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4bpp

Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

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joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC

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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 355


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd bet that at least one of the next three distinct US presidents will order physical military action against Iran at pretty steep odds.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's obviously your in-group biases showing, because a larger gap than white men's 55-43 red is right there in your numbers (women's 58-40 blue) but you presumably felt no concern that women would "continue to feel disenfranchised and start checking out of the increasingly masculinized society" when the red team was ahead.


If being outvoted on your group's preferences amounts to disenfranchisement any time it happens, then representative democracies disenfranchise most groups most of the time. If this actually led to "checking out" every time it happened for even one legislative period, most representative democracies would long have collapsed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's a favourite pastime for people who fancy themselves "high-information" to let some artificial macroeconomic metrics override common-sense observations. Another instance of this was when people were confidently predicting the swift end (in Western favour) of the Ukraine war based on GDP comparisons back in 2022.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, isn't Evangelical support for Israel premised on something to the effect of "we need Israel to be strong and pick wars with everyone, so they get pushed to the brink of destruction, which will trigger a prophesied sequence of events leading to the Second Coming of Jesus"? It's hard to fault them for not reciprocating this kind of love; even if you can decouple from the creepiness of it, on a material level it is clear that their mid-term preferences do not actually entail any sort of peace and prosperity for Israel except insofar as it needs to be lifted up to fall down better. Can you blame the goose for being ungrateful when you are fattening it up for Christmas?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't get what's going on with Responsible Statecraft's




"Nothing to see here," the American Conservative's Curt Mills snarked, pointing to a graph showing voting preference averages literally flipping from Republicans to Democrats since the war was launched in February.




If I look at the tweet linked thence, it appears to show a graph where voting preference averages flipped in March 2025, and there is barely any detectable signal of anything in Feb 2026. Am I blind, or are these people all failing at reading graphs? (...perhaps they are so discombobulated that they only read the "Jan" on the left and the "Aug" on the right and assume the graph must run from Jan to Aug of this year?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Midterms Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know. Demoralisation of the other team (or some blind hope of achieving it) has been the supreme aspiration of American politicians for a while now, and nothing would demoralise right-wingers like exploiting the burned wastes left in Trump's wake to run Kamala again and win.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought it very likely, in that context, that @VIM's "Support for Israel" was shorthand for the things discussed in the video - military aid, political cover and so on. This is further bolstered by him later rewording the stance in question again as "unconditional support". Your wording ("against Israel existing") suggests that you took "65% are against support for Israel" to mean "65% want Israel to stop existing". In that light, I am not convinced that you "understood the claim correctly". It seems to me that you are still trying to resist attempts to disentangle those two.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not a US citizen (and Germany is not about to follow suit any time soon), but if I were I think I would be about 50% satisfied if this indeed went through (which I highly doubt). The other 50% would be about the US using its political muscle to help Israel against third parties (such as sanctioning ICC judges who prosecute Israeli officials, legally punishing boycott movements, or pressuring other countries against taking actions against it).


If this stopped, again under the hypothetical where I am a US citizen, this would not make me like what they are doing, but it would demote the salience of their business back to the level of dozens of other far-flung regions stuck in a perpetual cycle of bad people making each other's lives miserable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There must be an uncaused cause; this can be identified with God.






However, that's a long way from being a canonical Christian.




By including "canonical", you are papering over the distance in an egregious way - as if the way from that is not quite so long to being some sort of non-canonical, perhaps quite heretical, but still recognisable Christian.


In general, I noticed decades back that US Christians arguing with atheists often seemed to expend a great amount of effort to try and persuade the audience that some/any sort of supernatural force exists, but then took for entirely granted the leap from "something outside of physics" to "our version of Christianity is true". Your "uncaused cause" argument is that taken to an extreme: unlike, say, "intelligent design" or miracles, it does not even try to insinuate any sort of attributes of the supernatural thing that would give it a special connection to humans, but instead seems to be content with postulating the bone-barest of featureless mathematical artifacts. (I won't even go into how unpersuasive the argument itself is.)


This might have worked a little bit in a setting like rural parts US of 50 years ago, where Christianity was so dominant that people may not have had the meme pool to conceive of a supernatural "cause" that did not have the essential properties of the Christian god; but nowadays, when everyone is exposed to a dozen of world religions with their own creation myths and science fiction like Clarke's entropy-reverting VAC blending into science reality like AIs running convincing simulacra of humanity in fake environments, there is an infinitude of possible "uncaused causes" you would have to rule out that stand between you convincing a reader of a supernatural "uncaused cause" and you convincing them that the "uncaused cause" will punish them if they abort, fornicate or trans their kids.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I read your post just fine. It's just that I don't consider "I was X for many years" to be good evidence of understanding X. Few born believers can match the zeal of an adult convert; most of those who convert were never typical examples of what they converted away from; and your post gave me a lot of signs of strong alignment with the perspectives of your current tribe, starting with how you naturally wrote it as if you could not conceive or did not want anyone else reading ("Bad news first, good news after!").




This is utterly absurd. I'm not suggesting stealing anything from illegal immigrants, like what happened to the Jews.




Did you read my post, actually? I thought I made it quite clear that I don't think anyone would think it literally equivalent, just that it is sufficiently similar to trigger similar moral impulses. (Mind you, the Nazis surely also did not think of what they were doing as stealing, but rather as reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. Whether you see it as equivalent more depends on whether you agree with their premise, or conversely feel that the extra expenses being saved also "belonged to" the illegal immigrants in the US.)


Either way, I'm not a US voter, but I've lived there long enough (and can speak for others in my household who are) that it should count for something if I think that switching D->R around Trump 1 and back to D around now (as I would do and people around me did), and seeing the moral analogy I outlined, is a plausible pattern.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If they had sent out monthly checks to all citizens for the past 2 years, and labeled them something like "rewards check for less illegals"




I'm not sure if you are not typical-minding yourself (presumably an ideologically fairly hard Republican) too much there. There is an obvious spin the other side can put on such a move, which is to make it rhyme with "Nazi Germany redistributing confiscated Jewish property/profits from selling gold teeth at the concentration camp". This might be quite enough to make ideologically more middle-field voters (who, unlike bleeding-heart Trump followers, are not feeling maximum spite towards illegal immigrants even if they might on the balance feel that it is just and necessary to deport them) feel uncomfortable about receiving the money; even if they think the Nazi comparison too extreme, an air of benefitting off of others' misery would stick to it.


(For an intuition pump, how would you feel about a law that caps palliative medical expenses of the "dying grandma kept technically alive on Medicaid money for years by drug cocktail and mechanical lung" type, if some of the savings came back to you as a "reward check for pulling the plug on grandma"?


Better still, assume for the sake of argument that by getting rid of various lower-class mistakes, abortion is a net economic positive. This at least seems plausible. Do you think the net favorability of legal abortion means that handing out "rewards checks for less unemployed single moms" would help the Blue vote?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You are the one who called the parent poster's comparison "misleading", after he posted a video that drew conclusions about support for El Sayed based on polling for "reduce or eliminate military aid to Israel" and "favorability of AIPAC", and suggested that the more appropriate criterion (to determine who would be willing to vote for him) is "categorically against Israel existing". I don't know the post from "a couple of weeks ago" you are referencing, and maybe in your eyes all the anti-Israel opinions you have seen form one homogeneous blob, but I could only evaluate your post in the context of the one you were directly responding to.


El Sayed seems to be (implicitly or explicitly) campaigning on reducing support for Israel. Per the video, this is a popular position. As I understood you, you were trying to argue that (1) stopping Israel from existing is on the other hand not a popular position and (2) this implies a majority will not vote for him. But for this reasoning to work, you need a significant number of potential voters to believe that supporting him actually amounts to "against Israel existing". You have not proven this, and seemingly not seen the need to prove this. This is highly reminiscent of the leftist strategy to equivocate "remove subsidies for gender transition"/"reduce positive media depictions of transsexualism" with "deny trans people's right to exist".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Good progressive liberals. It was a term of affection.




Show me an example.




"affirmiitve action for left-wingers"




How is it affirmative action? There is one proposed standard for everyone (do not use terms for members of your outgroup that they generally consider to be slurs), and the only group that is pathologically incapable of abiding by that standard and is trying to argue that it is unfair that it is applied to them are rightists. The rightists are the ones whose position rhymes with minorities being propped up by DEI in the US school system here.




Last paragraph




Well, I'm not "people". Don't Goomba-fallacy (ugh) me. (I do suspect that he would have caused much less affront if his name was not constantly clothing each of his posts in a stench of pointless provocation.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So, if he does win, how much will you update towards "the voters don't know (/believe) (...)" and how much will you update towards "they know, but they like Hamas more than Israel"?


(To begin with, voters are not uniform! It could in fact be the case that the majority of voters believe he will give money to Hamas, and the majority of voters likes Israel more than Hamas, but the majority of the former group likes Hamas more than Israel, and so he wins on the votes of that set \cup the set that does not believe he will.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, is he campaigning on "Israel should not exist"? You can play the game where you replace the outgroup's policy position with what you think they actually believe/what you think will be an inevitable consequence if they get their way/what you think gets listeners to take the threat of it as seriously as you do, but then the correct comparison is not to the mere motte of the reference position ("transing children under any circumstances") but the result of playing exactly the same game with it. Many leftists have in fact already done that very thing, down to the exact substitution you used!


So, how do you figure the number of Americans who are categorically against Israel existing compares to the number of Americans who are categorically against trans children existing (in the classic culture-warry "denying our right to exist" sense)?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Where exactly was I insisting that Darwin was treated unfairly?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If they made themselves popular with the populations rather than just the leadership, maybe terrorism would be less of a problem.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That count is too naive to be useful for decision-making. Ditching Ukraine would cost the US the affection of a big chunk of the European political class, which would not be unlikely to catalyse all sorts of downstream costs from further lawfare against US tech megacorps to rich countries ditching Mastercard/Visa/the petrodollar. It would make Russia more friendly, but these would be very modest gains. Ditching Israel would cost the US the affection of Israel, and some subset of the Jewish diaspora, and in return gain it massive soft power with the entire Islamic world. Nobody knows how to quantify those expectations, and so there are no objective utilons to count.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, your case would be more compelling if you could show even one person who uses the term while neither personally disliking transsexuals or transsexualism, nor engaging in some sort of reclamation exercise.


This is like the troon discussion all over again. Not only is this line of reasoning proving too much ("baboon does not diminish/insult the primates! coon does not diminish/insult raccoons! Why would they be an obvious slur against (...)?"), if you actually believed it you would just find yourself constantly surprised by reality, specifically why certain classes of similar-looking words keep coined by groups of people for other groups they hate and why the target groups keep reacting negatively to those words being used to them. Yes, some leftists famously use a strategy where they pretend to not understand something that is common sense but not backed by an articulate theory that looks good in front of an audience. That doesn't mean you should lower yourself to their level; if you think that you should do that because some leftists somewhere got to, that's a textbook example of fighting the culture war here, as opposed to discussing it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think either of those should be prima facie justification to not apply the rules to someone. We do not know the opportunity cost in interesting writing and original thinking lost by people who did not want to share a forum with him, but to just blankly assume that it can't have been so high as to justify losing him amounts to a complete lack of faith in the community's principles. There also was the untried option of trying to buckbreak him rather than just going for the kill, like by forcibly renaming him. Take a lesson from mid-2000s /b/, which managed to shape its culture by unrestrained use of wordfilters alone and still keep a reputation for "light-touch" moderation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


No, actually, it wasn't. It was ages ago, but I clearly remember it being used as a diminutive.




By whom?


It is a diminutive, which contributes to its usability as a slur, just like "sky daddy" (your example!) is insulting in a way "sky dad" or "sky father" would not be.




Yes, because whenever the left tries to come up with an insult, the right just appropriates it, instead of banning people and acting offended.




Good for them, I guess (not that they have a choice most of the time), but that doesn't matter. The goal ostensibly was to have a diversity of opinions on this forum, not to settle scores or enact justice for the right wing. There is a perfectly usable neutral word ("transsexual") which is less offputting to a demographic we need more of, because it is barely represented on this political discussion forum even though it is politically dominant in most relevant countries. On the other hand, the only advantages of allowing "tranny" are saving 5 bytes of space per use and letting some right-wingers feel good (and I doubt they would even quit if they were denied this little pleasure).


Also, in case that was not clear the first time around, I'd be very happy with a policy that bans all uses (as opposed to mentions) of "tranny", "sky daddy" and "chud".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not any more of a fan of him than you are, but it is an old rule of internet communities that singling out moderators to attack is the most surefire way to get more of whatever the moderator you singled out stands for. All you will get is wagon circling, because staff vs. the rabble is the most natural tribal division for a volunteer project. (See Wikipedia for the most famous example.)


The only productive way to effect change is to lay low until there is an opportunity to influence the selection of new staff, and then try to tip the scale towards people you find more agreeable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think banning "sky daddy" is fair, but I looked at the search results and I can see only one instance that is on the use side of the use-mention distinction (magicalkittycat from 5 months ago). The others - it seems like 75% of uses of "chud" at this point are by self-identified chuds (like the Asmongold fandom) though personally I would have also liked to see that one buried, and "blood libel" is in a different class as it evokes disagreement with its substance rather than its style. (Contrast "sky daddy": Christians would not disagree that God is a father figure, nor that He is at least metaphorically situated in the sky. The offense is caused by the baby talk formulation, implying that believers are stupid and emotionally immature)




"Tranny" is not a slur. I'm all for civility, but you'll never satisfy people who keep inventing things to be offended at.




Who is "inventing things to be offended at"? The term obviously was invented by people who are against "trannies" with the intent to offend, and to pretend otherwise is a level of gaslighting that would get you an A+ on your * Studies course paper if you deployed it for the other team.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If a hair trigger of this sensitivity was applied to left wingers, they'd be banned on sight.




What's a concrete example of that? I at least certainly can't think of any symmetrical slights (if I had to come up with a way, I'd suggest making your username "FetusSlushie" or "WhiteTears" or something).


I don't remember instances of leftists flinging childish slurs at the holy cows of rightists here at all; and if they did, I would likewise be in favour of the banhammer. What do you think tone policing is about? Why is it so hard for right-wingers to restrain themselves and not use slurs?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Random Musings on the State of TheMotte
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
+1 for moderating more on tone again. I'm genuinely struggling to understand why the mods have abandoned that idea so completely, unless it is either inability to shoot their own tribal soldiers in the back, or unwillingness to stand up to a community majority that gets pissy when you do so with theirs. I guess maybe the seeds of this were there since the beginning, considering how the staff had to be dragged kicking and screaming into banning one TrannyPornO (who some, unbelievably, still reminisce about wistfully) even though any forum that wants to be welcoming to leftists should obviously have shown him the door based on his username alone before he made a single post.


(I guess the proposition is complicated to implement also because you see the detrimental effects of popular posters getting punished immediately, while the positive effects of better tone take a long time to manifest as new people trickle in.)