Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
We seem to be having a spate of low-effort ramblings that are basically "I'm mad about something and want to vent." I am sorry if you're having an existential crisis over Trump (for months at a time now?) but if you are going to post a top-level post, please make it relevant, interesting, or at least present an argument. We don't want to see free-form rants about how Trump or Biden or whoever is The Worst, devoid of anything but your own undigested disgust.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5mo ago
What I would like is for you to stop jousting with old posts. I've already expressed to @FCfromSSC that I regret having taken the tone I did in that post you're still beefing about. If you're genuinely wondering (as opposed to just seeing if you can bait me) whether I still stand by something I said years ago, ask me directly (and be clear what it is you think I believe since your interpretation of what I believe is often inaccurate).
But I am not going to tell you to stop being petty and trying to dredge up old fights. That's your prerogative.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
8mo ago
We can't get even get people to stop reporting comments simply because they disagree with them. You'll never convince most members to stop using the vote buttons as expressions of agreement/disagreement.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
But instead of resolving it (either by severing the two sides, or by rejecting Christianity entirely if doing so is infeasible), this sub... tries to ignore it as much as possible. This sub pretends it doesn't exist, and then gets really conspicuously oversensitive whenever someone reminds them of it.
Well, now and then it comes up, but we have actually managed a detente here that the outside world has not: the atheists won't sneer at the Christians, and the Christians won't wag their fingers about Jesus and hell. (When that detente gets broken, as happened recently, you are likely to get modded.) Nobody wants this place to become either a platform for evangelizing or /r/atheism.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
9mo ago
"People say things they actually believe in order to garner approval from fellow believers." Yes, that sounds like an accurate description of a thing that happens.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
6mo ago
I hate ads too, but I have noticed that a lot of people who absolutely hate ads and paywalls still expect free content to magically keep being produced for them. I mean, subscriptions or ads, those are really your only choices. People need to get paid, server fees need to be paid, etc. Shit ain't free. It's fair to complain that something is overpriced, but it's not really fair to complain that the content you want has to be monetized somehow.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5mo ago
If you can't argue your point without getting personal and belligerent, bow out of the discussion.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2mo ago
Not mod-hatted, but borderline, because you're annoying me.
I modded Incanto below because "Shut up, I'm sick of you" is not a good response to someone who's being tiresome on a subject. But you really are being tiresome, and not because I disagree with you, but because it really looks like every time something even vaguely related to HBD comes up, you have to post some little jab that is clearly meant to provoke the HBDers on the Motte into going after you. Does this give you a smug sense of validation, or are you just spoiling for a fight? I don't know, but it's tiresome.
"One of the less stupid ideas..." "certain individuals" "I have my theories" - this is all weasel-wording to hide your real message which is "I want to openly display my contempt for you people." And as several people have noted, you do it even in the most tangentially related threads just because you have a hammer and you want to swing it.
As for "I have my theories but none that are likely to be considered "charitable" or "kind" by the mod team."That is "I really want to tell you what I really think of you and display my contempt even more openly, but I know I'd get modded if I did so I am just going to handwave in that direction and expect you to understand I'm insulting you even though I'm not technically allowed to do that." Speak plainly, and if you know "speaking plainly" would get you modded, then either keep it to yourself, or figure out how to express what you want to say in an appropriate manner (it's not like people here don't call each other's ideas stupid and evil every day).
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
4mo ago
The actual observed evidence, unless anyone can show me otherwise, is that trans women have no competitive advantage. Competitive advantage means winning more often, and if you win more often that shows up in stats. Sports stats are among the most obsessively collected and analyzed numbers in our society, no one has ever been able to show me a simple t-test showing that trans women win more often than cis women. No matter how many anecdotes you have and how strong your intuitions are, there's a straightforward statistical definition that's easy to test, and it doesn't support the idea of an advantage.
That people argue this blows my mind. Do you genuinely believe that males do not have a substantial physical advantage over women, or do you genuinely believe that going on hormones for a year erases that advantage?
You dismiss the growing amount of "anecdotal evidence" of 40-to-50-year-old men suddenly "transitioning" late in life and taking up a sport and absolutely dominating professional female athletes 20 years younger than them who've been in the sport for years because... there aren't enough trans women athletes to have taken over the leaderboards in every sport, yet?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
8mo ago
I'm an atheist who grew up Christian. I do still sometimes feel a sense of nostalgia for that "church feeling," and I've tried the UUs and humanist societies. They're lame. They don't really believe anything besides "we should all be nice to each other." I can (and do) get as much community and fellowship from the local boardgame meetup.
I've heard proposals like yours before, that you can "go through the motions" of being religious because it's good for you. I've even seen Christians argue that you should go to church and do that, even if you don't really believe, because it will lead you to belief. I don't see it. I can't make myself believe something I don't, and LARPing as a religious believer just seems like a waste of time to me.
I don't deny there is something to religion that fills a need for people, and some part of me would be sad to see religion disappear entirely. But, ya know, I don't believe in God or angels or faeries or psychics or ghosts and I think it's very unlikely anything will make me believe in those things. So we're going to need some better "social technology."
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11mo ago
Talking about some baseball player's Instagram post, reactions to it, and the Bud Light boycott is a valid Culture War topic, but this post is exactly why we say to leave the rest of the Internet at the door. You are literally just coming here to complain about being banned on reddit, with complete repostings of your entire personal thread just so you can bring your drama to what you presume will be more sympathetic ears.
Don't do this. Two-day ban to deny you the satisfaction of participating in this thread, because this is such an obvious and deliberate flaunting of the spirit and letter of the rules.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
3mo ago
I think you are trying to be fair, but agree with the people pointing out that going up against a lawyer and experienced podcaster is not a fair fight if you don't have experience in that kind of venue. I mean, I am pretty convinced that the theory of evolution is true and young earth creationism is not, and I think I understand the science well enough to argue that from an educated position, but I am neither a public debater nor a scientist, and if I debated a professional young earth creationist who runs a podcast "debunking" evolution, I expect I'd be made to look like a fool.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5mo ago
What do you want from me, to go through your list item by item and say whether I agree or disagree with it? There seem to be two claims here:
- Right wingers are on the back foot in the culture war right now, and left wingers are pushing their advantage as hard as they can.
- Right wingers are being oppressed in the sense of being deprived of civil rights, in danger of losing the franchise, or even reaching Soviet/dystopian levels. (Or even, say, the level of a fringe political or religious minority in previous eras in US history.)
I was always very clear that I was arguing against #2, while you seem to be accusing me of arguing against #1.
To most of your bullet points, I'd nod and say "I agree, that's bad." I feel like I'm saying "Yes, I agree, leftist/DEI/woke censorship is bad" and you're screaming at me "But you said they're not literally herding us into concentration camps, therefore you don't really think it's bad!" (And no, I do not think it would have to reach herding-into-concentration-camps levels for me to come around to right wingers being institutionally oppressed.)
The thread I was responding to, three years ago, was an argument about whether or not accelerationism and a second US Civil War is desirable and/or inevitable. If you just wanted me to say "It really sucks that leftists control so much of the culture war front," well, I'm here, aren't I? If you think I am too mushy and moderate and failing to see the existential threat to human liberty represented by DEI departments, okay, fine. Yes, I do indeed still cynically see your hysteria as essentially the same as the people who confidently assert that Trump is Literally Hitler, now threatening to become Zombie Hitler Returning From Hell. You all have legitimate cause for concern wrapped in hyperbole, and this leads to this kind of attack on the unconvinced (like me) as Refusing To See The Problem.
You are very good at collecting links and building legal cases. I can't write a brief like you can. But nothing happening today looks to me wildly different from previous eras in US history; the factions change, the dominant groups in the culture war and those being "oppressed" have different labels, and there have been people deprived of their livelihoods, jailed, even killed, before. I don't say this is good or there is "nothing to see here." I only observe that I don't think it's unique or particularly bad relative to the rest of our history (or the world). You will also notice I have not repeated the "You are not oppressed" rebuttal in years, so give it a fucking rest. If you have such a burning need to come at me at any opportunity, at least address things I have said in a current thread.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
9mo ago
It is notably different, there is no salvation for those to deny Jesus according to the church, except for the Jews, and the reason for that is a "mystery." It's not really a mystery, though.
It is not notably different. You hear very similar language from many Protestant denominations. (Many other Protestant denominations also say very clearly that Jews will go to hell - as have many Catholic theologians historically.) There isn't some special carve-out here somehow engineered by the Elders of Zion.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
The idea that "TPTB" can control literally everything, including wars, social unrest, pandemics, the stock market, and inflation, in order to ensure that the person they want gets elected, is an Illuminati theory. And somehow the same people who also believe that TPTB are incompetent idiots mismanaging literally everything manage to believe both these things.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
4mo ago
I did, and to be perfectly honest, I found it to be a disingenuous mish-mash of conflated statistics to present an argument that you imply ("trans women aren't really better athletes than cis women") but won't commit to, just vaguely handwave at. For example:
there's a lot of strong reasons why the strongest outliers in the female population would be better than the strongest outliers in the trans women population
While I don't find your "strong reasons" convincing, sure, let's suppose that the top 1% of female athletes are better than the top 1% of trans women athletes. The issue with trans women in female sports is not about how well the top 1% compete against each other, but how trans women athletes on average compete with female athletes on average.
Is the mean for the trans women population on athletics still higher than for the female population? Who the fuck knows. We've never really measured it precisely enough to say, we know it's not the same as for the larger male population anymore.
It's not clear to me if you mean the mean for trans women athletes or trans women in general (you seem to be deliberately fuzzing it a bit here), but what do you mean by "measured it precisely"? Are you claiming we have not measured strength, speed, arm length, aerobic capacity, grip strength, or other measures of ability for trans women and women? I mean, I can Google up the studies, but I'm reluctant to do so because I don't think this is a genuine question.
You are using statistical outliers when convenient and ignoring them when not: for example, one of your arguments is that if trans women were better athletes than women, then they'd be winning all the competitions, and they're not. This completely ignores how many competitions there are, how few trans athletes there are, how relatively new policies allowing trans women to compete are, and of course, as I said, the observable reality of second-rate, aging, out-of-shape male athletes transitioning, switching to the women's league, and destroying women's records. Does that happen every time? Does every trans women reach the top of the league? No, but from what I have observed, they almost always rapidly ascend far higher and faster than any actual female athlete of similar condition and experience could.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
22d ago
My dears, my darling, my honey, my sweetie-pie:
Stop this.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
Had Israel supported similar politics in the west as they promote in their own country, it could have worked.
You're doing what SS and his crew do, and assuming that Jews are all part of an orchestrated ZOG movement. Jews in the West are generally sympathetic to Israel, obviously, but Israeli political concerns are very different from Western ones - Israelis generally are not trying to get Western countries to open their borders. They don't care. They actually do have specifically Israeli concerns, they aren't seeing everything through the same lens of "Jewishness" that people who hate Jews do.
As for why conservatives have traditionally supported Israel, it's pretty simple: even if most conservative Christians don't particularly like Jews, they dislike Muslims even more, and geopolitically, a local boot to put on Arabs in the region is very useful.
And that's without addressing the Christians who genuinely do believe that support for Israel is Biblically mandated.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5mo ago
No, my point is that you've consistently and commonly argued #2, against people who clearly aren't bringing that position.
No, it is not clear to me that people are not bringing that position. You just (re)quoted FCfromSSC and yourself providing a long list of how conservatives are being persecuted and deprived of their rights. If all you're claiming is #1, then what are we disagreeing about?
I have not, at any point, compared what conservatives today are encountering with concentration camps, even in the figurative sense. At no point in this thread have I gotten anywhere near that. Neither has the_nybbler nor fcfromssc since the move.
You may not literally have invoked concentration camps, but the whole point of @FCfromSSC's accelerationism has been, as I understand it, that he sees peaceful coexistence becoming impossible in the near future. Actual concentration camps? Maybe not, but if we can't even share a country and accord each other civil rights, that seems pretty damn concentration camp-adjacent to me. And the @The_Nybbler's entire schtick is whining that the Left has won, laws and democracy are fake and gay, and the boot is already stomping on his face forever and ever.
You do realize that anyone watching can notice that you're endlessly retreating from specific ground points presented by the people you're talking with, to this?
No, I do not realize this. I think this is a claim you keep repeating because you're playing to the crowd. What specific ground points do you think I am retreating from?
I honestly can't tell if you genuinely believe you're scoring gotchas, or if you've just (correctly) deduced that accusing me of lying annoys me, so you keep doing it for the lulz. I can entertain the possibility that I am misunderstanding you, that I missed the point, hell, maybe even that I'm just too dim to understand your argument. But I don't lie or argue in bad faith or play "word games."
I can point to the OP of this very subthread claiming that conservatives no longer exist as a group in federal administrative infrastructure, in a way that will prevent them from achieving their goals (or, implicitly, seriously slowing the goals of their opponents), in a way that lacks parallels since the end of the South as a racial institution (coincidentally, a time where this meant far less). I can provide a dozen significant tactical or strategic differences, some wildly different, in powers that the progressive movement is actively using today, if they matter.
Do they?
I don't know, it depends on what you want me to do with these examples. Agree that they happened? Agree that they are bad? Or agree that they constitute the Right being oppressed? To what level do you want me to agree that the Right is being oppressed? Apparently invoking Orwell and disenfranchisement is too far, but just agreeing that the Right is losing the Culture War at the moment is not enough. What do you want? (Besides to goad me, so, mission accomplished I guess.)
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
9mo ago
Your understanding of the history of Judaism and Christianity seems pretty lacking. Christianity began as a Jewish splinter sect. The "Elders of Zion" didn't "convince" the Gentiles to accept anything; the beliefs of early Christians were obviously informed by the fact that initially they considered themselves Jews who followed the promised Messiah. Since then, the situation has become vastly more complicated, with two thousand years of history and schisms and factions and subfactions, some still holding up Jews as "God's Chosen People" and some condemning them to hell for being Christ-killers.
I know you try to fit your ZOG narrative to everything, but it does not actually fit everything.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11mo ago
You seem to be playing some sort of game here, and I strongly suspect you are trolling.
You have posted several times like this, long form culture war articles which you don't explicitly agree with, even suggest you might disagree, but this appears to be merely a guise for introducing the article without committing yourself to actually endorsing it. "Look at this article by a white nationalist; isn't this interesting?"
Normally, while I might consider this a little sketchy, you aren't the only regular poster who makes a habit of being somewhat oblique about your agenda, and we don't exactly have a rule requiring you to be explicit about your POV and agenda. (The requirement to speak plainly comes close, but people often misinterpret this as "You must always be direct and explicit and literal about what you're saying," and that's not really what it means.)
You've been warned a couple of times by @naraburns, and your now-deleted responses are consistent with this pattern of being coy about your intentions. @naraburns has also observed your tendency to write trollish posts that seems calculated to provoke responses without really saying anything.
Following your last posting spree, you deleted all your previous posts. While we allow people to delete their posts (though we'd prefer they didn't), this also looks quite suspect.
All of this is to say: whatever you are up to, you have attracted the attention of the mods, and while this post in itself is borderline (you basically repost the article with minimal commentary), you are starting to look like a bad actor. Whatever game you are playing, start being upfront and stop looking like someone who's not posting in good faith (and is likely a previously banned poster).
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
It is a neighbouring country with deep cultural ties to Iran. Of course they are going to help them defend themselves.
"Funding terrorist networks to destabilize the government" is a funny way to phrase "help them defend themselves."
@Dean's takedown of your understanding of Venezuelan history is pretty thorough, but this is a truly impressive howler. Iran hates Iraq. It's not just Sunni vs. Shia (though that is a huge source of animosity.) The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s began with Iraq's invasion of Iran.
Iranians are the most similar people to westerners in that part of the world and if anything they should be our natural allies.
... Yeah, Iran used to be a Western ally. We propped up the Shah for that reason, and you may recall, there was a revolution. Which is where we are now, with an implacably hostile religious theocracy in charge as a result of our earlier "alliance" with them.
You seem to have a thesis ("American imperialism is the root of all evil") to which you are attempting to fit every conflict in the world. Believe it or not, other countries are quite capable of starting armed conflicts, suffering coups and instability, and turning themselves into economic basket cases, without America being behind it.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
4mo ago
I think you're having trouble following my argument, which is reasonable because it has a lot of steps and I don't know how well I explained it.
Golf clap for the well-played condescension, sir.
My point is that, if the cis women population has more extreme outliers on athletic ability than the trans women population, then most of the cis athletes will be better than most of the trans athletes.
This does not follow. The female population is much larger; there will be more outliers and probably more extreme ones. That says nothing about how well the average female athlete compares to the average trans athlete. That there are a handful of exceptional female athletes who can beat most men (but not the top men) in a sport does not mean therefore that most female athletes can beat most trans women.
We have, to my knowledge, done a few studies on average performance among trans women on a few simple isolated measures and tasks (like sit-ups). We have not, to my knowledge, done measures of population variance in a way that lets us compare outliers between the groups, or have we measured athletic ability on a holistic way.
I don't follow this issue closely enough to collect studies, or links, but this is one of the first hits when I searched "Trans women athletes studies." (Leaving out "studies," you mostly get articles by the ACLU and various news organizations claiming that either it's been "debunked" that trans women have an athletic advantage, or it's "unknowable.") Doing a little more digging, I see quite a few studies that measured more than just sit-ups.
And there is just... empirical observation.
The claim is not that if trans women had an advantage, they would win every competition. The claim is that if they had an advantage, they would individually have better personal win/loss ratios (or whatever is the most relevant individual metric for a given sport) than average cis women in their league/division.
If a trans women competes in a bicycle race and finishes third, she's #3 and you can easily say "See, two women beat her, so on average, they aren't better." Until you find out that this trans woman is 45 years old and just started bicycling competitively four years ago. Look, I don't want to dig up all the Jesse Singhal and Graham Linehan links because you'd dismiss them as motivated cherrypickers (and Linehan certainly is) but this is happening in sport after sport. If you actually wanted to do some sort of fair study, then you would have to factor in things like age and number of years in training which would pick up what I am claiming, which is that the advantage of trans women is such that a man who was a mediocre male athlete can fairly easily become one of the top 5% "female" athletes by transitioning.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5mo ago
Which of the following are you actually claiming :
I'd say my position is somewhere between A (3) and A (4).
or They happened, but they aren't novel enough to count, compared to past cultural loggerheads that Americans resolved calmly.
or They happened, but they aren't novel enough to count, compared to past cultural loggerheads that included the Literal Civil War.
I did use to be closer to 3.
Unfortunately the OP deleted his comment. But I think what you say is largely true. Especially about the course that almost every other forum takes- I've seen it on RPG and boardgame forums, on fan fiction forums, on writing and literary forums, even (to a lesser degree) on tech forums. Some of the places I hang out at which are ostensibly "apolitical" have threads explicitly about "How can we support Biden in the election?" You can imagine what would happen if someone started a thread about how to support Trump.
I am "left-aligned" but this place feels like one of the few places left on the Internet where I'm still a liberal. Anywhere else, if I express my actual (classically liberal, or as the choads on those forums would mockingly say, "cLASSiCly LIbErAl!!!") views, I am immediately tagged as a right-winger. This used to make me say "Wtf?" but now I just accept that I am politically homeless and will be the first up against the wall.
(But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing.")
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