Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
He made it personal first?
Are you a nation? Or are you unable to parse grammatical structures such as the general "you"?
Maybe you should stop making it personal. Have a vendetta since I think your forum's rules are garbage and are strangling this place into irrelevancy.
People have been saying this since years before we left reddit.
Never liked you on the old forum either before you made mod since all the regulars quit.
Stop, you'll hurt my feelings.
You've been told many times to stop doubling down and stop trying to antagonize us because you don't like the modding. You don't have to like the modding, or me. I don't care because you're a very low-value poster. But keep coming at me and other posters like this and you will start getting longer bans.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4hr ago
There are a lot of Ayatollahs. There have been two "Supreme Leaders" who we usually know as the "Grand Ayatollah" but Grand Ayatollah isn't an exclusive rank either.
I used the plural because I was specifically referring to Iran's entire (religious) leadership.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
Is your real name remzem? How do you know "Hadad" actually represents his ethnicity? Maybe it does, maybe not, but it's a thin pretext to start declaiming the purity of your bloodline. Stop making things personal.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6hr ago
Well, to also be fair, every Ayatollah since the Shah was overthrown has called for death to America, and we know that the Iranian government, by and large, is on board with this. The grudge certainly runs both ways, but Obama did make some half-assed attempts at normalization and look what that got us.
I kind of feel about Iran the same way I feel about Israel and Palestine - there is a lot of wrongdoing and doublespeak on both sides, but there is one side that really could have peace if they wanted it, but they clearly do not actually want it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9hr ago
I am genuinely shaking my head in amazement that you wrote such a long wall of text to defend such an absurd argument and expect it to be taken seriously.
Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.
What are you even talking about? How many times has someone been banned for this? Any guesses? You talk like this is how it usually goes down, that when a big breaking news event happens, everyone wants to talk about it and someone has "take one for the team" and post a thread-starter they will get banned for.
Of course when big events happen, there will inevitably be a thread about it. Because someone will write about it. And they will, hopefully, write at least a measly paragraph or two that is something beyond just "HEY GUYS SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING I WANT TO BE THE FIRST TO START A THREAD SO MY THREAD WILL THE THREAD ABOUT IT!"
Our standards are not high. They are not unreasonable. You do not have to write an essay, a flowery effortpost, or come up with some wildly innovative idea. You just have to not look like an attention whore on Twitter.
There is a very simple solution for a major event worthy of discussion: write something about it. If it's too low effort, we'll probably clear our throats and say "Low effort, don't do this." Sometimes we will create a mega thread, like for elections and other predictable events. If next week, World War III has started, we will probably create a mega thread for it (you know, if we're alive and the Internet is still up and stuff).
@ABigGuy4U ate a ban because he was so blatant, so deliberate, so "Tee hee ain't I clever guys!" about it. I explained this. Normally if someone rushed to be FIRST! we'd just warn them not to do it again (as I said!) and let the thread continue. But someone who goes out of his way to be obnoxious about it, yeah, he's going to eat a ban. Don't tell us "I'm breaking the rules on purpose because the rules are stupid and I want attention." Of course I'm going to be inclined to respond harshly to that.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11hr ago
At this point it just signals your support for Israel. It is more dignified to just post the 🇮🇱 emoji.
Dude, you and your fellow Jew-posters turn everything into a story about Da Joos, ask anyone who questions you as to their Jewish affiliations, and are quick to post the most thinly-sourced claims about Jewish direction as proven fact while sneeringly dismissing anything contrary to that narrative no matter how well reasoned or documented.
Look in a mirror. You are the very reverse image of the pro-Israel partisan who deflects every criticism of Israel with bad faith accusations of anti-semitism. (An accusation that, frankly, seems less often bad faith than merely overly broad nowadays.)
Someone whose posts are full of thinly-veiled 1488 content is not in a position to snarkily comment on other people's lack of dignity and imply they are just 🇮🇱 wavers.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
18hr ago
The US could very will have had amicable relations with Iran. Instead they had warmongering and aggressive policies that have made the relation hard to fix.
Iran's hatred of the US is because we backed the Shah, and because of Iran's ongoing support for a global Islamic revolution (sometimes people forget that religious fanatics really do believe in their religion). Israel is an aggravating factor, but Iran, a Persian Shia nation, cares about Palestinian Arabs and Israel's other Sunni Arab neighbors getting fucked only inasmuch as it is leverage against the Great Satan, the West.
If the US dropped all support for Israel today, Iran would still hate us and would still be funding Islamic terrorism around the world. They don't just want us to stop "warmongering," they want us completely out of the Middle East so they can turn it into an Islamic state (under Iranian control). China, if they were left as sole hegemon in the region, would have to start contending with that, instead of being able to act indifferent towards Islam like they are right now.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
18hr ago
"Israel is trying to pull us into a war" is fine.
It's now just accepted conventional wisdom that Israel wants to drag the United States into a likely globally-destabilizing conflict on the basis of their insane, racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths.
is not "conventional wisdom," it's an ideological argument. Which he wrapped with "We're totally done with bullshit platitudes about this being about oil or Spreading Democracy. Everybody knows now. We're done with the precepts. At this point there's nothing left to say, all of the predictions and analysis of the so-called Anti-Semitic Right is proven correct. It's just a matter of whose side you're on at this point."
That's the kind of "we" consensus-building and rallying we have always modded.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
18hr ago
"What I believe" is not "Just accepted conventional wisdom."
Who is "we"?
You can argue these points. You cannot just assert them in an effort to claim rhetorical territory.
You get plenty of slack for your Joo-posting, but the rules against consensus building and rallying for a cause still apply.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
—Inb4 “low effort post ban” Additional facts and my thoughts will be added as the situation develops
You know, without this passive-aggressive snidery, I would have just warned you and pointed out why we don't want people to rush to post "BREAKING NEWS" just to be the first person to post about it.
But since you clearly did it knowing the rules, and really did just want to be FIRST! Banned for three days, so this discussion will be happening without you.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Look, I don't hate her or think she should be insulted, abused, dragged, etc. I dislike dogpiles and sadism and gleeful cruelty.
That said, her entire schtick is stirring up controversy, posting provocative things as "thought experiments," and bragging about her gangbangs. That she suddenly discovered that people say mean things about her on the Internet and it hurts her feelings that more people aren't defending her is really hard for me to find credible. She's either having some kind of mental breakdown or this is as performative as most of the things she does.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4d ago
No need to get all autistic-ragey about it…
Don't drop personal insults like that.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4d ago
No, this is not cute or clever.
We're still formulating exactly what our AI policy is, but we've certainly made it clear before that posting LLM output without declaring it to be so, especially as an attempt at a "gotcha," is low effort and not actual discourse. Consider this a formal warning, and we're likely to just start banning people who do this in the future.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5d ago
But it's not a binary, it's not as simple as one party being the "responsible adults" and the other party being spendthrifts. Unless you are an ancap, almost everyone will agree that some level of defense spending and social welfare is necessary, or at least desirable, and everyone has some threshold at which it's excessive, and then we start getting into favorite or least favorite programs and Russell's Conjugations.
Neither party is ever going to be happy and get everything it wants. I would rather neither of us precommit to maximal defection. So you actually think the responsible thing to do is make unpopular budget choices, but you refuse to do it because you're afraid your party will suffer for it and the other party will enjoy the benefits? Yet you reject bipartisanship.
This is prompted by repeated claims here by a number of posters that MAGA should disapprove of Trump due to his fiscal irresponsibility and the fact that his budget bill results in considerable deficit spending.
Any MAGA who honestly believed that Trump was serious about reducing the deficit and thought this was a good thing should presumably be reconsidering their position. If you never cared about that, then sure, you're consistent in supporting Trump for other reasons. OTOH, if you were one of those who was against deficit spending, and now that it's clear Trump played you, the MAGAs switching to "This was the plan all along and it's good" strike me as merely the worst sort of defectors. If Trump announces a new Smaller Prettier Bill tomorrow that in fact reduces the deficit, will deficit spending suddenly be something to oppose again?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5d ago
Of course we do. The entire debate is meaningless semantics. Obviously there is such a thing as biological sex, obviously there are some differences in behavior of the two biological sexes on average. Obviously there is such a thing as a male brain and female brain.
Many trans activists and progressives now explicitly reject all of those premises.
None of that is inconsistent with allowing people to transition.
There are really only a handful of anti-trans people who literally believe people shouldn't be "allowed" to transition. You are an adult who wants to have surgery and hormones and live your life as the opposite sex? Okay. Probably most conservatives would even be willing to go along and use your preferred pronouns out of politeness. They might think you're mentally ill and should reconsider your life choices, but only assholes go out of their way to "misgender" someone just to make sure you know what they think of you.
It's when the "debate" went far beyond semantics and social kindness that trans people became seen as more than just troubled individuals who deserve sympathy. It's not meaningless semantics when we're talking about puberty blockers for children, or men competing in sports and being housed in women's prisons and taking over women's spaces, or people being shunned or professionally harmed for saying there are four lights.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5d ago
I think knowing what a woman is is pretty deeply rooted in our biology and no amount of gaslighting and enforced consensus can change that. 1984, famously about the Party's ability to make people say black is white and up is down and war is peace, spent a lot of time describing how much effort went into enforcing these edicts, and the implicit message there (though not the one Orwell was getting at) is that people actually knew the truth, even if they knew better than to say it. Even the most loyal enthusiasts might convince themselves they really believed war was peace and we had always been at war with Oceania, but people would slip because they couldn't actually turn off memory and reason entirely.
So it is even with the most devoted adherents of trans ideology. They tell themselves they really, truly believe trans women are women and "woman" is just an arbitrary socially constructed label. But they don't actually want to fuck a person who clocks as the wrong sex (it's more than just genitals, we all know this). On a deep, instinctual level they recognize the difference. To the degree that they are sincere, they may convince themselves TWAW but they have to work at it to keep their words and behavior in line with what they claim to believe or they will slip up. And I think actually a lot of them are insincere and will ditch TWAW as soon as it is no longer the thing all good progressives believe. You'll see then how attached they really were to this professed lack of difference.
That said, you are right about some things. A lot of unphysical guys who've never done sports or martial arts really don't understand just how significant the physical differences between men and women are. If their last time in physical competition was middle school, they probably knew some girls who were more athletic than a lot of boys and hadn't yet seen just how rapidly that changes once the T hits.
I have to admit to being a nerdy, awkward kid who hated sports in school, and I was one of those guys... until I took up martial arts as an adult. At first I was a little confused that a woman with a higher belt wasn't wiping the mat with me the way more experienced men did, and that in fact I had to be careful not to hurt her. This was, you might say, a little red-pill moment.
Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."
You've read John Scalzi, I see.
And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.
TERFs are mostly second wave feminists and very much want to rewrite third wave feminism. Second wavers largely believe that absent the patriarchy, men and women would behave the same, but physical differences are real. Third wavers are the ones who went post-modernist about gender categories.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Which is a roundabout way of saying that, in my view, Defense spending should absolutely be as touchable as entitlement spending, maybe even more so.
Oh, I'm not disagreeing with that, even though it would be to my personal detriment. But on the one hand, you are talking about things we could do to improve the economy and the country. On the other hand, you argue that we should not bother to do that because you don't want the other party to have a stronger economy to work with when they come into power. So I am a little confused what you actually want if it's not "Assume everyone is in defect mode and loot what we can."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
The Republicans haven't been the party of "fiscal responsibility" any more than the Democrats have been the party of the working class in living memory.
Are you just making a somewhat sardonic argument for accelerationism ("we should just loot the treasury since that's what everyone does when they're in power?") or do you actually have a proposition for how we could right the ship in some fashion? I feel like you're really just making another pitch for accepting that America is over, and so, okay, then what?
The actual solution to the debt is what we've discussed many times: entitlements and defense spending, both of which are regarded as more or less untouchable. Every other "budget-cutting measure" (including and especially DOGE) is just theatrics. Since most people agree that neither party will have the stones to cut Social Security or Medicare or really meaningfully slash the military, the actual question seems to be, can we somehow survive this? (Here we hear arguments for AGI saving us, or asteroid mining opening up a new frontier, or Modern Monetary Theory being real, all just variations on "Wish for a miracle.") Or are we debating how much ruin is actually left in the nation and whether we or our children will outlive it?
There is always the option that we face reality and do the hard things, and I think that is still possible - sometimes people do the hard things when they actually have no other choice. But you do make a compelling case that rather than hoping for actual economic reform even if it does mean I personally will see my retirement amount to less than it should have been, I should be selfish and just try to grab what I can and hope I'm dead before the shit really hits the fan. Sucks for the kids, though.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
I started writing a response with my own anecdotes several times, then decided not to, as I don't wish to provide too much identifying information.
Suffice to say I have experienced similar things. I definitely remember a time, pre-Great Awokening, when I had friends who were both right and left. Sometimes we had some pretty vicious arguments, but we usually patched things up afterwards. And my other friends on the left and right could at least conceive of being friendly with folks in the other tribe. Now, not so much.
That said, I saw the online precursors of the Great Awokening well before 2012. I was online way back before 9/11. I remember some leftists absolutely losing their shit over Bush (and telling me that my ability to be friends with Republicans made me a fascist sympathizer). I also remember conservatives on social media circa 2008 and 2012 absolutely losing their shit over Obama's election (and reelection), and angrily demanding that people defriend, shun, and even divorce any friends or family members who voted for him.
This is not to say that both sides do this equally (they definitely do not - I still have some right-wing friends, while I have lost liberal friends for having right-wing friends) but I definitely see accelerationism picking up steam on both sides.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
I'll bite. I have an EV, and it had nothing to do with virtue signalling (and being "green" was little more than an afterthought). I bought an EV because when I was looking for new cars, I tried them out and loved them. The torque, the smooth ride, the lack of vibrations, noise, or smell. I will probably never go back to ICE. The convenience of never having to go to a gas station or get an oil change again really is awesome.
It does of course come with some caveats: I was able to put a charger in my garage. Charging at home is the real game-changer for EVs. And I mostly only drive locally. @100ProofTollBooth is right that I wouldn't choose it for a "go explore remote mountain trails" car. (That said, modern EVs have a 300+ mile range, so it's not that easy to run out of battery without very poor planning.)
Also, I did not buy a Tesla, and again, not because I have Musk Derangement Syndrome. Teslas have the best software, generally, but other than that, a lot of EV makers beat them on comfort and performance (and I just don't like having everything be controlled by a tablet).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10d ago
Read: “I made an alt so I can drop a pissy comment without repercussions”
Don't be pissy yourself.
This is, at the very least, debatable. Egypt massed troops on the border and was making threats (and closed the Straits of Tiran after Israel said they would consider this an act of war). Whether Nasser was just saber-rattling for appearances, or really meant to attack Israel we may never know, but if you mass troops on the border of a hostile neighbor and talk about how you're going to finish the job you failed to do last war, you should not be surprised if your neighbor decides to take you seriously.
The guerilla tactics used in Israel's early days were not nice. Nor is the ongoing occupation. Israelis and Arabs are certainly both guilty of war crimes. That said, you seem like most dedicated Israel-haters to take every Hamas PR release at face value while playing down Palestinian atrocities. Israel might not have a lot of charity left for Palestinians, but they'd still take even a disadvantageous deal if they actually believed it would lead to peace. (Obviously, the likelihood of this now is very close to zero.)
Israel isn't pure good facing pure evil. Israel has as much blood on their hands as every other country, and more than most, but they're facing people who are even worse. Sorry, that's the truth, and I have sympathy for Palestinians, but both their government (what there is of it) and, frankly, their culture, is terrible. Even other Arabs hate Palestinians and couldn't care less about dead Palestinian children except as props to make Israel look bad.
Maybe we should just abandon Israel and let them sink or swim on their own. I'd actually be okay with that, as long as there are no crocodile tears when Israel says "Fine, we'll show you what a genocide actually looks like."
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