!agree

!gamer

Yeah, if you pay really close attention you can see the cue cards. It's essentially scripted. Playing to see how long they can keep people reading the script because their confused.

The whole thing is an act.

I wanted to know if there's a good place to discuss videos. Youtube comments are pretty much drivel and Discord tends to move a bit fast.

@Ryecast, @Dr.Wol about your thing from yesterday.

Ryecast is right. The reality is that hierarchies always form. A lot of it is just that not all people are equal in ability and ambition and there are people who tend to want to follow and people who want to lead. You put any significant number of people in a group and someone emerges as a de facto leader. When that person gains the ability to force conformity (an inevitability in a group of people with any shared identity and collective problems) you are left with the beginnings of a tyranny.

This is fundamental human nature. It is also is the case that as power concentrates, power corrupts and the formed institutions become vulnerable to subversion and abuse.

Ultimately, we must ask though, when it comes to stateless communism and democratic socialism, what is the difference between production and consumption and how is it allocated. In a capitalist system this is decided with money and ownership of property. If we abolish money and property but instead use 'abstract points' to allocate resources, is that not equivalent to money? What if we use cultural influence? Would the fact that Tim Pool has more influence and a bigger platform for any of use indicate he should have a better say in the distribution of resources? Would these things not form a hierarchy and something akin to money (you could, after all, count something like twitter followers and derive some kind of index of influence)?

"fairly distributed society" is like true stateless society, it's a myth. Democratic socialism falls from the same issues of socialism except that it admits the reality of a state and of money. But conceptually, you run into alot of the same issues when it comes to the allocation of resources (namely, it's very easy to game).

As it is, we should also remember that not all "democracies" are democratic. China has freedom of speech enshrined in it's constitution (and some Chinese will insist they are more free to speak than we are) but I don't think there are any illusions about how effective that guarantee actually is. North Korea is a "Democratic People's Republic" (with elections!) but it's rather totalitarian in practice. Simply creating a democratic superstructure is insufficient to actually guarantee democracy.

That's the danger. It doesn't. That's why I'm concerned of the present political moment. There are forces, especially cultural forces, that believe it doesn't and it shouldn't.

This is most pertinent and obvious if you see the free speech debates at Universities.

The government does have a great deal of power. But it's power confined by convention and popular edict. If the government does too much too fast, there's the threat of rebellion.

The police and military have power because they hold a monopoly on violence and no one wants to get in a shooting war with either. The government leadership hold power as long as they hold the support of key institutions.

Dr. Wol gets it. The state is order. It can be a good force or a bad force.

It depends. What if the CIA said "fuck off Trump" but the US Army responded "no you don't"

That's why it's a balance of power between institutions which hold their own influence and power.

They hold *alot* of pseudo-miiltary power. Particularly if the revolution is localized.

Imagine what you could do if you could dox anyone at will, if you knew what everyone was doing, and had a couple trained assasins and hackers at your disposal.

But that's a side issue.

This is also why people go around proclaiming the 2nd amendment as the "ultimate defense against tyranny."

A large, sudden organized force can violently revoke the monopoly on violence of the state.

Yes. And in tyrannical states, the military is specifically designed so that members cannot defect easily without exposing themselves and or their families to grave danger.

And any incipient rebellion cannot spread easily.

Yeah, the organization element is the big issue. Really, the bigger issue is how easily any potential leadership could be targeted.

But organization springs up quickly given the proper threats. And decentralized organization is actually advantageous in a hypothetical 21st century civil war.

Because it becomes harder to eliminate.

That's what a hypothetical civil war would probably look like, TBH

Unless something cleaved people apart politically in clean lines beforehand.

I think at that point, we can assume the breakdown of order means the destruction of just about everything and extreme bloodshed.

The hypothetical civil war scenario only makes sense with very widespread popular backing.

Honestly, it's so hard to figure out how a new American civil war would end, it's probably better not to speculate.

The most important factors are the kinds of factors that are hard to predict.

It's also the kind of thing that's going to get everyone on here put on a watchlist. Care to change topic?

That's what people *say* but so much is dependent on how it starts.

Did the state cleave cleanly? Are there divisions within states? Is it a set of guerilla actions? Is it more of an open rebellion? Is the rebellion contained to one region? Who is most directly opposing the government? Where is the foreign support?

all these questions can dramatically change the outcome.

One thing that can be said, is that if the US descends into a true civil war, everyone (and I mean everyone, including outside the US) loses. It's an outcome better avoided IMO.

You would think. But human society has a weird way of finding stable regions and holding together.

Humans were built, in some sense, to create societies of one form or another.

If the system wasn't somewhat stable, it would collapse into something stable (barring world-ending or species-ending events)

IDK. I think you can get armed pretty quick if given support.

^ That's the big thing.

It feels like there's alot of pushing for something like that, but everyone knows that everyone loses.

It's brinksmanship at it's core.

I think Tim Pools' video on the possibility was hinting it would probably be more like the bombings of the 70s.

That's not outside the realm of possibility, but it's different than what most people would consider a "civil war"

If that's what you mean, I think I could agree that it would be alot like our second "great depression" in that it's alot of hyperbole.

The media does 2 things in this world

1) pushes a collective narrative that it likes (this isn't as conspiratorial as it sounds, it's a complex interplay of personal biases and a need to create narratives to keep people hooked)
2) pushes sensational stories that prey on people's emotions to get them to buy papers.

Telling everyone there's oncoming catastrophe is #2, which then becomes #1.

I can only see up the where "is now the leader of the FREE world when Trump was elected"

Everything else got cut off.

Ok. for a second I saw what looked like more.

Blame lag.

makes sense.

Probably should. You must not be in the US.

"United"

But anyways, nice talking.

Honestly...as someone in NY, he probably would.

Well, not quite NY, but close.

!rank

Oh hey, I'm higher level than I thought.

My solution: The rationalist community.

It's almost exclusively leftists (over 60% if memory serves) and almost all the rest is shades of libertarian.

But the less than 5% of reactionaries are vastly over represented in their servers because it's one of the few places where people are committed to having productive debate.

Slate Star Codex is amazing.

I think everyone is ignorant on something.

It's more an issue that she was taking a position she didn't really understand and she's running (essentially already won) for a position of power where her votes would have very real consequences.

And Israel is a very sensitive topic to alot of people.

I don't think it's a 'safe space' issue as much as it's a decorum issue.

It's like, on a free un-moderated server everyone wants to talk so the dominant position tends to overwhelm opposition.

It would be more effective if it were more like a formal debate with timed positions to avoid keeping people from getting overwhelmed.

Reddit is the worst at this, because then you get ideologically minded down/up voters.

^ The other big issue.

Or when there's a major event and everyone floods to attack the people who would be harmed by the development

"asking for comment"

I'm sure we all know someone in some friend circle who does this.

Like, I can't say how many messages I got about the 12 Russia indictments. I saw more "ARE YOU READY TO ADMIT YOUR WRONG NOW" posts everywhere (including on fairly 'closed' social media) than I ever did discussing anything about the idictments themselves.

Obviously, that's going to make people feel attacked.

It's a tribalism issue. Everyone is so obsessed with getting extra voters to themselves they've forgotten literally all other concerns.

Eh, let's not go too deep into it. I was trying to use it as an example of taking an event and go after people. It was the most recent thing so that's why I took it.

It's better not to get too deep on a tangent on this kind of thing.

lol. Which server was this? It sounds like someone being a shitlord.

I'd gladly switch to ancap if I got recreational nukes 😃

Eh. Citations make sense. And I can see the argument for just saying "read this book"

It's more an issue if they won't defend the ideas presented in the book or attempt to summarize them.

Sometimes you just have to egg it out of them

Or modify it, at the very least.

Actually, one thing I'd like to say.

We are woefully missing long term documentation.

Alot of these servers have very significant ideas come out of them. But I doubt most people are interested in documenting any of it.

But when you think about it, these are the thoughts by which future generations will have to consider.

Yeah, one issue with ideological arguments though is that we tend to define them by the extremes.

And communities will lay claim to "ideas that work" even if they themselves didn't really come up with the idea in the first place or simply renamed something someone else said.

The fuzzy middle ground is hard to stand on.

@Grenade123

Yeah, definitions matter. And some people just want to rework them. There's not too much you can really do IMO. I've redefined words myself (heck, I've had days long discussions on what definitions make sense), sometimes you just have to if you want to get a point across.

LIke, I can think of atleast 3 definitions of "conservative" that all make sense and can be hard to distinguish in context (and all mean radically different things)

Oh man. Truth. That's like, a whole branch of philosophy.

Probably one of my favorites too.

Lol. That would work.

But then you'd probably have to flood the dictionary with new entries after just 15 minutes of real conversation.

You sorta have to do that in real discussions.

I've had arguments with friends that lasted hours that came down to which part of a distribution we were thinking about.

Iron out the difference and we would be in complete agreement.

The challenge is knowing when you need to stop and clarify definitions.

That people don't do this more often in formal debate is one of those signs that people aren't really discussing as much as fighting.

Abstract is the only real good way to go for some things.

Since the pragmatics can easily break on tribal boundaries.

But that's the reality of most debate in this world. No one's actually looking to discuss. They're looking to win.

Who cares, he's almost certainly going to retire soon and isn't that much of a factor in anything anymore.

I mean, in some ways he is.

Lol. You can avoid the tax with a VPN

Not a very effective tax by the sound of it.

Let's just hope that they don't give other governments any ideas.

Aside, I felt like the Ugandian Knuckles was a real missed opportunity. Had it lasted a bit longer it could have kickstarted the Ugandian film industry into being something more.

tl'dr. Everything is Disney now.

But in all seriousness, it only takes one or two major exposures followed by a steady stream of releases to form a media niche.

And niches expand from there.

Take Anime in the 80s/90s versus now.

That investment wasn't even being purchased as much as just outsourcing.