FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
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.
I don't think "Hard Times Make Strong Men" has to be parsed as "Hard Times Make Strong Men 100% of the time", but given the rest of the meme it should at least mean "Hard Times Make Strong Men more often than good times."
I think the more accurate formulation would be "Hard times make strong men inevitable. Good times make weak men inevitable." This formulation not only seems obviously consonant with my understanding of history, but the reasons why it should be so likewise seem obvious: Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength. By contrast, bad times impose many consequences on weakness, and often provide an abundance of free energy through which strength might be exercised, not least the general population's desire to organize their collective power and resources to change things for the better.
But of course, this requires us to take the terms "strong" and "weak", "good" and "bad" seriously. Likewise words like "decadence", which Devereaux seems to believe contain no semantic content of significance, and so declines to even engage with in any meaningful fashion.
If you agree that states usually beat non-states, and rich states usually beat poor states (as you seem to suggest with "not as the expected result") then you agree with the core factual claim of the Fremen Mirage series.
I think a culture can build an effective military force, such that they win a disproportionate number of their engagements, not merely through technocratic KPIs (amount of money available, population size, etc), but through specific cultural features and norms. I think such a culture can then replace those cultural features and norms with a new set, and as a consequence begin to lose a disproportionate number of their engagements, even though it now has more money, more population, and a greater share generally of the technocratic KPIs than it did when it was winning. Further, I think this signal is strong enough that predictions can be made in advance.
By contrast, it seems to me that Devereaux aims to convince his readers that military affairs are largely deterministic, with a layer of luck on top. Therefore, empires are born because they got a streak of good RNG hits, and Empires die because they got a streak of bad RNG hits, and human decisions are not really terribly decisive either way.
In which case what is it that "Hard Times Make Strong Men" means that you find both true and interesting? "Hard Times sometimes Make Strong Men, even if that isn't the way to bet" is trivially true and uninteresting.
"Hard Times make strong men, strong men make good times" is interesting because it provides a firm historical basis for hope. The problems we face are not inevitable, insurmountable. Things can change. Often the hardships we face can shape us to better change them.
"Good times makes weak men, weak men make hard times" is interesting because it warns us that there is no permanent victory, that good times are not stable, that preserving and extending them requires effort and constant vigilance. And this is not a general warning: the hazard is specified, so it can be recognized in advance and action can be taken accordingly.
You claim that Devereaux is (a) wrong and (b) obfuscating this. You have not stated a concrete point where you disagree with him, or a false belief you think he is trying to insinuate. I think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.
Here are two paragraphs:
Now, the way this trope, and its contrast between ‘civilized’, ‘soft’ people and the ‘uncivilized’ ‘hard’ Fremen is deployed is often (as we’ll see) pretty crude. A people – say the Greeks – may be the hard Fremen one moment (fighting Persia) and the ‘soft’ people the next (against Rome or Macedon).
A brief search confirms that this "moment" covers two centuries, and the entire point of the meme is that cultures change over time. It's possible that there's a valid argument to be made here, but he's pretty clearly chosen not to make it.
But we may outline some of the ‘virtues’ of the ‘hard men’ sort of Fremen are supposed to have generally. They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized).
Is self-sufficiency and flexibility a bad thing? Is there such a thing as overspecialization or excessive complexity as legible cultural problems? Are the average men in societies, populations, or tribes more or less capable of becoming soldiers en masse, due to the culture they've been shaped by? Does this problem show up even from the perspective of men who appear to, in fact, be quite strong? Fuck that noise, questions are for dweebs! Let's round it to "all men in the society are warriors", that sounds way less complicated.
Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes. Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents.
"Literate". Why portray "literate" and "intellectually decadent" as synonyms? Could it be that arguing against "intellectual decadence" is a hell of a lot harder than arguing for the merits of literacy, and so he finds it most convenient to substitute the former for the later? Can we wait two more sentences to find out?
The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’ conditions, associated with complex societies, wealth and book-reading weenies (read: literacy) make for morally inferior people who are consequently worse at fighting. Because we all know that moral purity makes you better at fighting, right? (My non-existent editor would like me to make clear that I am being sarcastic here, and it is extraordinarily obvious that moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success.)
...And there's your answer.
"moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success". What a disgusting example of intellectual cowardice.
Nothing always leads to battlefield success, so it's good to see that he's really putting himself out there with the bold claims.
And yet, character, of both leaders and followers, very obviously matters immensely in leadership, and leadership matters immensely in all domains of large-scale human conflict. I am pretty sure that "moral purity", in the sense that he very clearly is framing the term, would not be a very good way of describing the phenomenon, which is why I find his framing choices so execrable. But in actual fact it is obvious that Morale and Morals/virtue/character are pretty clearly linked, and that even central examples of Moral Purity in the sense he frames it have in fact been used historically to build winning armies. Discipline is incredibly important in all forms of military affairs. Commitment. Loyalty. Determination. "The moral is to the physical as three to one." We know what amoral armies look like; there is a reason people don't want to rely on them. And yet, even that last link opens up a whole vista on how morality or its absence change war, how morals/character/virtue cannot be done without, the lengths leaders must go to in generating makeshift analogues in their absence, all in the context of a problem that, by itself, greatly illustrates the reality of decadence as a sociopolitical force.
More recently, we have the truism that "no one is going to fight a war on behalf of an economic zone." While we haven't tested this principle hard yet, I know which way I'd bet.
think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.
I reiterate: This is propaganda, and worse it is stupid propaganda. You should not trust him to describe or diagnose "cults" of any description, and you should re-evaluate whatever lessons you have drawn from his writings.
Very briefly, central examples of the "Hard Times Make Strong Men" thesis do not claim that non-states usually beat states, or that poorer states generally beat richer ones. Devereaux is attempting to frame the thesis this way because if he can bake absurdity into his audience's understanding of the argument, then it's all over but the sneering, which is pretty clearly what he's primarily interested in doing.
"Hard Times Make Strong Men" exists as a thesis because we can directly observe that rich, powerful states often actually do decline, that states are defeated by non-states, and rich states are beat by poor states. Not all the time, not as the expected result, but often enough that very clearly wealth, population, or whatever other technocratically legible KPI one prefers are not deterministic. Why is this? What causes upsets? What causes the mighty to decline? What injects mortality into the putatively super-mortal? This is a fascinating question, but Devereaux appears mainly interested in cauterizing such interest in anyone he can, and is enthusiastically willing to employ the argumentative dark arts in doing so.
Here are two paragraphs:
Now, the way this trope, and its contrast between ‘civilized’, ‘soft’ people and the ‘uncivilized’ ‘hard’ Fremen is deployed is often (as we’ll see) pretty crude. A people – say the Greeks – may be the hard Fremen one moment (fighting Persia) and the ‘soft’ people the next (against Rome or Macedon). But we may outline some of the ‘virtues’ of the ‘hard men’ sort of Fremen are supposed to have generally. They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized).
Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes. Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents. The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’ conditions, associated with complex societies, wealth and book-reading weenies (read: literacy) make for morally inferior people who are consequently worse at fighting. Because we all know that moral purity makes you better at fighting, right? (My non-existent editor would like me to make clear that I am being sarcastic here, and it is extraordinarily obvious that moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success.)
...This is propaganda. The person writing it likes you stupid. To the extent that you not of my tribe, the more you listen to him, the better for me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I remember his "fremen mirage" series, and being left with the strong impression that he was playing word games in an attempt to obfuscate a fundamental reality he found unpalatable. Particularly, his four-part definition in the beginning of the first part more-or-less immediately convinced me that he was not operating in good faith.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The problem with most conversations of this sort is that memory exists.
The Jan 6th protestors were also "hilariously incompetent", to the point that they forgot to bring any weapons at all. And yet, this apparent incompetence somehow failed to overshadow "what they were actually trying to do."
It's who, whom. We observably take Red violence seriously, even when it is hypothetical. We observably do not take Blue violence seriously, even (especially?) when there are multiple bodies. This is not an accident. This is the essence of Tribalism.
Normal white Midwesterners don't get his will to power ideology.
Also their women do not like him and he doesn't seem to actually like white women. Really hampering his aspirations to make white children. So he pivots to rationalizing how having kids with Hispanics is okay.
More power to him on that front, but this part:
Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of white people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their podunk hometown. 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.
...Is kind of indicative of why this guy and people like him are not the future of Red Tribe.
He's a Blue. His values are Blue to the core. It doesn't matter if he were Von Neumann reborn; he doesn't want what we want, he isn't interested in our values and so he's never going to be on our side in any meaningful way. If he were supremely competent, then he'd be dangerous; as is, he appears mainly to be an instructive, cautionary example.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
The anti-trans faction, believing themselves entitled to know, and act on the knowledge of, the genital/gonadal configurations of strangers...
...You frame this as though this was some novel innovation on the part of an "anti-trans faction", but in fact entitlement to know and act on the genital/gonad configuration of strangers has been a bog-standard feature of society for centuries, and arguably back to the beginning of recorded history.
thus allowing them to make the assertion that other people's genitalia are any of their business without being seen to make said assertion
They didn't have to assert shit. This was all common knowledge for generations at least. Other people's genitalia, in the framing you present here, are and have been a matter of public interest for as long as we've had sex-segregated public spaces, which is a very, very long time.
This seems to me to be a remarkably dishonest description of what has actually been done, and by who.
The traditional substitutes are money and power.
...I think you left off a third element, which is "immunity to consequences." There's lots of ways to get money and power. There are few ways to get or wield money and power that are protected from consequences deriving from the getting and the wielding, and almost all those ways involve "be an elite" among them. Include this element, and the hostility toward elites you correctly identify with gains a heaping helping of necessary context. Our elites have almost completely insulated themselves from negative consequences arising from their wielding of money and power, and the resentment this lack of accountability breeds is probably not something the present system can or should survive.
Wild material prosperity is a good start.
Do you believe elites have delivered wild material prosperity? Does the current generation understand that it is living amid wild material prosperity? If not, why not? Was Mangione mistaken? Are his fans in the public and the press and the justice system aware of that fact?
Like, the basic problem with the anti-populist defense of elites is that elites by definition are the people running things, and we can look at the world around us to assess how they're actually performing. So we repeatedly get, as you offer here, vague appeals to how wonderful things are in this best of all possible worlds, which die a death the moment you compare them to the PANIC PANIC PANIC elites themselves observably resort to in order to goad the populace down their preferred policy chute, into their preferred policy captive-bolt-gun.
The public at large believed that "police shooting unarmed black men" was a crisis, because Elites spent a decade intentionally generating the illusion of such a crisis. But the largest spike ever recorded in violent crime was actually real, and was very clearly a direct consequence of the public reaction to that elite-generated illusion.
And so for Education, and the Afghan war, and the GWOT generally, and the criminal justice system generally, and for offshoring manufacturing annd arguably for the economy generally, for the whole of the Trans Rights issue, for the LGBT movement in at least a large part, the COVID response, immigration and on and on and on.
Really, the question is absurd unless you draw a very unintuitive box around “elite human capital.” Purging your best and brightest is not conducive to scientific or cultural wealth.
I can't find the X.com link at the moment to the academic lady with a prestigious fellowship, arguing in an interview that reporting child abuse is racist. So instead, I'll note that I disagree that our present elites are in fact "our best", and that intelligence is very clearly orthogonal to goodness.
We straight-up cannot afford these people. They have to go, and if they do not go peacefully they will absolutely go violently, and much that we value will go with them, and that will still be preferable to the ruin of letting them continue to run things.
Presumably your hedging of 'by its own rules' means something like 'if a member of the outgroup does something bad, we can blame the outgroup for it', and I am sure you have some story of some Trump supporter having a psychotic episode and shooting up a shopping mall getting spun as MAGA violence.
Right-Wing Violence Is Not A Fringe Issue
The American Right and the Thrill of Political Violence
Analysis: What Data Shows About Political Extremist Violence
Right-wing extremist violence is more frequent and more deadly than left-wing violence − what the data shows
The Right's Violence Problem
As Right-Wing Rhetoric Escalates, So Do Threats And Violence
Right-Wing and ‘Radical Islamic’ Terror in the U.S. Are Equally Serious Threats: ADL Report
...Just a couple links grabbed off a stack that rivals Everest.
Blue Tribe wants there to be a legible, coherent category of "Red Tribe violence"; for people to have common knowledge that Red Tribe violence is a live social issue to which current events connect, that there's a history and a dataset, a conversation in progress, potential solutions ready to go.
Blue Tribe wishes to prevent "Blue Tribe violence" from being such a legible, coherent category, or indeed for any of the above features to coalesce around it.
Blue Tribe very clearly uses the dance back and forth between "this is a social problem that demands systemic solutions" and "eh, crazy random happenstance, what can you do" as one of its core political tactics. People recognize this pattern, and they see it everywhere, and charity is burned thereby. This particular front in the Culture War has been operating for much more than a decade. You should be aware of it, and you should, I personally think, account for it in your arguments. Absent such an accounting, your condemnations are meaningless, because it is obvious that they are selectively partisan.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
This is the most American of things. Men are free, and when free, this is what significant amounts of them do.
This is certainly a view one can hold. By all means, maintain the same perspective when it is you getting got.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
At some point, I want to write a review of that movie, having never actually seen it beyond clips. It seems extremely obvious to me that most of its target audience badly misunderstood it, which is a shame because I think it's an amazing example of explicitly Culture War film. As with Ex Machina, though, it seems like the target audience is willfully determined to miss the point.
Not everything is culture war material.
Do you believe that the personal is not political?
NFL ownership leans Republican.
What sort of Republican? Trump has been fighting a bitter civil war within the Republican party since the 2016 primaries, and that numerous establishment Republicans have explicitly sided with Blue Tribe in opposition to him. "But these people are Republicans" is a line that's been abused for a full decade now. Sure, this person who is voting Democrat and wants me to vote democrat and agrees with the Democrats on all major issues and has nothing for scorn for me is a "republican" because he used to be high-up in the party that took my money and gave me nothing for decades. Obviously he wants to resume that occupation, and obviously democrats would prefer that my choices are to vote for them or for someone who bends the knee every time but who they still get to call names. I have zero incentive to play along with this farce.
"The only thing stronger than hate is love" is a slogan popular among people who take pleasure from publicly contemplating the violent death of my children. I do not believe anyone is actually confused about what is going on here. Some people, even here, simply find it convenient in the moment to pretend.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
"Bad Things" and "Subjugation" are subjective terms.
You want humans to cooperate. Cooperation necessitates hierarchy. Hierarchy is not objectively distinguishable from "subjugation".
Even real subjugators generally do not subjugate "for no other reason than that they can". "Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth" is the typical form.
If you want the able to help the unable, the bare minimum price for that help is for the unable to obey the able. This is not an obscure fact to anyone who interacts with young children. Absent such obedience, you are just obfuscating costs, and the obfuscated costs will bring the system down one way or the other in relatively short order.
Non-law-based norms is the substance from which laws emerge. you can't say "anything not illegal should be permitted", because not permitting things that aren't illegal is how things get to be illegal in the first place.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12d ago
A liberal's answer - this liberal's answer, for example - would be that, quite the opposite, the personal becomes political because society ie the body politic tries to screw around with people's personal lives.
This framing would make sense if you could define a "personal life" that politics should not screw with. But in fact, no such definition exists, any more than there exists a rigorous definition of "harm" or, in our context, "screwing". The appearance of such definitions is a product of values-coherence, of cultural homogeneity.
In fact, I rather think that for the personal not to be political, you would need a maximally liberated society, a society where the very idea of taking issue with another citizen's behavior would seem nonsensical, if that behavior is not literally criminal.
I think you are correct that this is indeed the Liberal perspective. I think it should be obvious to you and all others why this perspective is self-destructive. Behavior being criminal requires laws. How do those laws get written if you can't imagine objecting to someone else's behavior unless it's already against the law?
Human coexistence requires significant constraint of individual desires and will. Humans generally cannot "live secure in the knowledge that their life is their own"; the closest approach to this happy state is to get them to accept the constraints other humans place on them as normal and not really constraints at all, and the only way that happens is values-coherence.
I am not a full-on anarchist or libertarian in terms of the political systems that I think can produce good outcomes in the long term, but I do believe that "people can do what they want forever" is an essential component of the Good, and that government is good largely insofar as it gets us closer to that ideal (with the obvious epicycles about the government being empowered to infringe on freedoms in the interest of collective survival, as people need to be alive to be able to do what they want).
Maybe founding society on a goal that is obviously impossible to achieve or even closely approach is a bad idea? Values-diverse humans are going to want a lot of things that interfere with other humans against their will, and are going to have no way to calculate or enforce which infringements are minimal and which are unacceptable. Politics becomes a weapon, not a common tool, and then the whole thing burns down. You are currently watching this happen.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13d ago
Because admitting they are up for debate means letting opponents speak and granting them legitimacy. If you can preemptively shut down the debate by declaring any other position beyond the pale, you win.
This is correct, but I've been arguing for some time that this isn't necessarily even bad behavior, because endlessly negotiating every facet of your existence with the entire rest of your society is antithetical to anything resembling a peaceful, prosperous existence. Such an existence depends on the personal not being political, and the way that happens is exactly by the formation of "common decency", of a set of norms and rules and behaviors that people conform to without significant argument or complaint, with those who cannot conform being ostracized.
We have to do this, but having done it, we forgot why it was necessary, and so burned down all the mechanisms required, and are now sort of rebuilding them badly, ad-hoc, and in a values-diverse environment they aren't made for.
I assume you are familiar with the phrase "with great power comes great responsibility." Do you recognize that it runs the other way as well? With great responsibility, comes great power? If so, what's the difference between power and dominance? If not, why not?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
I have no opinion on the quality control inspectors on the Artemis program in particular, but I would note that we have seen strong DEI pushes that trade off directly against high-stakes safety institutions like air traffic controllers and pilot training, along with pretty much every field in the whole country. This is not something I'd be super confident in asserting obviously wouldn't happen, especially given the degree to which space programs are very clearly run off politics rather than engineering.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
To be clear, we are discussing a case where what they called up was used to excellent effect for three decades, and only now begins to turn on them when the entire country is coming apart at the seams.
It's not obvious from a pure power analysis perspective that they made the wrong play here. At least wait until there's some actual convictions, eh?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
You should not treat your political opponents as a homogenous group made of their most distasteful members
You should recognize when thoughts, positions, attitudes or memes become sufficiently widespread within a group to be normalized, such that it starts showing up in your day-to-day interactions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
While it was a bad shoot the current theory is his gun fired on its own.
To my knowledge, the evidence that his gun fired on its own consists of:
- His pistol being a SIG 320, which has a controversial reputation for uncommanded discharges
- Some people thinking they see the slide move in a handful of frames in a very grainy video.
From what I've seen, the latter point is very shaky, and is very pointedly not a claim the agency has made, to my knowledge. Digital video of this sort is not good at capturing gun mechanics at long range, poor lighting and in a confused environment. This same problem came up with the Mangioni shooting when people claimed the gun was a station-six or "welrod", as opposed to a semi-auto malfunctioning because it wasn't set up to work with a suppressor properly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
Mu.
Human rules cannot constrain human will. This does not mean that rules are useless. It does mean that they are not a general solution to the problem of human evil. You appear to be doing an absolutely fantastic job of demonstrating this reality with your arguments, so my congratulations on that. I will certainly be quoting your arguments in the future.
Logic is not a human rule. If you are appealing to it, you must be bound by it. I believe I am doing a fairly good job of being bound by logic.
If the above is not a satisfactory answer, I invite you to elaborate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
I can definitely say that any LE shooting someone who is restrained and is not pointing a gun at someone is outside of it is outside of it.
What about law enforcement shooting someone who is not pointing a gun and who they are not even attempting to restrain?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
19d ago
To a first approximation, a supermajority of all journalists and editors, a supermajority of newspapers and TV news stations, A supermajority of the people and companies making "professional" books, music, movies, TV shows, video games, a supermajority of celebrities...
Right-wing media consists primarily of podcasts, youtube channels and streamers, and as of a couple of years ago nation-state actors were openly coordinating blanket censorship against them.
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.
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