Sending this to an irl friend who I know will appreciate this banger.
For civil society to be safe the suburbs must die
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Sending this to an irl friend who I know will appreciate this banger.
Reading this makes me understand why people gulag post.
I don’t feel like gnosticism fits very well thematically with the rest of the items in this list (not that it’s wrong that this isn’t a current in transhumanism).
It’s funny that I realize I have fallen into the same pattern but it’s for eras of internet shitposting.
(Ofc Trump deserves no credit for the pardon because it was obviously cynical pr with no principled objection to drug criminalization actually behind it)
Considering the latter was a direct consequence of the former (read drug prohibition) I think that makes it more defensible actually. If you don’t want drug markets to be gangland about enforcement and security maybe don’t make them illegal and hence outside the operation of normal law.
In general worries about reversion to some preliberal supposedly default state always seemed to be motivated by a kind of presentist bias about mass feelings of societal uncertainty that are constant amongst most societies around history.
Also like it’s important to remember that modern authoritarians are very eager to wrap themselves in the language of small d democracy which I don’t think happens if the liberal democratic revolution didn’t put down deep roots.
Also when it comes to lack of access to medicine the bigger issue is drug patents arbitrarily driving up prices than the existence of a market in medicine anyway.
At some point these kinda criticisms also just seem completely divorced from the reality that every health care system is going to have to ration care on some level at any given point. Like there are many issue with US health care but the fact of rationing isn’t really one of them.
Myself
What if I’m reading a book on my phone?
I don’t think so given that the point of the performative male is that their doing it to court women, it’s probably more similar to peacocking in all honesty. But also in the grand scheme of heterosexual courtship rituals this is pretty damn harmless all things considered.
On an unironic note I have actually sometimes made a point to go read something I was going to read anyway in public in hopes of impressing people, it doesn’t work but Alan Knights history of the Mexican Revolution is quite good.
Avoiding accusations of performative maleness by reading everything on my phone or laptop.
Because what is instrumental rationality if statements like “if I am hungry and I want to alleviate my hunger I should eat“ have no normative force in terms of what I should do to alleviate my hunger?
epistemically evaluatable claims.
Even then it still seems prudential normativity is still operative which seems truly insane to try and dispense with and if that’s not dispensed with then it seems like epistemic normativity is back on the table given that a statement like “if you want x you need to do y” is also making
the existence of hate speech laws also the question of banning a party is different from the question of banning speech and probably more defensible under certain *very* extreme circumstances)
I’m not saying it’s worse what I’m saying is that clearly hate speech laws do not actually prevent the rise of the far right in these countries in any meaningful sense (to the extent they have managed them better it’s almost certainly because of the structure of their governments not
And before you start lecturing me about the Civil Rights movement I would ask you to remember how much of it was a. precisely about winning hearts and minds and b. how much of Jim Crow was a state backed project.
You cannot use the government to do an end run around winning hearts and minds (this is basically what MAGA is trying to do right now and while it’s making a big fascistic stink of things it is not actually winning many converts contrary to what the doomers here may think)
That American dogma is correct actually and the manifest failure of hate speech laws to prevent the rise of the far right in Europe shows exactly why. I regret to inform my fellow liberals that they need to get cozy with solving problems in civil society through civil society.
of liberal democracy. Like it just seems obvious to me that that doesn't happen if liberalism as the justifying political story hasn't put down some deep roots in the population.
This is a valid fear I also think this shows that your "liberalism is the historical exception that might not be long for this world" fear is unfounded if modern autocracy (which I consider this to basically be) needs to be wreathed in the forms, trappings, and legitimizing stories
elites also didn't seem to take that seriously. And again, I think this points more towards people taking liberalism for granted rather than there being a deep upswell of support for autocracy.
This also ties back to Buckle's point about an unwillingness to fight at least as far as government is concerned (I concede there has been plenty of fight in civil society). The electorate should have taken seriously the threat to democracy and the rule of law seriously when the political
and more that after these various breaks from the constitution didn't result in out and out authoritarianism people really just can't conceptualize that it can happen here.
Also, I should make clear that I come from this from a libertarian angle too and that's partially what's informing this. I think (and maybe I'm wrong!) that a lot of the laggard response to Trump is less that people like and want autocracy when its terms are made clear
I just find it profoundly doubtful that there is a real constituency for autocracy in this country. I could believe a story about people being too bored or demoralized to care but the theory of MAGA having some broad mass appeal, that I feel you slip into sometimes, is extremely unconvincing to me.
That's true but also how much of that is bored monkey who hasn't touched the stove yet talking? To the extent that the people are tired of liberalism (which is the core claim I take issue with here) it seems more because people can't actually imagine the alternatives.
No he wasn’t it’s obviously better for the workingman’s independence for his income to not be entirely dependent on a single external source like an employer or the government and the only reason people think otherwise is because of an irrational phobia against solving issues through civil society.
I hate Trotsky but he was one of the best poasters to ever do it
constitutional government are still broadly popular with the majority of population and importantly MAGA is making a fairly direct assault on all of those.
is trying to do an almost lenninist flipping of the table through the state. I will concede it’s probably true that peak wokeness doesn’t have much of a popular constituency but it does seem like basic liberal principles like equality before the law, civil rights, and small d democratic
able to turn out low propensity, low info voters who only like him when they aren’t paying attention to him. Similarly when I look at MAGAs response to liberal dominance in civil society what I see is a movement that knows it’s lost battle for hearts and minds in civil society and
But like a lot of the US purported rw tilt is down to institutions no? Like we all need to remember that in the last 25 years a Republican presidential candidate has only won the popular vote twice and that one of those times was because the candidate was
political ideologies (this is also how I’d begin building the case for Rawlsian public reason being normatively incoherent but this already too long).
definition is already loading the deck a bit. The other theoretical nitpick is that I also think it fundamentally doesn’t make sense to conceptualize political ideologies themselves as comprehensive at all rather they are outgrowths of comprehensive worldviews and I think this applies to all
Equally comprehensive worldviews. Like for instance it seems that there’s an important theoretical distinction between the righteous life and the good life something that’s seen even in the Abrahamic tradition (think the Book of Job) and so defining comprehensivity by this quasi Aristotelian
This does’t really address this problem but a conceptual complaint I have about this entire discussion is that defining comprehensive worldviews as being about the good life and human flourishing already seems to be presupposing a very specific normative worldview to the exclusion of other
So we could say something like “since some form of normativity is needed to explain the epistemic force of our best scientific theories then we should accept some form of its existence“.
I mean if we’re talking naturalized epistemology a la Quine then presumably we could run something like an indispensability argument for some kind of normativity if we think something like an unbelievable errors situation is a reductio (which I obviously do).
Which part of what I said are you responding to? If the last part is responding to the companions in guilt argument the point is that rejecting normativity means rejecting epistemology because normativity is core to the epistemic project, it’s a reductio.
Also strictly speaking the question of whether or not naturalism is true as an ontology is a separate question from what epistemology is correct.
saying that the epistemic project is inherently normative (though maybe you are familiar with the argument and accept something like unbelievable errors which I think is a reductio position but that‘s a separate argument)
Two things one this only works if one accepts reductionist naturalism which I do not second if a non reductive view of nature then there seems to be no good reason to exclude normativity from it. Also you seem unfamiliar with the companions in guilt argument which if what I was driving at
More boldly the epistemic project *is* a norma project!
I don’t know how anyone can dig into epistemology and *not* want to create/maintain a normative projec.
I dream of an America that looks like this.
We should bring back shining city on a hill rhetoric in response to the federal assault on cities.
But if we are going to do that Vichy is better than the third reich.
And also just the broader point that it’s better to compare to France which had a much longer and more firm small d democratic tradition than Germany. Yes there are obvious and quite big differences and that’s why I said we shouldn’t just be comparing to WWII era European regimes
This is entirely compatible with my point which is that Trump was trading on a very short honey moon that was going to be wrecked by other factors (tho in this case the initial factors are regime caused which was not true of Vichy as you point out, tho it would be true Vichy late into the regime).
of its lifespan.
This is one of the many reasons I think if we're going to only make WWII regime comparisons (which we shouldn't) Vichy is the much better comparison than the Third Reich which did actually have a majority to at least a sizable plurality of the German public behind it for a significant chunk
I will not be taking questions at this time
That being said though real ones know the best historical comparison between Trump II to a WWII fascist regime is Vichy France (I know nerds will point out their not technically fascist but stfu)
I remember during Trump I being annoyed that people where not making the Latin America comparisons more because they seemed way more app than the third reich and tbh the only reason I’m not as annoyed by that is because of how much Trump II has tried to present itself as the American third reich.
Because actual crime going down isn’t what they care about it’s the public brutalization of undesirables that excites them.
Like animal cognition is obviously special vis a vis LLM cognition on physicalist grounds just do to the nature of animals and LLMs being very different complex physical systems which qua physicalism is all minds are.
But like embodiment is obviously more important on physicalist accounts of mind? Like yeah a lot of folk dualism is just reflexively anthropocentric in stupid ways but tracing out the consequences of a radical separation of mind and body obviously makes embodied cognition way less special.
That meme is so funny because it’s basically just conservatives bragging about their close psychological proximity to literal sociopaths.
There’s a dark joke to be made about if this is true to any extent (it isn’t) it’s probably evidence that antivaxxers are structurally more prone to psychosis and/or mania.
I like Milwaukee
He’s probably not dead but it would feel very personally rewarding for him to die on the night I got wine drunk and had some very productive emotionally cathartic conversations with some close personal friends.
Becoming obsessed with categorizing certain behaviors as performative male or not.
*teens who murdered
who murdered someone for Slenderman.
That should exist obviously at the same time my kinda cynical thought is that the internet gives so many ways to potentially lethally cook one’s brain that the focus on AI is only a thing because it’s new. Like I’m still not really convinced this incident is much different in kind then like those
So a moral panic story is having moral panic results? Why gee ain’t that just shocking.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an esoteric reading is a good guy with an esoteric reading.
Lib third-worldism time
Trvke
I feel like more people need to be pounding the drum on Trump being fundamentally illegitimate and the court decision that let him run in 24 being fundamentally illegitimate.
I would also point out while the US does have more state capacity than revolutionary Mexico, Trump is no Carranza and he has no Obregón. There is simply no top political talent there to steer the ship when shit really hits the fan.
And DOGE and the coming economic apocalypse does not make budget incentives seem like a promising prospect.
But where’s the point were a blue state government backed by the population says “fuck this, fuck you we’re not going to do what you say, you’re not a legitimate president” how is the federal government going to make them do it besides by force they probably don’t have?
The problem is that it’s obvious that Trump isn’t a legitimate president and the Trump v US decision was illegitimate but if anyone in a position of political power says this then it’s insurrection time.
exercise authority across the whole country (as blue state governors start increasingly going on the war path I expect this to occur)
Eh I think the road to full authoritarian consolidation is not there but that doesn’t mean immanent overthrow is also in the cards. It’s very possible the US resembles Mexico circa 1915-1920 where the central government has *just* enough control to not get overthrown but not enough to actually
Can’t tell whether I would or would not trade for that tbh.
In the twilight zone of being a zoomer who goes out and drinks (to the point I have made people think I am an alcoholic) but is still too terminally online to actually get play.
The problem with Critical Theory is that it’s English major sociology.
This man is being subjected to a real-life version of Kafka’s “The Trial” as punishment for being the embarrassing object of the regime’s own malicious and chaotic incompetence. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...
with zero moral status whatsoever.
And increasingly I’m starting to think that the really dark implications of that aren’t that we’re committing atrocities against potential conscious beings it’s that in the true moral order of the universe they’re actually just are many conscious beings that are essentially ontological slaves
You know I’ve increasingly come to agree with you on the plausibility of animism and the ethically frightening implications of that but for a long time I thought those implications were frightening because it would seem that we might committing moral atrocities unwittingly.
You’re right I think that substance dualism can make animism surprisingly plausible but I think it’s kinda fun to imagine all of the mainstream positions in phil mind including even physicalism make animism at least somewhat plausible
If you aren’t a liberal by 20 you have no heart, if you still aren’t a liberal by 40 you have no brain.
schtick it’s uncertain to me that their will even need to be a fight.
I think this will all entirely depend on if gov institutions continue to be as anemic as they are now. In a fight where the institutions are actually trying Trump probably loses even with everything that’s already happened but if the institutions continue they’re “let’s just roll over and die”
WHY IS THE GOVERNMENT OF MY COUNTRY HELLBENT ON TORTURING THIS MAN
…each other: what if suddenly I was just disappeared and then the U.S. government was all over tv calling me a terrorist yakuza for no rational reason, what would you and the boys do
I am not stupid or egotistical enough to think the regime cares about me, and I’m aware I’m a citizen (not Protestant white tho so, you know), but just as a mere thought experiment for empathy’s sake my wife and I — who I imagine are in a more comfortable position than Garcia’s family — just asked…
Drinking, crack smoking, whoring myself on the streets of Baltimore
Reminder that Hitler targeted his more moderate right wing critics on the Knight of the Long Knives.
The silver lining about Trump being a personalist authoritarian is that personalist authoritarianism famously bad at handling the problem of succession. I fully expect the internal factional fights of a Vance presidency to look like the late Porfiriato.
Then the argument can be dismissed with contempt.
Many but most of them can be neatly summed by this principle: If an argument for restricting human freedom/activity relies on either a. sensationalized stories of singular lurid incidents or b. statistics garbling ie “some bad thing x went up by 100%! (It‘s incidence went from 0.00001 to 0.00002)