that the Jews suffering under a curse is part of his will. Why should I as a Christian commit to protecting Israel if God himself has stated it is his will that they not be protected?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
You don't need to go into new law/old law. the old law itself is incompatible with SS's claims.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
The most unfortunate part is that what you call the "strawman" of Christian Zionism is actually the only internally coherent position a Christian can hold...
This is an absurd statement on multiple levels.
As a bare existence proof, it's notable that most of the history of Christianity as a religion, it has not exhibited anything approaching the strawman behavior you are claiming is required for internal consistency.
In terms of actual theology, your claim appears flatly incompatible with the 26th chapter of Leviticus, as well as many, many, many other passages. You do not actually know what you are talking about even a little. You are hostile toward jews and you want everyone else to be more hostile toward jews; you say whatever you think will nudge those listening in the direction of greater hostility.
I meant in the sense that I'm neither a lower class Indonesian or a lower class white British man so I don't have a direct dog in the race.
One notes that it is possible to be interested in axes of identity other than class, and judging by your comment history it seems clear that you pretty clearly adhere to such interests, between a thin veneer of self-interested line-go-up markets cheerleading.
No reason why Amelia in the UK who has a job making and serving mediocre coffee should get paid any more than Mehmet making and serving mediocre coffee in Ankara.
Is Indonesia as wealthy per-capita as the UK? Is the wealth of Indonesia roughly equivalent in terms of concentration within the population? That would at least potentially be two reasons why Amelia should be paid more than Mehmet.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
More importantly, though, because even among the people who do favor a more technocratic approach, almost nobody would claim that “man can be perfected (that’s not the point), and even the very few who would still believe that such an outcome is only possible far into a theoretical future.
...And yet, we very clearly have a large, cohesive population of people enthralled to vast, superhuman "processes" that were instituted for nakedly utopian goals, continue to operate in the same way they have since their foundation, and at no point changed goals. These processes observably square the circle by continuously adding epicycles between where they are and the goal, rather than admitting the original goal was unachievable and abandoning the effort. See the war on poverty and blank slate education for two notorious examples.
A commenter here once argued to me that affirmative action and other forms of anti-racist government intervention should be implemented for at least three centuries before we could really draw conclusions on whether they worked or not. How does that sort of mindset differ from Utopianism specifically in the actions it produces?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
I think this is a fair-enough way to divide "soldier" and "warrior", but a lot of people who are using the term and see value in the term are not using it in this way. Particularly, I think the people arguing that a "warrior ethos" is needed are arguing based on something pretty close to the logic above, and not on occupation or social class. Likewise, it seems to me that they often argue that warrior ethos should be taught/acculturated, not merely located.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Maybe the problem is your conception of the term?
What I observe in this thread:
A - "people wanting a 'Warrior Ethos' is stupid. Why would people want it? Warriors are violent and dangerous, we want less of them."
B - "Because Warrior Ethos is not primarily about being violent and dangerous. It's a term for an approach to handling unbounded chaos that is generally useful in all manners of high-stakes, high-demand endeavors. War is just one of the most high-stakes, high-demand endeavors, so it's the trope-namer."
A - "If it isn't about being violent and dangerous, then warrior is a bad name for it."
See here, also.
Can anyone charitably explain this "warrior" obsession?
My civilian understanding:
"Soldier" is centered on process, regulation, drill, standardization, War as science/industry.
"Warrior" is centered on prowess, performance, results, war as, for lack of a better term, art, an anti-inductive, chaotic process that cannot adequately be codified.
Soldiers typically generate success by consistently stacking small advantages and snowballing them into an insurmountable advantage.
Soldiers typically generate failure by following the process in situations where the process is a bad fit, or at their worst following a process that is just straightforwardly bad.
Warriors typically generate failure by taking high-risk gambles and losing, and at their worst doing so with "high risk gambles" that are just straightforwardly a bad idea that process would have warned them against taking.
Warriors typically generate success by disrupting the enemy's process, creating out-of-context problems and then capitalizing on the enemy's failure to efficiently manage them.
Look at the American Military over the last few decades, both how it fights and how it sustains itself. Would you say that its biggest problems are coming from following process too loosely, or too tightly? With the caveat that the problem is very complicated, I'd argue the latter. The Navy's current woes seem pretty clearly to arise from a widening gap between process and reality. The Afghanistan/GWOT failure seems pretty clearly to have been a process failure through and through. Failure to anticipate and keep in step with the drone revolution seems to have likewise been a process failure.
This shows up in other fields as well. Take NASA and SpaceX. Which is the better performer? Which fits more easily into "Warrior", and which into "Soldier"?
The people obsessed with "warriors" think we have too much process, past diminishing returns and into straightforward loss, and we need more performance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16d ago
The professionals are roughly equivalent to the Klan in its heyday, and the tourists are roughly equivalent to the populations the Klan emerged from and operated within.
Insurgency seems a reasonable description.
If you disagree with his central thesis, then I welcome actual arguments.
Here you go. My children's bedtime interrupted my furious attempts to edit them into the original post. I left them out of the initial post because I thought they were honestly too obvious to need elaboration, but that's never a good bet.
To give two examples, it doesn't seem to me that there's a European analogue to the Christian Right or to Gun Culture in terms of relatively-large, cohesive and politically-powerful subcultures. It seems to me that this is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, a distinct, cohesive, organized Red Tribe is the reason America is such an outlier politically from the European political scene. On the other hand, it means polarization and thus tribal conflict gets much worse, because legible structure makes coordinating large-scale, serious meanness much easier. And in America, the coordinated meanness is much further along the escalation spiral: we're actually trying to do mass deportations now, and Blues are actually coordinating terrorism to fight back against those efforts.
The UK right is pretty clearly willing to accept the left's electoral victory. Their reasoning, which is in my view correct, is that a left victory will result in very bad policies, which will in turn discredit the left further and rebound in their favor. This is a risky bet, but the risk seems rational and acceptable to me, given their situation. However, a dominant variable in that calculation is that they don't really have much of a choice, because they have no legible path to victory other than that provided by electoral politics.
In America, by contrast, I'm willing to accept the left's electoral victory, for certain definitions of "accept" that do not preclude their leaders and agents being murdered by people on my side, in much the way they have been willing to "accept" my electoral wins, modulo murders of my leaders and agents by people on their side. That doesn't change the fact that if such murders happen to them, they are not going to accept it as I have, and instead are going to escalate to the limits of their capability, or the fact that I will support unlimited escalation in return. Electoral Politics is still plan A in both the European and American contexts, but American politics has a legible plan B, and both tribes having been in a degenerate orbit toward it for at least a decade now.
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