Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
25d 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
10d ago
There was nothing wrong with my reply.
I'm telling you there is something wrong with your replies throughout this thread.
You can reject that or ignore me. I'm just informing you of the situation and what the consequences will be if this continues.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10d ago
Okay, initially I wrote a rather harsher response, because the combination of projection ("You are being snide! You are responding with Nuh-uhs!") and the old "emotional investment" gambit (a low class tactic usually seen in forums where going to straight to ad hominems is the norm - "Huh huh you are arguing with me, you must be emotional about this! Like a woman!") annoyed me. However, from your lengthier reply I think you are arguing in good faith and deserve a kinder response. So, just to make a few points in order:
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If you are referring to Revolutionary France, that was more than 200 years ago. 200 years was your criteria, hence my confusion.
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A common tactic I see, usually from Christians, is to accuse atheism of being responsible for the mass atrocities of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al, when the defining feature of communist dictatorships was communism. State enforced prohibitions or control of religion are just one aspect of communism. It's not the atheism that is their ideological driving force, it's the Marxism. (Indeed, I would argue China never really became "atheist" in a real sense. They just replaced Confucianism with Maoism.)
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I still disagree about Rome and the Weimar Republic, and I think you haven't really brought much evidence to bear that "control of women" was the defining or even most significant failure leading to their collapse. Even you back down a bit from that proposition, merely citing it as a contributing factor.
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Yes, I am kind of personally invested in my society not collapsing, but I don't think I am just ignoring evidence that it is. I just think we are on a long slow decline for a lot of reasons, not a rapid collapse that is happening because of modern hypergamy and male avarice.
To address your broader meta point: no, I am not going to accuse you of being personally misogynistic. But anyone proposing something like "Women must be controlled or their sexuality will destroy society" has to grapple with the essential misogyny of that position. You can bite the bullet and say "Yes, for the good of the species, women must be treated as property." You can propose social guardrails (like Christianity) that hopefully will constrain them in a less brutal fashion. You can argue against the premise (I am far from sold on it). Or you can go full blackpill and say "Who cares what women feel, they aren't even people." (Not hyperbole, that is more or less the position we have actually seen a handful of people take here over the years.) But a lot of this talk about how women being able to choose and the feminization of society seems to just complete lack any empathy at all for the position of a (female) person being told to accept a society where she has little or no say in who gets to fuck her and when and whether she will be impregnated. That's stating it in its bluntest terms, but it's hard to dismiss the hysteria of of women wearing Handmaid's Tale cosplay at protests when they can actually see men who really are proposing what they fear. For those who are honest and say "Yes chad" to that, okay, points for being forthright about it, but you don't get to sneer at feminist arguments anymore, because they are actually right about your intentions.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
25d 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
24d ago
Well, it is, actually. Some people just misunderstand "freedom" as an unalloyed good. Freedoms come with responsibility, as they say, which is why a lot of people like libertarianism in theory but find it's completely nonviable in practice, and anarchists are just profoundly unserious people.
Put another way, your argument would also be made by Muslims who claim that making women wear burkas actually gives them more freedom, since they are protected from the lustful gazes of men. (I have actually known Western progressive female converts to Islam who argued this, happy in their burkas, and ignoring the key word making.)
Getting back to @KMC's point, he's right in the sense that a man in 1875 could ride out into the frontier and build, explore, or taking another path, rob, rape and pillage, with much more impunity than today. That was certainly more "freedom" and some men fancy themselves born into the wrong age, but yes, freedom comes with tradeoffs. And wealth, safety, and security is very much a kind of freedom! Sure, a man starving in the wilds is more "free" than me in the sense he has no legal authorities "surveilling" him.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
20d ago
The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different.
This is wrong. The far right (especially the areligious far right) is much more negative about single mothers, but mainstream conservatives have never approved of single motherhood. They just consider it better than abortion.
Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing.
This is wrong. Mainstream conservatives also think the welfare state subsidizing single motherhood is a bad thing.
I think in general you have an extremely reductionist view of rightists, such that you cannot actually distinguish between "mainstream conservatives" and "the far right." The fault line there is not how much they disapprove of abortion or single mothers.
Well, 8 reports so far and a very strong consensus that this post was bad. OTOH, writing meta-fiction isn't really against the rules (though in the future, I think aspiring short story writers should just start a new thread) and while arguably this was all very boo-outgroup, it does seem to be making a point, which is well within bounds, even if you took a wordy and elliptical path to get there.
I don't know what to do with you, buddy. I'm dropping a mod note here so people know we have taken note, but I am not rapping you for this post. My opinion is that it's not ... technically against the rules, though I definitely would put a foot down if you keep doing this. You've already been warned several times recently for snark and low-effort mockery. This was at least high-effort mockery. (I think. It doesn't look like AI generation, but I wouldn't stake too much on that.) I've asked you a couple times now to please straighten up and engage respectfully, even with people you think are terrible. This post doesn't add to your infractions per se, but it does add to our overall impression of you as someone who is here to rattle cages. I would prefer you stake out a position as a leftie who can actually debate civilly, as opposed to a leftie who can't restrain his contempt and will eventually end up banned.
Anyway, this is my personal opinion. But if another mod disagrees, I am not going to object if they think this post merits an official warning or a ban.
(FWIW, a couple of people have suggested this is Impassionata. I don't think so - Impassionata burns out like jet fuel, he wouldn't be able to hold it in this long.)
ETA: ninjaed by @naraburns. I agree with him also.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
30d 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
25d 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
20d ago
But your entire premise is wrong. The "far right" and mainstream conservatives both prefer people not to have premarital sex. (Okay, non-religious rightists only disapprove of women having premarital sex.) I don't think you are actually distinguishing between them, as evidenced by the fact that you label "most people on this website" far right. I realize to leftists, "far right" is anyone who votes Republican, but it's still a nonsense categorization.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Your report was obnoxiously unfunny and we have to deal with enough spurious and bad-faith reports on posts.
Normally I'd leave it at that, but you have a history of this kind of obnoxious trolling, so banned for a day. Knock it off.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
That was an impressive screed, but you haven't connected a single thing to "male avarice" and female emancipation. And you're doing exactly what you claimed you aren't, telling a just so story about how Christianity is the only ideology that somehow avoids the failure mode of every other civilization.
Are we in the End Times? I've been hearing that in one form or another since I was a kid. A pity that we (or at least I) am too old to see it through or I would put up money on you being wrong.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
21d ago
I modded him for wordily telling you to fuck off. I'm telling you to let mods handle it and do not respond in kind.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2mo ago
AI DESTROYS THE HUGOS!!!
Okay, that's totally a clickbait title and not really accurate. But hey, it's not as high stakes as a potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, or Trump's tariffs, or even whether or not polyamory is ruining society, but it's my beat: nerdy sci-fi bullshit.
It's a year beginning with a 2, which means there is drama over this year's WorldCon.
What is WorldCon?
We're all nerds here, but I know not all of us are SFF nerds, so for @2rafa and the handful of others who'd never lower themselves to reading shit with elves, WorldCon is the annual science fiction convention, held in a different city every year, that awards the Hugos, at one time considered the most prestigious award in science fiction. The drama and controversies over past WorldCons and Hugo Awards have been enumerated here often; at this point, as my lede says, it's practically an annual tradition. I don't collect links but maybe if you ask @gattsuru nicely he'll post some of the past dirt.
Usually these controversies are something Culture War-related. The Hugos are widely perceived to have gone fully Woke, and I must admit that I am one of those heavy SF readers who not only no longer cares much about the Hugos, whereas at one time I would have at least checked out the latest Hugo winner, I now consider them to be almost an anti-recommendation.
Just to give you an idea of the state of the Hugos: it's been ten years since a man won the Hugo for best novel (Cixin Liu and his translator Ken Liu (no relation) for The Three-Body Problem in 2015), and most years since then have seen between 0 and 2 men even nominated. This year actually features three men on the ballot (including Adrian Tchaikovsky nominated twice)! I'm rooting for Tchaikovsky since I actually read his books but, well, John Scalzi is the last white guy to get a Hugo, in 2013 (for one of his worst novels, Redshirts).
So anyway, technically this year's drama is not (so far) about the Hugos themselves, but about WorldCon (which this year is being held in Seattle).
What did they do this time?
Short version: They used ChatGPT to vet WorlCon panelists. Several WorldCon committee members resigned in protest, and the list of authors and other program participants doing likewise is growing.
https://file770.com/seattle-worldcon-2025-hugo-administrators-and-wsfs-division-head-resign/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/128296070
https://gizmodo.com/worldcon-2025-chatgpt-controversy-hugos-2000598351
Longer version: Reportedly there were as many as 1300 people applying to participate in various WorldCon programs this year: this would be book signings, readings, panels, workshops, etc. Obviously not everyone who wants to be on a panel can be, and WorldCon has to be selective about who it invites. The vetting is done by volunteers, and researching 1300 people must be pretty time consuming; apparently they had the bright idea of using ChatGPT do a search and summary of all prospective participants as a "first pass."
I assume they mostly want to weed out obvious crazies and literal Nazis and pedos, but given that WorldCon skews very woke nowadays, the vetting almost certainly includes looking for any "problematic" public statements or other transgressions in someone's background that might lead to a Cancellation or Drama.
Honestly, using an LLM to summarize and categorize your list of randos seems like a pretty good use of AI to me. Supposedly all final decisions were made by humans, but nonetheless, the concom is imploding.
If you're unaware, most artists and authors hate AI. This has also been covered extensively in past CW threads, but the stated reason for the disdain towards AI is that authors' and artists' work was "stolen" to train LLMs without compensation, but there is also a very real fear of being replaced.
This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI, no final decisions made by AI, and that AI has nothing to do with any Hugo nominations or decisions, people are still Very Very Angry that it was used at all.
If you read the commentary, it's not just general AI-hate (though there is plenty of that), but also concern that the LLMs might have made Problematic Decisions. Obviously, people are bringing up hallucinations (what if ChatGPT made up a racist Twitter post?) and the possibility of false negatives, but, there is also concern about false positives. What if ChatGPT missed something Problematic? Again, supposedly humans were supposed to make the final decisions, but cynically, I think they're worried that ChatGPT might approve too many cishetwhitemales. Also much outrage at "Entering private data into an AI without permission" (i.e., typing someone's name into ChatGPT and asking it to do an Internet search).
This isn't as juicy as past WorldCon/Hugo dramas, but it's very Current Year. I cannot help finding it ironic that we're now at a place where science fiction fans are demanding that we ban AI tools.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
16d ago
No, it isn't. Iran's political platform is explicitly and publicly stated by their political leadership and their supporters. We have some hawks who will not miss a chance for an opportunistic war. You are constructing a false equivalency. Iran and the US are not the same in their terminal goals towards one another.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
16d ago
Yes, if Israel just let its neighbors invade them and did not respond to Iran's funding of Hezballah, Hamas, and the Houthis, surely Iran would realize that peaceful coexistence with Jews is the way forward.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
21d ago
Given that your OP was pretty heated and begging for heat in return , I still dinged @Chrisprattalpharaptr for taking the bait. Now you're egging him on. You wrote a nice spicy hot take; do not try to turn this whole thread into mutual raspberries.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
I am currently reading Private Citizen, by Tony Tulathimutte, on @FtttG's recommendation. (We had some discussion about his collection, Rejection, not long ago, in which appeared his most talked-about story, The Feminist).
So far, Private Citizen is quite entertaining with the same clever and descriptive wordcrafting and vivid descriptions of a certain caste of Millenial. They are all striving fail-trackers in San Francisco, messed up in various ways, and while I enjoy the true-to-life and often hilarious slices of their lives - self-involved neurotic would-be PMCs-in-denial at the bottom end of the social spectrum in the proto-woke era - gods, they're annoying. So far not much of a plot has emerged, but that was true of many of his short stories as well- they were more like "Here is a Certain Type of person and how they end up." It will be a super-dated book in ten years (it's already showing its age) but some things will probably remain timeless, such as the brutal takes on sexual relations. (The "nojob" is cringey and physically painful to read.)
On a less highbrow note, my current audiobook is The Air War, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is the eighth book in his Shadows of the Apt series. I wish more people knew about Adrian Tchaikovsky. He's obviously a big seller, and he has two Hugo nominations this year, so he's not exactly a nobody, yet you rarely see him talked about with other big names in fantasy and science fiction. I suppose it's because in some ways, he's not a super-memorable writer; his prose doesn't leap out at you, and he writes so much that it's hard to say he's notable for any one thing or series (he isn't even a "fantasy" or a "science fiction" author - he is very much both, something many authors try to do but few pull off well), other than writing a lot of books. He also seems to be aiming for that inoffensive middle ground where his books are very people-pleasing and as an author, he's an enthusiastic science and gaming nerd but mostly seems to stay out of the culture wars and SFF politics.
But boy does he produce, his output is at Brandon Sanderson or Stephen King levels, and I have read about 20 of his books now and not one let me down. He switches between epic fantasy and space opera and writes long series. I think Sanderson is his closest comparison, and IMO he is a much better writer than Sanderson in every way.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo 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.
I am happy to trivially inconvenience people who would otherwise lower the quality of conversation. That's the point.
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