Tanista
1mo ago
Rather in a kind of stoic sense that one should treat events and people sort of like passing clouds.
This would be easier if the non-stoic side of the anti-judgment movement were able to keep their behavior restrained. A lot of people do act like you; though they don't pretend they don't judge. They just judge silently but choose to be polite. But forbearance is mistaken for weakness which is followed by an attempt to deny that the judgment is legitimate.
Since We Live in a Society someone is going to have to be disagreeable and tell the truth that being fat is usually a lack of virtue and trying to cover that fact up is also lack of virtue. If only for the kids, who can't be expected to have a philosopher's judgment and stoic detachment.
I've wondered if there was a story that has the Culture encounter a rival power that matches their social mores in almost all but ONE critical way, and they abjectly refuse to compromise on that one difference for reasons that they cannot explain (and may not even know) but that is such a central, load-bearing aspect of their civilization that they simply cannot join the Culture if doing so would endanger that factor at all.
This is the case with the Gzilt in Hydrogen Sonata, who actually almost joined the Culture as founding members but stayed out because they see themselves as a chosen people because their holy text being surprisingly scientifically accurate. In the Culture universe this could mean all sorts of things, including sponsorship by Sublimed (functionally godlike) entities.
They haven't really suffered for it. They're about equivtech, despite not having a war for a while they maintain a Starship Troopers-style draft system that is functionally optional because they're also post-scarcity and they insist on their ships running their own emulated minds sped up. It's basically an answer to many of the things people don't like about the Culture like the hereditary caste of Minds running the whole thing.
Look to Windward's Chelgrians aren't Culture-level and their caste system seems to have very strong downsides. But it also allows them to maintain communication with their ancestors who Sublimed, which is basically unheard of. They truly are special, in a way many don't want to lose. The Culture's attempt to weaken their caste system releases awful tendencies kept in check and leads to absolute disaster.
The narrative being circulated is that the NYPD “killed a man over a $2.90 subway ticket.”
This can be translated as "this is why America will never look like northern Europe in terms of transit"
Can you understand why I might look toward the decisiveness, the cold competence of a robot cop who’s not afraid of libelous press coverage or administrative leave or criminal charges by an anti-cop DA, and think, “Hell yeah, let’s get some more of that.”
We're getting a head start. This - and not some Brian Herbert Terminator bullshit - is why the Butlerian Jihad happened:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
It would be nice to have a technological solution to social problems. But all this does is centralize power in the hands of people who made things like Google Gemini a mess. You think they can't see ahead to the "imported" racial bias? They called it way ahead of time, and took steps.
For all you know, your cold robot is going to be given an androgynous body shape, will only answer to Xir and, in a twisted inversion of I, Robot, have a built in random factor to save a marginalized body every so often instead of doing the "rational" thing, for equity. It only makes sense. Getting stabbed in the subway is awful. But what about the violence done against black bodies and other justice-impacted folx? It's not an easy equation.
The idea that this is some sort of escalation or new and novel threat is frankly just dumb
There are few arguments that make me want to climb up a wall like this one. Intellectually, I know people sincerely believe it. But I still sometimes wonder if I'm the victim of a Ken M-esque troll (if so, bravo)
Nuclear weapons are simply an improvement on our ability to blow shit up. You can tell because they're literally measured by comparison to our previous set of explosives. Nobody is blase about them.
It is of absolutely no comfort to me that we went thousands of years trying to set woods on fire before we figured out how to roast cities.
Tanista
2mo ago
Yes.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
He seems like an equal opportunity degenerate frankly, raping women and having them used by male sex workers/his friends.
I skimmed the indictment and it doesn't seem to mark him as having a singular preference. It's naturally focused around the trafficking and prostitutions
Tanista
2mo ago
What he said might have been smart, but the fact that I misinterpreted it proves that it was actually dumb.
Unironically. There are more dumb people than smart people (or just people who aren't paying that much attention). Vance's 3D chess playing audience is outnumbered by people like me.
Tanista
2mo ago
It's not a coincidence, obviously. They'll find something.
It's preferable they find "binders full of women" than you saying what Vance said. All you can do is minimize.
There's an argument for some Trump-style disagreeableness on important things. But I'd be making this argument if a Democrat spoke this way. This is not the sort of thing you want a paragraph-long explainer on. Waste of time.
but I don't see why I can't vote and advocate to withdraw all support and let the situation solve itself
This would be "their bed to lie in" I think.
or how I could do this without condemning the load-bearing parts of the overwhelming consensus to continue support.
The cynical answer to perceived hypocrisy (often on the left anyway) is that it's all power all the way down. If America's enemies aren't terrorists because that is a cynical judgment on the US' part, it doesn't necessarily follow that the US are terrorists. They may all be hypocrites.
Then it's just a pragmatic judgment what you prefer.
But it often doesn't go like this. America's judgments of its opponents are false, but their judgments are correct.
Tanista
2mo ago
Since we just had a discussion on whether #MeToo has run out of steam last week: Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs jailed by judge after sex trafficking indictment
Combs was arrested Monday in Manhattan, roughly six months after federal authorities raided his luxurious homes in Los Angeles and Miami.
A conviction on every charge would require at least 15 years in prison, with the possibility of a life sentence.
The indictment describes Combs as the head of a criminal enterprise that engaged or attempted to engage in sex trafficking, forced labor, interstate transportation for purposes of prostitution, drug offenses, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.
Combs and his associates wielded his “power and prestige” to intimidate and lure women into his orbit, “often under the pretense of a romantic relationship,” according to the indictment.
It alleges that Combs used explicit recordings as “collateral” to ensure the women’s continued obedience and silence. He also exerted control over victims by promising career opportunities, providing and threatening to withhold financial support, dictating how they looked, monitoring their health records and controlling where they lived, according to the indictment.
This sounds very similar to the tactics used by Keith Raniere, which bodes ill for Diddy.
He's always been a Weinstein figure in hip hop (both in the sexual deviant sense and because he fit the stereotype of record/studio owner screwing artists over better than any Jewish exec in hip hop at this poinnt). Most of the stories centered around his homosexuality in perhaps the most openly homophobic genre. But, as with Weinstein, this goes way past the lurid stories passed around for years.
Funnily enough, I was just watching a video of one of the victims of Raniere [talk about the FBI's recalcitrance to take on the case up until it became public, at which point "speed of government" ceased to be a joke.
In this case, I wonder if Cassie's very public lawsuit against Diddy, facilitated by the Adult Survivor's Act and its extension of the statute of limitations (the same thing that got Trump in trouble with E. Jean Carroll) is what opened him up to a more vigorous investigation?
So, a MeToo win or not?
Tanista
2mo ago
Why should they not fight back when getting occupied?
If the battle is to stop the occupation of Lebanese land, then Hezbollah can make some ploughshares now.
I obviously get that it's a GWOT hangup, it's the first response you get. I was being polite: I don't "get" it in the sense that I think there are significant disanalogies I often see the sorts of people making the above argument or your comparison simply ignore for unclear reeasons. If OP gave an alternative to violence, it'd explain why he thinks those don't apply.
Also, you switched the question. Nobody is really asking why Hezbollah is doing this.
The question was why Americans seem to behave with not only with absolute fatalism but also with condemnation that others don't take them at their word that, because they lost, nothing can be done. And why they think that's an option for a nation that can't just fly away and let any Afghans dumb enough to believe that they were now global citizens fall to their deaths or be beaten back into niqabs.
Why should I as a right winger support people who went to the middle east and try to bring wokeness and globalism to the third world?
Also not the question. These people, like OP, don't say they don't support it. They actively condemn. "Their bed to lie in" is totally different. Because that goes both ways.
Tanista
2mo ago
Maybe not just in the Arab world at this point.
If I was the sort of person inclined to try to convince people that "They" didn't get Epstein, shit like this would certainly make my job harder.
Tanista
2mo ago
I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front. It's just a terrorist attack
I see this attitude - you can't beat Muslim terrorists and militias and will only make it worse so don't even try- a lot amongst Americans (usually left leaning ones) and I don't get it.
What's the alternative? Full scale war? Some peace deal?
Tanista
2mo ago
Different incentive structure? Death guarantees heaven, victory guarantees glory, and heaven. Eventually.
Still too optimistic.
I don’t think that’s true, because this is something that absolutely hits the sensibilities of the PMC who have been basically able to ignore the problem because it’s not affecting them. Pets are in many parts of the PMC class a very sensitive point.
And race isn't? Arguably it's the sensitive point. If it was refugees from Scotland you might have a shot.
Your mistake here is assuming people are going to treat this as a neutral rational argument and not a plate of political sewage; they will react with visceral disgust. 2rafa's post about how people react in Britain to bringing up uncomfortable immigration facts is how it'll actually go:
It reminds me of real life conversations I’ve had with white English people, intelligent, center-right conservative types, about groups, identity, mass immigration, genetics, civilization, and they just shut down. I don’t mean that they shut down the debate, they’re usually polite enough and I wouldn’t discuss ‘edgy’ things with people I didn’t trust anyway, but they shut down internally. They display the exact pigheaded stubbornness that the Seattle video interviewees do, the strange combination of [post] Christian guilt complex and superiority complex and absolute, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ type emphasis on propriety above policy
In the American case they'll simply refuse to even grant it unless it's absolutely unavoidable. And even then, you might get some of the "pigheaded 'what of it?' stubbornness" with the more left wing types.
There are some things people of good character and breeding just don't want to hear, let alone talk about in polite conversation. "Black savages are eating people's cats" (which is how it'll sound to them because, let's be real, that's what the DR is saying) is as close to the top of the list as I can imagine. You really need the 4K video. And something that hints it wasn't one deranged person.
Tanista
2mo ago
It's catchy, but dangerous.
That's actually optimistic. IMO it's just dangerous and the damage has already been done.
My take is that it doesn't matter if they pull up a case. It's already too late at this point.
Unless Trump went into the debate with multiple, verifiable (as in "caught in 4K video") cases it was always going to seem crazy and be easy to dismiss.
I think the idea that this is what gets John and Jane Q finally onboard is the sort of thing jaded internet people who've seen Democrats seemingly escape every single "immigrant t-bones/rapes/robs citizen" story thinks will finally land and cause the scales to fall from the eyes of the nation. It won't. It just looks weird to even bring up and people will recoil. If they don't Google it, see the first mainstream outlet and fuck off.
The truth is that Democrats in the real world (as opposed to online leftists who have a clear incentive to never cede an inch) aren't getting away with it; people are already dissatisfied with Democrats on immigration (which is why they tried to deal) and the polling indicates this is one of Trump's (or any Republican's) strongest issue and the one where he has the most credibility relative to his Democratic opponent.
It's just that Trump is unpopular enough (and has a flexible enough relationship with the truth) that it's still close. If it was anyone else you likely wouldn't need the dogs and cats thing in the first place. And it certainly would be more believable if Mitt Romney or Nikki Haley decided to sound the alarm.
a right wing media ecosystem catastrophizing Ring Of Fire disasters out of very real but currently statistically ineffective culture war pain points,
Yeah, the campaign feels very online. The Haitian thing is incredibly specific and the sort of thing you think lands when you follow too many DR accounts.
It feels like in 2016 Trump was saying things that people felt but couldn't hear on cable news or the debate stage. Now it feels like he's digging up things a lot of the people who wanted that would see as the theories of online weirdos.
Even this is not really true. The right wing gives police grace in the face of criticism because they, imo rightly, don't believe their opponents are acting in good faith.
The discussion is not really about whether there're bad cops, anymore than the education debate is about there're bad teachers (where I'm sure a right-winger can accuse progressives of refusing to grant this when it comes time to defend teacher's unions)
Why does the right say it, then?
They literally think the police are the bulwark between order and chaos, as the phrase implies?
I'm asking why we shouldn't take them at their word. If progressives say "teachers shape the future" enough that it becomes a cliche that their enemies use to describe their position do we need to wonder why progressives are still on the pro-teacher bandwagon despite obvious problems with the educational system? Do we need to wonder what progressives mean by this? Shit happens, no institution is perfect but if you believe in it you don't throw out the baby.
If I had to guess at a bog-standard conservative belief… The average Republican voter probably thinks policing is difficult and unpleasant but necessary for a social contract, that they’d prefer a heavy hand to an absent one, and that the consequences of policing mostly fall on criminals who asked for it.
More or less my model but, as with anything in America, sharpened by partisanship and the perception of bad faith on the other side.
I think you can get many conservatives on board for certain things like civil forfeiture being bad. Or even that something like what happened to George Floyd Sonya Massey was wrong. The problem is that it's an iterated game and it never stops at that cop.
Same reason progressives don't want to yield on teachers or public schools.
Tanista
2mo ago
I'm not sure exactly why people on right in the USA are till on the "thin blue line" team. Perhaps its because the median cop is more conservative. Perhaps its being more comfortable with authority and generally being more conscientious - leading to less altercations
You clearly know why the right says it's for police.
"Thin blue line" is not a content free slogan, it doesn't just mean "pro-cop". It says something about the right's view of society that explains why they're pro-cop. The right has told you why and you clearly heard them.
Is the right so insincere that their given explanation doesn't suffice and we need to speculate ?
That's already covered by the "shrill Karens are less capable than 192lb men" clause, no matter what absurd statements came out of the bird-watcher or Citibike situations.
Tanista
2mo ago
Practically speaking, Harris can't win, she can only lose.
Then why take the debate?
Tanista
2mo ago
Currently rereading R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series .
Got sucked into reading some passages across both trilogies since I haven't toughed it since the second trilogy wrapped up and finally decided to bite the bullet and just do the whole thing from The Darkness That Comes Before.
I used to be like this. Until I intentionally fasted. And I'm not even talking about serious fasting; 16:8 plus some minor daily exercise.
It was shocking how negotiable what seemed like a command was after a while.
I still glutton out, but I'm never in doubt now that I don't have to. It's an extremely useful exercise. You see it's just compulsion like with weed, porn or anything else except it's much better at fooling you that you're gonna die.
Something to consider trying. At least in my case, I build bad habits (no exercise, eating awful, non-satiating food) and then convinced myself this was some natural condition. It was "natural" in the same way my inability to deadlift or sprint is natural.
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