FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
If you've got a comprehensive debunking of the x-ray claims I'd like to see it
Can you link the x-ray pictures you considered credible, so the debunking would be more direct?
Minus specific pictures, a comprehensive debunking is not complicated. The Israelis generally use 5.56mm NATO rifles for their regular troops, and 7.62mm NATO sniper rifles and machine guns as support weapons. The physics of these rounds are well-known, and you can, right now, go to youtube and watch a functionally unlimited number of examples of what happens when a roughly skull-like object is struck by one of these rounds because "shooting skull-like things with a rifle" is an entire genre of video entertainment at this point. The short version is that when skull-like things are struck by an assault- or battle-rifle projectile, they explode from the transferred kinetic energy, and the bullet continues on its merry way.
In order for the bullet to stop dead inside the skull, it needs to be moving very, very slowly. It's possible to get a bullet moving that slowly if it was fired into the air and comes down a great distance away, but this would make deliberate aim impossible. It's also possible for a bullet to expend almost all its energy penetrating some obstacle, and then hit someone on the other side with a marginal penetration, but again, this would no longer be aimed fire.
It is almost certainly not possible for a sniper to be shooting kids in the head in a way that the bullet stops in their skull, positioned properly for a photogenic x-ray. It would be trivial to fake such a photo, though.
For what it's worth, if you've got video evidence of the attacks, I'd certainly be interested in seeing it.
It was a fine argument. We have overwhelming evidence that it can't be maintained in an environment of values-diversity. The same author went on to write Be Nice At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness, and then a year later wrote Kolmogorov Complicity And the Parable of Lightning. Now, I'm given to understand, he declines to write about these matters at all. Taken in sequence, it seems to me that the trajectory isn't hard to plot.
You know who hasn't had to engage in a grinding rhetorical retreat year after year? Zunger. He got it right the first time. Ditto for Ozy.
near as I can tell, the best way to handle things at the moment is to go to your platform, make a note of all the things you need, then place a requester chest on the ground one space away from the rocket, set requests for the items and amounts, wait for them to be delivered, replace the requester with a steel chest, add an inserter, and then launch the rockets until the chest is empty. There's probably a way to do it better with circuit networks, but getting the correct amounts into the rocket is a pain to do manually, and you need to switch to the platform and open the hub to get a summary of what is actually needed. It definitely could use some serious improvement.
There might be a way to do it better with combinator witchcraft, but I do not worship Satan.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I got as far as the subhead:
Since they liquidated socialists by the score and opposed everything we believe, Nazis were not leftists.
Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin also liquidated socialists by the score, and opposed "everything we believe in" at one time or another.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Just wanna say I'm really enjoying the commentary. I've been ignoring quality in my playthrough so far, but just started working on it last night thanks to the explanations here laying out how to think about it and why it's valuable.
DeSantis was not working to achieve these things prior to the rise of Trump in 2016. He fell in line behind Trump after Trump was already ascendant. If the Blues can successfully destroy Trump, I am not confident he will not simply tack back to the center. He is efficient and effective, but not reliable.
Blues have made destruction of Trump an overriding priority, and therefore a legible proxy for their control. Reds, it seems to me, correctly perceive defense against such destruction as a Schelling point to coordinate around. We believe that our own party has been grifting us for decades, and we are attempting to weed out the grifters, to align the party with our values in fact rather than only in appearance. Part of that is rejecting the sort of "compromises" that have been used for decades to sell those values out. A good way to avoid those compromises with our enemies is to force them to compromise with us instead. Trump is excellent at accomplishing this, and the "never Trump" movement has successfully removed a large proportion of these people from our party.
If Trump had lost the primary, the argument would be that "Trumpism" had clearly failed, and that it was time for "moderation" and "reconciliation" and for the Republican Party to "regain its sanity". In other words, total capitulation to the Blue consensus. We know this because this was the argument for why it was a mistake for the Republican party to support Trump in 2024. And if it had worked, the argument would have smoothly transitioned to "The republican party is still tainted by the shadow of Trump, and all his supporters/policy goals/constituency must be purged". And once this was accomplished, in another few years all the articles about how the current Republican candidate was actually Hitler would start back up, and Cthulhu would continue swimming left. We need our leadership to reject the authority of Blue Tribe in total. We need them to ignore and delegitimize the media and the knowledge production apparatus generally. We need them to break the bureaucracy. They can't do that if they're convinced that fighting is doomed and "compromise" with Blues is the only path forward.
Despite the rivers of ink spilled on the topic, we still don’t have a robust theory of what makes him appealing to voters.
He literally just ran a campaign wherein he successfully appealed to voters. Have you tried looking at his actual appeals to voters, and what voters say they found persuasive about them?
The single biggest failure of Western Democracies that sticks out like a sore thumb is their complete inability to control immigration.
What about the wars? What about cost disease? What about culture war? What about Institutional trust and social cohesion?
This all seems quite straightforward to me, and I'm at a loss where the confusion is coming from. Blue Tribe achieved a high degree of social and political dominance. They became The System. They then failed to deliver appreciable progress, and their failed efforts burned institutional trust and social cohesion. Because of that loss, the public is now rebelling against them en-masse.
I wanted to vote against the dominant foreign policy consensus, typified by endless, pointless foreign wars. Trump seems like the best candidate available to do that.
I wanted to vote against the dominant economic consensus, typified by offshoring and free trade, the service economy and the decline of industrialization. Trump seems like at least one of the best candidates possible to do that.
I wanted to vote against the dominant social consensus, and particularly against the repeated and coordinated attempts at forcing epistemic closure on the part of major political, media and corporate institutions. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against rule by an unelected, unresponsive and uncontrollable federal bureaucracy. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against crime and unaccountable political violence. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against entrenched corruption on the part of government officials. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against censorship and propaganda coordination between the government and major media corporations. Again, Trump.
I want to vote against the disastrous educational policies that have been shambling forward like a zombie for the last fifty years or so. Again, Trump.
None of this even seems to require "multicausal" explanations. I want to break the social and political dominance of Blue Tribe. All of these are just expressions of that dominance, and the insulation from consequence or accountability that has resulted from that dominance. And sure, there's a lot of Trump voters who probably wouldn't describe their view in the way I have above: they'd say something like "everything's gone to shit" or "I don't trust the democrats or the media" or something along those lines. Tomato, tomahto.
Arguably Trump himself doesn’t go far enough here. We didn’t even get a wall last time.
Trump had many failures last time. But given the record of how his last administration went, it's hard for me to grasp an argument that the problem was Trump, and not the entrenched elites working to foil and destroy him from the second the 2016 election ended. This goes well beyond immigration, into a whole variety of very serious illegalities and norm violations taken in an effort to end or at least stonewall his presidency and to protect his opponents.
A lot of people support Trump because they want to fight back against a system they perceive to be deeply pernicious and entirely insulated from accountability. They want that system removed, because its continued existence forecloses their ability to hope for a better future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
For what it's worth, I thought it was an excellent meme, quite amusing, and certainly fit for a fun thread.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
nearly two decades ago, I was introduced to the term "titalitarian" specifically in reference to the La Leche League's emphasis on breastfeading.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
But you understand that we, the base they both depend on for their continued careers, want them to work together, right?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Yes, Trump's grand move is to empower Desantis, the man who tried to kill the king less than a year ago
...Could you elaborate on your model here? Like, it seems you're positing that Trump and Desantis are enemies, and further that his supporters should consider them enemies and prefer conflict between them rather than cooperation. Would that be accurate?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
It was already permeating normie spaces, though. Trump was part of the inflammation response to the infection of Woke ideology. Fevers are necessary; it's the infection that's the problem.
this is true, for strict definitions of "normal" and strict definitions of "enemy". Al Qaeda was a political enemy, was it not?
...More generally, though, I think you're more or less entirely correct in this case. "Resist the Fascists" signaling is mainly signaling; there is not actually a way to hurt the outgroup much worse than previously without getting in too much trouble, and a lot of the signaling is being driven by at least a subconscious understanding that nothing is actually going to happen.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Just a few days ago I was reading multiple posts on this forum about how the $44 billion Elon spent on Twitter was worth every penny to the Trump campaign and now the Harris campaign spending $1 billion is a sign the big money is on the side of the Democratic Party?
Going by the numbers on Forbes, Harris spent 1.6 billion, to Trump's 1.1 billion to contest the 2024 election. Musk spent $44 Billion to contest the entire culture; the relevant frame here would be the amounts spent on, say, every other major media and tech company in the nation. So yes, the big money is on the side of the democratic party. Blackrock alone has somewhere north of ten trillion dollars under management, to give one example of a company aligned to Blue Tribe.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
This has come up a few times, and the best anyone could come up with is "distributed motte and bailey". Calling it that is obviously unfair to a person being held to account for an argument they may not have made, but on the other hand, it's pretty goddamn frustrating to get mutually contradictory arguments from people sharing a coalition.
There's probably no solution but to recognize that the discourse is fucked.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Am I the only one who likes discrete legible units in most of my games?
Nope. That's my preference too.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I assumed someone wrote a script, had the AI read it and create a lip-synched video. Am I overestimating capabilities?
I'm having my first moment of AI-related epistemic crisis. I've been provided the link to this clip, and I legitimately can't tell if it's real or not. I'm pretty sure AI gen is good enough to generate a video like this, so the obvious first choice would be to search for other sources repeating the content and providing additional context. I've done so and found nothing, which raises my concern that it isn't real; I'd expect this to be everywhere if it were genuine.
Does it even matter? If it's generated, then who's it generated by: his supporters or his own campaign, as a way of field-testing proposals? Why not generate a ton of these and see which go viral, then simply do those? As a private citizen, why not generate these as a way to influence your leader, by demonstrating a possible avenue they could choose to take? Could we be on the cusp of AI-accelerated populism?
[EDIT] - nope, looks like it's genuine. Search failure on my part. Hot damn!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
Dyson Sphere Project had a respectable pseudo-3d grid system, made somewhat annoying by the wierdness of mapping the grid to a sphere.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
and yet when people say that we shouldn't be doing it, the argument is that we've got to protect the poor Ukrainians. There's this maddening bullshit arbitrage between "protect the Ukrainians from the evil Russian Orcs", and "We should harm the Russians as much as possible, who cares what it costs the Ukranians."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
I have been repeatedly told by people arguing for support of Ukraine that our policy is and should be to drag the war out as long as possible to maximize harm to Russia. The fact that this also maximizes harm to Ukraine is waved off as Ukraine is volunteering for the honor. The fact that Ukraine is volunteering for the honor based on their belief that we will help them win, when in fact we have no intention of doing that is likewise dismissed.
And of course, actually providing them the resources needed to win, presuming those resources actually exist, risks escalating into direct warfare with a nuclear power.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
What is reality?
That which does not go away when you stop believing in it.
Who decides that exactly?
No one decides it. It happens regardless. If you do a bad job planting your crops, people starve. If you do a bad job enforcing the law, chaos and violence reigns. If you do a bad job protecting your borders, foreign armies victimize your populace.
How can you decide whether an institution , whether that is the police or whoever , did their job correctly?
For the police, you derive a general understanding of what their job is by examining the laws they're supposed to enforce, and their actual enforcement of those laws, measure it versus the costs of maintaining them and the general realities that add friction to the system.
Are you capable or even interested in judging each and every move they make ?
Random sampling and statistics help a great deal here.
Do you just use your judgement ( whether right or wrong) to fuel hatred and distrust? Because you are probably not using it to make a a practical change.
That is certainly a thing people can do. For example, the BLM movement spun out of a coordinated attempt by Blue Tribe to generate hatred and distrust by pushing misinformation about the actual performance of law enforcement, resulting in a very large and quite partisan disconnect between public perception of police misconduct and actual rates of misconduct. And the result is that tens of thousands of additional black Americans are now dead, and hundreds of thousands of additional Black Americans have been victimized by serious crimes. That was a practical change of the sort you are describing.
So what is it? What is the goal? The cornerstone of society is trust. Trust has to be blind up to a logical point.
Alternatively, one can do one's best to verify that trust, and to withdraw it when one perceives that it has been repeatedly violated. It is always possible that one has been deceived, though, so it's best to keep an open mind to new evidence when it arises.
It might help if those attempting the reality check had some plausible claim to a superior grasp on reality themselves. By all means, list off the victories of the Establishment, the evidence of their prudence and sound judgement. They've been running the country as a coherent bloc since at least the fall of the USSR, so there should be plenty of victories to list, no?
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