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"
1mo ago
So far, you have deleted everything you post, including all the top-level posts you use to start threads with. And your posts mostly look very much like trollbait.
At this point, I am convinced you are posting in bad faith. I am banning you, effective immediately, but if you would like to DM the mod team and explain yourself, we will hear you out.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
Oh no, you don't get to duck out that easily.
You started this, and you started it with multiple, very specific, very damning statements about a very specific person (JK Rowling) which you claimed were obviously and provably true. And when I took on the challenge and went down the list of every one of your accusations, you suddenly play "Oh well, that wasn't my point, I don't actually care about Rowling"?
No, dude. You clearly do care about Rowling.
I will say that 'carefully litigating every word JK Rowling has ever said to determine whether it is about X of just mentions X' is exhausting and frustrating.
If we're talking about JK Rowling (and we are), it actually matters what she actually said. I mean, if you were accusing me of being a Holocaust-denying white nationalist who also thinks we should abolish the age of consent, and you based that on my saying some things that Holocaust-denying white nationalists who also think we should abolish the age of consent say, you can bet I would care a lot about carefully litigating the words I actually said, because if you are accusing someone of holding reprehensible views, it matters whether they actually said the things you are accusing them of! You don't get to just accuse them of believing all the things the very worst people in their "faction" say!
Frustrating because it's really super irrelevant to my larger point about the rhetoric and factions involved here, which is the relevant thing I actually care about, which few have bothered to respond to
I directly addressed your entire "This is what her faction believes and this is what her rhetoric inevitably leads to" argument! If you disagree with me, go ahead and point out where my reasoning is flawed, but don't claim I didn't bother to respond to it!
I find it frustrating that you make specific, provably untrue statements (for example, repeating bullshit about how Troubled Blood is about a serial killer who pretends to be trans and tries to sneak into women's spaces, as evidence of how much Rowling hates trans people) and when this is contradicted by people who actually read the book, you don't even acknowledge it, you're just all "Oh, I don't actually care about Rowling."
So many of the comments are nit-picking about whether I'm being 'fair' to Rowling, and I frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this and what they did or didn't say, the interesting issues are the larger factional concerns
I mean, we can all agree Rowling has FU money and immense popularity and can't actually be harmed by anyone saying mean and dishonest things about her. The reason we're arguing about Rowling is because people much less wealthy and powerful than her who say similar things (the people in her "faction" as you keep calling it) are suffering tangible harms, harms which you apparently believe are justified. So yeah, if you claim that JK Rowling wants a trans genocide, or that her "faction" does and she's abetting it, then that has implications for people who are not JK Rowling and that's why you are being challenged, not because everyone here is a JK Rowling fan.
I'd be happy to just say 'sure, whatever, Rowling is a perfect angel who has never done anything wrong, if that's what you want to believe;
Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.
can we please talk about my actual point though'
Yes, let's. It's your turn.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5d ago
Everyone claiming that "feminists want to castrate all men" cite the same small handful of mentally ill fringe figures, e.g., Valerie Solano, Andrea Dworkin, etc.
The number of women who actually, unironically want to "cull men and castrate them" is probably considerably less than the number of men who actually, unironically take KulakRevolt's or Dread Jim's ideas about lobotomizing/turning women into sex slaves seriously.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
18d ago
"Stop doing this." "No."
That is always going to get you a ban, and this is not new.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
The actual challenge is that Holocaust deniers are a very highly motivated group of people who swarm to free speech forums because they are instantly banned in most other places. And the majority of them, whether they consciously or unconsciously realize this or not, are not really interested in having a real debate - they want to proselytize. And the majority of them have a poor understanding of history and/or poor critical thinking skills.
Yes, this is why @SecureSignals annoys me. I agree with the revisionists that historians have become lax/afraid of critically examining anything to do with the Holocaust and that has resulted in pretty shoddy research and a lot of historical misconceptions. And yes, it has culture war impacts. All interesting things to discuss, and normally I'd welcome that. But the fact that @SecureSignals doesn't actually give a single solitary damn about truth or historical accuracy, but throws up walls of text about "history" to obscure his actual agenda is sleazy and dishonest. That and his habit (like another certain frequent hit-and-run poster) of dropping by just long enough to rile people up before disappearing when the counterarguments stack up.
The combination of these things means that when a large enough group of them come to any given forum, they tend to mess up the place by derailing as much discussion as they possibly can into the service of their own interests while also not actually making particularly good arguments. In this, ironically, they are similar to the woke.
And this is why he got banned this time. I know it looks like a topic ban for wrongthink. It's not. It's a ban for repeatedly trying to shit up the place after we told him to at least pretend he's here to engage in general discussion once in a while.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
12d ago
This is just a pathological level of oversocialization, to have even had these thoughts occur in your mind... Jesus Christ. I wish I knew you, so I could take advantage of you.
This is unnecessary. I'm sure you're a shark among seals, but don't do this.
Let me spare you some time: take two days off for low-effort antagonism in this thread, degrading the discourse with your inability to keep your seething contempt in check, and generally failing to take heed of our previous warnings to stop being a jerk.
It is tiresome to have to keep reminding people that this place is for discussing the culture war, not waging it. This place is also not for you to vent and work out your anger issues.
ETA: Escalated to 7 days for "Fuck you" in response. We will accept people being upset at being modded, but abusive messages get you a (longer) ban.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
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.")
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
21d ago
Getting bogged down in the details of what Scientology, as an organization, is capable of today is totally beside the point that they prove a conspiracy of the type I outline is possible, and easier than ever. Maybe not for them, as they aren't what they used to be. But for someone sufficiently motivated.
The details are relevant because you're claiming that "Scientology once succeeded in conspiracy shit" is evidence that someone else could do the same thing today, and I don't think that sort of conspiracy (a literal cult trying to destroy an individual with social engineering) is so easy to do today, especially in the dispersed online way you are proposing.
Who knows, maybe in 20 years people will be leaving the Current Year cult, spilling the secrets of the things they were "forced" to do at the time.
There is no Current Year cult. There's trans activism, BLM, Free Palestine, whatever else you want to categorize under the broad umbrella of "wokeism," but I am fundamentally disagreeing with you that these things are engineered by shadowy cabals somewhere or being manufactured by a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds doing A/B testing on memes. You don't need to wait for anyone to "spill secrets" - we already know how it happens, through social pressure and conformity and agreeableness, not because someone did some Ludovico conditioning on them or inserted fnords into their social media. There are plenty of people who have "escaped the Woke cult" and talked about how and why they bought into it in the first place.
People like Crowder have been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology.
Basically anyone has been declared "fair game" by the successor ideology. The result is Twitter pileons, sometimes deplatforming, but
Imagine some "rogue employee" at Facebook deciding "LOL, I'm going to manually add Crowder and Mrs Crowder's accounts to the 'hate algorithm' list."
You seem pretty invested in a very science fictional notion for someone saying you don't really believe this. "Facebook can plug you into a hate algorithm and pretty soon you and your wife are heading for divorce" is kind of like Shiri's Scissor - it's a great concept, works for a short story, but I've seen too many people (including here) take this kind of dystopian brain hacking far too seriously and literally.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
21d ago
As it happens, I've read several books about Scientology also (including the one by David Miscavige's niece), and the problem Scientology has today is the same one a lot of your hypothetical conspiracies would have: yes, in theory the technology exists to do all these nefarious things, but the pulling it off secretly and without opposition is a lot harder. Scientology nowadays has a real recruiting problem and almost all growth is via next generation members raised in the cult, because anyone can get on the Internet and look up "Xenu," and for every dirty trick Scientologists try to pull online, there are thousands of motivated opponents ready to fight back in kind.
Scientology used to run these operations against reporters and succeeded in bullying the IRS into giving them tax exempt status, but it's not likely such tactics would work as well today (if you've seen their attempts to discredit ex-Scientologist critics like Leah Remini, they just look lame and desperate).
Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman, is very critical, and yet the church was actually pretty cooperative with her (and to my knowledge, never attempted to intimidate or harass her).
People like conspiracy theories because they have a pleasant explanatory power: things I hate are engineered by shadowy, evil cabals acting in secret. If only they could be exposed or fought! Clearly these things cannot happen organically, or because thousands of factions often acting at cross-purposes bring about a lot of the things I don't like. But people just aren't that organized, they aren't that efficient, they aren't that secretive. The same reason you should be afraid of the state of the world (because there are no "grown ups" in charge somewhere, who have the will and the means to pull a few levers of power and keep shit from getting out of control, the economy and global politics are all basically running on daily ad hoc decisions far more than long-term planning) is the reason you should not get too wrapped up in the idea of Illuminati conspiring to make your life worse.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
21d ago
I haven't read the Prince of Nothing series, but surely you've read Neal Stephensen? "We used to be p-zombies until (some of us) actually became sentient (maybe)" is the premise of a couple of his books.
While I sympathize with your take in general (I too know people who will just swallow The Latest Thing uncritically and there's no point talking to them about it), it's not stupidity and it's not new. People are largely group-thinkers and want to go along to get along and also lack the necessary time or energy to dig deeply into the particulars of whether a particular claim is true. Even here on the Motte we see people sometimes show up and plaster a laundry list of highly risible deepity-sounding assertions in a wall of text, and they rarely get much more than vibes-based pushback because who wants to hunt down each and every bullet point to dispute it? And on the rare occasions when someone does that, the deepity-poster disappears and returns after a while to do the same thing.
Jesse Singhal is slowly driving himself mad on Twitter because he keeps doing this with trans activists: "No, look at these fifteen studies I have carefully analyzed which show that what you are saying is not actually true!" he says for the fifteenth time, thinking that this time, Facts and Logic will make them stop calling him a transphobic Nazi.
There isn't some "elite" class of human capable of actually thinking. What we have are agreeable people who don't think most battles are worth fighting (especially at the cost of career and reputation and friendships) and a few highly disagreeable people (often on the autistic spectrum) who absolutely will fight over these things. I hesitate to say that the latter actually have much to do with building bridges and advancing civilization, even if we probably do need a few of them around.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
12d ago
You're clearly here for rdrama-style shitposting, and this is not rdrama. You've filled the mod queue with these shitposts, and you've been banned before for this.
Go away.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5d ago
This sounds like a very unhappy and mentally unhealthy way to negotiate life with half the human race, believing unironically that they all hate and want to castrate you. If you are being serious and literal. (Which I doubt.)
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
27d ago
More like permabanned for being naughty over and over and over again arguing with everyone.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
I'll be honest, I agree with @Ben___Garrison below that this post is just a little too pat, reads just a little bit too much like someone trying to flatter the preconceptions of certain Motters, and indicates just a little too much awareness of those issues to be someone new here. And there are a few other flags I won't discuss publicly that make me suspect you are a return guest.
That said, we prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, and if you are sincere and who and what you say you are, I apologize for the suspicion, but understand that we deal with trolls and LARPers regularly. But I would earnestly encourage you to engage and talk more.
As to your actual point, as someone who believes HBD has much explanatory power (but I'm not a "hard HBDer," meaning I don't believe black people are just genetically predestined to always be an underclass or that it's evidence we should divide and segregate ourselves racially), I would echo what other people below say, that first of all, being a member of a group that is, on average, disadvantaged does not necessarily say anything about you as an individual, and that secondly, there's no reason to think that average gap can't be narrowed over time, and third, even if it is permanent and unfixable, we are all human beings and the goal should be to give everyone the opportunity to live their best lives, with equal justice under the law. Sounds hokey, I know, but I really believe it.
I've commented before (much to the derision of the some of the other HBDers) that I think one problem with HBD is that even if it is true to the fullest extent, it does not present a clear course of action, because "push all the races apart and create bantustans for the inferior ones" is morally repugnant, and also it would be nearly impossible to get the "inferior" ones to just accept that yes, they suck and it sucks to suck and they should accept their lot.
So, as an (alleged, sorry, I am still suspicious) black man, what would you suggest should be the message to the black community, if you really believe that the worst implications of HBD are true?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
I am very skeptical that you're actually serious. This is the sort of edgy "Well, I guess I'm on Team Sauron then" take that young people use to express their disgust with The Man. The reality is that you have a pretty good life under the Western elites, however much their policies and hypocrisy might disgust you, which you would not have under the Taliban.
"Well, they'd forcibly convert me to Islam, forbid me all Western decadences, my wife and daughters would have to stay inside for the rest of their lives or risk beatings or worse, and the economy under their management would almost certain drop below third world levels, but at least I wouldn't have to call anyone by their preferred pronouns!"
If you actually are serious, you either know very little about the actual Taliban, or you have become so blackpilled by the culture war that you've become the sort of person who will blow himself up to spite your neighbor.
You just tried to roast me for being too slow to see how terrible wokes would become once put in charge. It's hard to take seriously an assertion that the Taliban would be less bad.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
This has been discussed before. The mod team finds it annoying too. We are not going to prohibit it, but repeated abuses will be viewed as bad faith participation. (Some people delete their posts for reasons they've discussed with us, and some people just think better of a heated post and would rather delete it than apologize.)
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
It is sad, but that's how most people vote, even here.
People also tend to upvote a nice, spicy polemic, even if they don't necessarily agree with all of it, because it's so deliciously heterodox, pisses off the right people, or tells off one's hated enemies.
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"
27d ago
Tone-policing and telling people not to be antagonistic has always been a thing here. If you can't call out the witches civilly, don't spin up a new alt just so you can do it uncivilly.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
Speak plainly and drop the sneering sarcasm.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
This post alone is not the reason he was banned.
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"
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.
The subtext here seems to be that women specifically can be socially influenced to dump their husbands because they see other women dumping their husbands. Am I wrong?
I think as a "jk... unless?" theory, this is about as plausible as any conspiracy theory. Could "Silicon Valley" theoretically target some individual and try to destroy his marriage? Yeah, I guess there are enough people with the social engineering and technical skills, and the money, to engineer some sort of anti-Crowder campaign. But, uh, who, exactly? And why? Crowder might have been targeted on social media; we know this doesn't take a whole lot of coordination, just a few activists in the right places at Facebook and Twitter. But deliberately trying to destroy his marriage? With this level of deep psychological warfare? What boardrooms and labs was this plan cooked up in, and is Stephen Crowder really the lowest-hanging (or most hated) fruit for them to target?
It doesn't add up, on so many levels.
Let me recommend another book to you: Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, by Ryan Holiday.
It's actually really good, and interesting. As you may recall, Peter Thiel set out to destroy Gawker, for a variety of reasons (not "because they outed him" - that is covered in more detail in the book), and he did so by secretly funding a lawsuit against them brought by Terry Bollea, aka Hulk Hogan. The details are fascinating, but the point I am making in recommending this book is that Peter Thiel, an actual Silicon Valley billionaire with the money to fund James Bond villain schemes, engaged in an actual conspiracy to destroy an enemy, and even his "conspiracy" was fundamentally just mundane lawfare with an extra layer of intrigue. Now, maybe some other billionaires are in fact funding secret projects to sow divorce amongst their enemies via social contagion, but when you look at what we can see real people actually doing, it seems very difficult and very unlikely (even for billionaires!) to pull off these sorts of shower thought Illuminati schemes.
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