Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
I'd like to hear from other progressive people what the steelman version of this is.
I don't consider myself a progressive, as that term is used today, but since you'll only get conflict-theory explanations from most folks here, I'll give it a shot at the mistake-theory explanation, and it's pretty simple: it is a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy.
Your friend probably doesn't actually want to move to a place with fewer white people. Such places probably exist within the city he lives in, and you could ask him why he doesn't move there, though you'd probably either be accused (with some justice) of being a jerk, or else you'd get a response that goes "something something gentrification." (Freddie deBoer has written about the catch-22 in which white people moving to whiter communities is white flight, which is bad, but white people moving to less white communities is gentrification, which is also bad.)
Among progressives nowadays, it's just considered an accepted fact that any place or organization that is "too white" will be hopelessly infested with institutional white supremacy. The only cure is more diversity. The problem with this is that "too white" basically means "majority white," and the problem with that is that, contrary to what a lot of people think, the United States is still majority white. Which means even places that are aggressively trying to attract more "diversity" are generally going to remain majority white and therefore will always be "too white."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7mo ago
I imagine that, like me, you don't pick unnecessary fights. For non-confrontational grillers like us, it's pretty easy to just let all the Pride stuff brush past us. Do I really care about rainbow flags everywhere and trans activists in the workplace sending out multiple emails every month about the importance of PRIDE!!!! and allyship and diversity? No, it doesn't affect me.
But... it's annoying. I notice.
More importantly, I know what the cost would be if, just once, I said something like "Why do we need yet another Pride event? Nobody is harassing you here, of all places. (And why do we need entire full-time positions just to support and affirm you?)"
I don't say things like that, because why pick an unnecessary fight? Yeah, mostly I can just ignore them. I don't have to go on their stupid Pride walks or attend their stupid Pride events or wear their stupid Pride pins or put their stupid Pride posters up at my desk.
But if I did say something like that, I'd be the office Nazi. I'd need to be educated.
Never mind that I am not "anti" LGBTQ. I want them to live their lives free of harassment. If someone was suggesting they be criminalized, or not allowed to work here, or forbidden to be public about who they are, I'd be strongly against that.
But that's not enough for them. You say no one is harassing or abusing me, and this is true, but only because I know how to keep my mouth shut and it's not important enough for me to fight over it.
If you're unfortunate enough to be someone who can't keep their mouth shut - like say, a James Damore - these are the people who will go after your job.
I will say that of the few trans people I know, personally and professionally, mostly they are pretty normal. But without exception, I have seen them go off a time or two at a relatively minor "microaggression." They definitely remind you that they are a walking social hazard zone.
When I say I resent having to keep my mouth shut, I don't mean that I really want to call someone a tranny or say "You know you're a man, right?" I'm not that big a jerk (though some of the biggest jerks among them make me want to be). I mean I resent that anything other than a nod or just benign silence when they are going off means you are now engaged in the firefight. I mean I resent that I can't say "Why yet another Pride event?" I mean I resent knowing that they expect us all to pretend and affirm and validate.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
I have noticed. A lot of hobby spaces have actually banned AI art, and if it's not banned, it's treated with extreme disdain. Any boardgame publisher caught using AI art, for example, gets a social media pile-on. It's a big deal in RPG and self-publishing (where authors and publishers operating on a shoestring obviously find it very tempting to cut costs with AI art). A few traditional publishers have caught flak for using AI art on their covers.
As a bit of an AI enthusiast (I even bought a chunkier GPU for Stable Diffusion), I obviously do not buy the "unethical" argument, but this has become kind of like "Actually, I think racial IQ differences might be real" - not something I can talk about openly with a lot of my circle.
There are a lot of anti-AI arguments, and the ethical/copyright issues are ambiguous, but the bottom line is that artists are, rightfully, afraid of being replaced by a machine. When they complain about how AIs were trained "unethically", ask them if the algorithms improve so much that an AI can be trained entirely on open source or public domain artwork (there have been some efforts to create so-called "ethical" AI models) and produce equivalent results, if they'd be okay with that? They will usually hem and haw and hope that doesn't happen.
I do feel a little bad for artists. I mean, if you had a decent side hustle charging $50 to draw D&D characters, or a more lucrative side hustle drawing furry porn, AI is going to replace you. High end artists will still have jobs, and AI can't really do competent composition or graphic design or a series of pictures with a consistent theme (yet), but the DeviantArt and ArtStation kids are getting hungry and desperate.
It ultimately boils down to money, and they are trying to make it a moral crusade to preserve their livelihood. It is only the threat of being dragged on social media that's preventing more publishers and companies from using AI art, and as AI art gets better and less easily detectable, and more widely accepted, that will change.
I will say that a lot of AI art is just lazy. Like, if you just give a prompt, run 50 iterations, take the best one, and slap it on your cover, it's still probably not going to look very good and it will look like obvious AI generation. Even for my hobby art I do some photoshopping and have learned enough composition to blend elements together - it might still be detectable, but it doesn't just scream "AI." (Then again, I'm not generating anime waifus or furry porn, which is like 90% of AI art as far as I can tell.)
This is coming to other industries as well. Audiobooks, for example, are now pretty lucrative for most authors, and AI voices are becoming nearly as good as human voice actors - and human voice actors are expensive. For self-published authors, it's a no-brainer economically, so narrators and readers are doing their best to make it morally unacceptable to use AI. If the disapprobation fails to kill sales, that entire niche is going to be dead.
It will be some time before AI can replace a lot of other industries, but low-end software development, customer service, and other industries are already being affected. This is what the artists are fighting - not subjective esoteric notions of whether AI art has "soul" or qualifies as "good art."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
I'm surprised no one has commented on the racial angle. The target audience is specifically black women, who are being urged to pressure black men to vote (for Harris, obviously).
Harris is having trouble getting support from black men - she will obviously still get the majority of their votes, but her polling is relatively low for that demographic. A lot of black men seem to be actively turned off by her. Not being a black man, I can only speculate, but I suspect a lot of black men, even liberal ones, find the combination of resembling their wine mom auntie who tells them to pull their pants up, being a woman whose career seems to have mostly advanced by blowing the right men, and being a former prosecutor, is making her a hard sell when her campaign naturally assumed that black men would prefer a black woman to Donald Trump. (There is also the fact that her "blackness" has a bit of an asterisk.)
I remain actually shocked at the tone-deafness of the Harris campaign ads, though. Do they not have any heterosexual men on staff?
Even aside from the laughable cringe of "full-throated endorsement" from guys who "eat carburetors" and... give bear hugs, and fat black women turning down a 6-figure, 3-6s black Chad (as if), it just screams weakness. "Vote for her! No, really, vote for her! Vote for her.... please? VOTE FOR HER GODDAMIT!"
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
You were told, repeatedly, that you were on your last chance, and yet your last several warnings were mod-noted with "Permaban next time." Yet you weren't, because, well, you seemed to be making a good faith effort to dial it down... for a while. But your comments remain mostly low effort and shitty. So much so that after being here for months, we still have to manually approve your posts because you can't get out of the new user filter. This isn't because you have some brave iconoclastic point of view that's too much for the Motte; there are other edgy, lefty posters who establish themselves as decent posters.
This post is just another crappy low effort post. I've specifically told you to stop writing posts whose entire content is just "Your beliefs are stupid."
It's also the last straw. I will not miss fishing your posts out of the queue and having to decide which of the dozen posts you wrote during a drunk-posting spree need to be modded. This was a dumb hill to die on, but so mote it be. Good bye.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
In my bubble, all my Democrat friends went from fear and loathing and despair to a sudden surge of optimism. Now they think they can win again and they are all-in on Kamala, as if they've always loved her.
Me? I despise Trump. I think he was a bad president before and will be a bad president again. I cannot bring myself to vote for him.
I also cannot bring myself to vote for Kamala, and I might just not vote for the first time. Democrats actually think it's cute for the Harras campaign to be embracing the "Kamala is brat" meme? No, it is not cute. It's infantilizing and embarrassing. Harris is an unaccomplished nobody, but I don't really hold that against her, nor her alleged trading of sexual favors during her climb to power. Historically, most vice presidents have been also-rans picked for whatever advantage they are believed to offer during the campaign and for being relatively unobjectionable compromise options in the event that they become an "accidental president." Harris was picked for her demographic attributes and because people didn't really have strong feelings about her otherwise. What I hold against her is being an intellectual lightweight with a cringey demeanor. But more than that, what I hold against her.... is her followers.
I fucking despise the hivemind that has taken over almost all the social media spaces and groups I am in. "Trump is Hitler, if he becomes president it will be The End of All Things" (even though he was, and it wasn't), and there is just... no discussion. No debate. No disagreement. Just such smug self-righteousness.
I can't say I will be happy if Trump wins, and it's remotely possible Harris could convince me to vote for her in the next few months. (For Trump to convince me to vote for him, he'd pretty much have to stop being Trump.) But if Trump does win, I'm gonna buy me a big bowl of popcorn and enjoy me some schadenfreude.
I know these are not noble sentiments or sober political thinking. But damned if I won't enjoy watching some epic meltdowns.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Freddie's not wrong, but I find him endlessly tiresome and miserable. He constantly gropes for the truth and almost seems to grasp it, and then hastily backs away as if it burned his fingers. Every time I read one of his essays, I think "You've almost got it" and then he swerves and ostentatiously clears his throat to make sure no one thinks he's suggesting non-leftists might ever be right about something.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
So here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it.
I don't think it has "always been" like this.
I am usually the one who contradicts the catastrophizers, the doomers, and accelerationists by bringing up whatever American history book I have most recently read to point out that we had extremely hot culture wars in the past, with politicians literally assaulting each other on the floor of Congress, with ideological camps deriding each others' partisan cures for epidemics, with very real, widespread and sometimes laughably blatant voter fraud, etc.
But at least in my lifetime, we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas, but nobody actually wanted to delegitimize and disenfranchise the other side. If you lost an election, that sucked and you could be unhappy about it, but you set about trying to win the next one.
The Motte being the place it is, most people perceive the Democrats to be the villains here, and right now, they are, because they are in power and because the left has the upper hand in the culture wars. But it was during the Clinton years when I first noticed a radical shift amongst right wingers; Clinton was not just a bad president, he was illegitimate. He was a monstrous, degenerate, nation-ending catastrophe. Liberals were traitors. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter rose to prominence on the strength of their invective.
This wasn't a particularly unique period in American history and I am not (quite) saying "Republicans started it," but I am saying that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together. I know for certain that Congress was a more congenial and bipartisan body (and a lot of people criticized it for that, arguing that bipartisanship was bad because it meant making compromises and concessions with the enemy - well, those critics got what they wanted).
So I feel what you are saying, and what your National Review article is saying. I feel it every time I talk to my liberal friends. I feel it when I visit my hobby boards which have become essentially a chorus of daily agreement about leftist talking points. That someone could be a good person and still vote Republican is basically unthinkable. That you could be a liberal and remain friends with a Trump supporter is considered a logical contradiction, like saying you're a Jew who's friends with a Nazi.
I have seen liberals arguing that packing the court is a perfectly legitimate measure, that controlling free speech on the Internet is essential to combat disinformation, that the Constitution is fake and gay, and it's very clear that:
liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing.
This makes me sad and frustrated and gloomy, but while I am not going to say Republicans started it, I'm not not saying that either.
No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Because this woman is almost certainly part of the problem. Yes, yes, we don’t know, but do you really think she’s voting Republican? You think she has a Blue Lives Matter flag in her living room? I’d eat every hat I own if she did.
I really dislike this argument that's becoming increasingly frequent here and elsewhere, that is basically "Even if what happened to this person is unjust and morally wrong, they probably voted for Biden so fuck them." (Obviously the same argument is made everywhere else on the Internet about Trump voters.)
Yes, I get it, war to the knife and it's fun to munch popcorn while watching leopards eat faces, and @FCfromSSC will say this is just the sound of inevitability.
I know expecting people to show empathy for a (presumed) member of the enemy tribe is too much, but ffs we don't even actually know if she is in fact a woke liberal BLM-supporting enemy tribeswoman, we're just doing some sort of pseudo-Bayesian reasoning where she probably is so fuck her.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr 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
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Are the rich really so attracted to the idea of cheap servants that they would see their communities destroyed? I think there are some true open border believers in the far left, and that the rest of blob is just sort of going with the flow.
This touches another one of those thoughts that would coagulate into an effort post if I had the will. I watch people believing obviously absurd and horrible things ("We should let infinite numbers of people across the border", "Trans women have no advantage in sports" while staring at a 250-pound "female" rugby player, etc.) and my conclusion, from being in a pretty Blue bubble with mostly leftist friends, is that you are underestimating both the number of true believers and the degree to which normies don't notice and don't care until their schools are actually being taken over by illegal immigrants.
Yes, a lot of lefties (and not just the "far" left, but mainstream liberals) literally cannot imagine that letting more people across the border is anything but good. It's a combination of "They are poor refugees fleeing oppression and it would be immoral to turn them back" and "We need more people who will become good productive American tax payers." Any suggestion that a lot of these people becoming criminals and/or net drags on the social welfare system? That's racism.
When I was younger, even on the left, "I support immigration but not illegal immigration, we welcome new Americans as long as they come the right way" was the mainstream position. Now that's racism and dangerous Trumpism.
And the normies who don't pay much attention except when a picture of people flooding across the borders hits the news? They vaguely understand that there are poor people who want to come here, as there always have been, and we have some sort of immigration system that's supposed to filter them, but to speak up and say that there seem to be some problems and maybe too many people are getting through would make you sound like a MAGA or something.
The dominant theme of the post Covid period has been that incentives don't matter and we can't enforce rules on anyone. So maybe we are theoretically against open borders, but we also can't actually enforce any rules (that's mean!), so we end up with defacto open borders.
From talking to a number of my true blue Democrat-voting friends (but who would not describe themselves as "leftists"), yes, this is pretty much the case. Ask them if they are literally in favor of open borders and they will say no. But ask them what sort of restrictions we should have, and what measures they would consider acceptable to keep undesirables out, and the best they'll come up with is "Well, maybe not someone with a violent criminal record." (As if we have access to that information for hundreds of thousands of people coming from dozens of countries.) Like, in theory they'll allow that letting Cartel soldiers just come across the border is probably bad, but anything that resembles strict enforcement makes them cry about children in cages.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Legitimate thing to discuss, but please tone down the overt culture warring in your commentary. "Look at how awful my outgroup is and join me in snarling at the awful thing they did this week" is still not what this place is for.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Entertaining rant, as always. Also a juvenile preoccupation with aesthetics and going out in a blaze of glory as if everyone in the world should aspire to be a Shonen manga character like you do, as always.
I find some germs of agreement in your disgust with state-sanctioned suicide and asking someone else to do the job for you. That said, I wonder if you've ever known any genuinely suicidally depressed people? Your uncharitable projection of a pathetic need for validation and someone to "rescue" them may be true for some of the people seeking this last resort, but I would guess that many of them really, truly are in so much pain that dying seems like the only escape from an existence of undending, hopeless misery. Whether they are entirely rational (some are, some aren't) and whether there might be some cure for them (in some cases there is not) is beside the point. They really are, subjectively, suffering as much as someone with locked-in syndrome or constant physical pain.
There are a number of good arguments for requiring that people "do it themselves," but "don't be a pussy!" isn't one of them, and neither is "make it awesome." These people aren't you. They don't care about whether they make a grand statement or go out in a blaze of glory. This is like demanding that someone who doesn't believe in or care about God say a prayer before dying. Your aesthetics are not theirs, nor should your aesthetics shape public policy. Go ahead and beat your chest and use every muscle in your face to produce a sneer of epic proportions, they don't care because they are so depressed that they don't care to the nth degree. Fortunately I have never suffered from suicidal depression but I know enough people who have that I can easily imagine the response to one of them finally taking this step of asking for state assistance, and KulakRevolt sneering at them that they're pathetic pussies. Their response will be, quite simply, "Yes, and?"
From a somewhat more rational perspective, as others have pointed out, the usual suicide methods have a high enough failure rate, with the possibility of winding up not dead but maimed, paralyzed, or brain-dead, inflicting further suffering on both yourself and your loved ones, that it's not unreasonable for someone who lacks your go-jump-in-a-volcano aesthetic to prefer a surer, safer method. And the more spectacular methods (jumping in a volcano, walking off an ice flow, swimming with great whites) similarly seem to be unreliable and/or gruesome. (Ironically enough, while suicidally depressed people generally care not at all about their own lives, they do often still care about the people they will leave behind, the people who will have to clean up the mess they make, etc., which is often the only small deterrent that does keep them from doing it themselves.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
23d 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
11mo ago
Not having read your article, and in isolation of whether or not this is actually a "problem", per se, this seems like a bad-faith article.
I'm not going to mod this because people can have shitty opinions, but "I haven't read your article but I am going to pass judgment on it being bad faith" is really on the border of obnoxiously low effort. On the subject of what the Motte is supposed to be and what it is becoming, we want it to be a place where people issue considered opinions after taking in the available evidence (including, you know, at least reading what you are commenting on), not just a place where people drop hot takes based on vibes and how they feel about the poster or the subject.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Generally we'd prefer people didn't remove posts unless they really regret posting something.
I don't think this is consensus-building, but it is kind of failing to leave the rest of the Internet at the door. "Look at how stupid SSC has become" isn't exactly a genre of post we want to encourage.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
I haven't read any since high school English class
Well, there's your problem. You literally don't know what you're talking about.
I read a lot. I read fiction and non-fiction, but mostly fiction. I read genre fiction, I read litfic, I read classics, I read small press and indie-published stuff and I read stuff from the big publishers. In other words, I think I am qualified to say that while you may have accurately described most of the books your fiancée reads, you have not accurately described most of what's published.
Publishing is pretty woke so the wokest titles get prominently featured at your local bookstore, so sure, you'll find plenty of misery-porn with characters like you describe. (I have not read anything by Hanya Yanagihara or Sally Rooney - I am not into misery-porn.)
However, if you bother to browse past the highlighted displays and actually look at the shelves (or, you know, browse Amazon), there remain hundreds of books published every year to suit every taste. Even conservative tastes, even the tastes of conservative men, in whatever genre you like.
As for awards, the big literary awards (the Man Booker, the Pulitzer, the National Book Award) rarely resemble your bullet list. Can you tell me which award-winning books you think fit that description? (As far as I can tell, Yanagihara has been nominated but not won any of them, and Rooney has won some smaller awards for Irish writers and the Goodreads Choice Awards which is... probably not as prestigious as you think given that it's literally just a Goodreads popularity contest.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
The thing I find interesting (and which Freddie DeBoer has commented on extensively) is the vicious denials that mental illness can in any way be considered a factor when an obviously crazy person starts spouting crazy shit.
The mantra now is "mental illness doesn't do that," but mental illness clearly can make people say and do things they wouldn't if their illness was under control. That doesn't mean Kanye isn't genuinely an antisemite, and we can't know for certain he's having a BPD episode when he tweets stuff like this, but it's clearly another culture war angle. If Kanye started spouting rants about how black people should kill all whites, I suspect the same people outraged now would say "You have to understand that he is mentally ill and his words shouldn't be taken at face value; I hope he gets the help that he needs."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
@ZorbaTHut explained it (which is to say, there really isn't much more explanation than what we've said before).
My personal opinion is that we probably weren't in as much imminent danger of being banned as many people (including Zorba) believe, but it was inevitable that we would be banned someday. I always watched /r/CultureWarRoundup as a kind of canary, because despite their much smaller footprint, I honestly thought they'd get banned before we would. Their witches are pretty open, and SneerClub definitely knows about them, which means presumably they must get reported fairly frequently.
But I do have two things to contribute which I never would have posted on reddit. First of all, I will confirm that it was indeed Chtorrr who visited us and dropped the "friendly notice" in our mod channel.
And that being said, a few months back there was a "Mod Summit" (via Zoom) to which all subreddit mods were invited. I was the only motte mod who I guess was bored enough to zoom in (I even sent them questions! None of which made it to the queue that got answered, naturally). As you might expect, almost all the talks were about things like "How to build safe communities" and "How to self-care and preserve your mental health while having to deal with all these terrible people," etc.
The most valuable thing I got out of it were screenshots.
Without further comment: https://imgur.com/a/4oIS59D
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
I have despised Amanda Marcotte since before her tussles with the Scotts. She has always been one of the sleaziest, most intellectually dishonest, and just plain dumb feminist writers emerging from the early 2000s blogging boom, and inexplicably she and Jessica Valenti (almost equally dumb and dishonest) became the most successful.
Outside of anecdotes, it's hard to know how common it is for men to control the votes of wives or other women in their families.
This entire article is premised on something that there is no proof happens at all (in statistically significant numbers). Like, I'm sure there are some households with men who literally tell their wives and daughters how to vote, but the idea that this is such a widespread phenomenon that it might actually change an election seems flatly ridiculous to me.
Exit polling data shows a 12-point gap between how married and unmarried women voted in 2020, but a smaller seven-point gap between how married and unmarried men voted. Still, the differences aren't all up to men forcing their wives to vote for the candidate of their choice. Some are due to age and other demographic differences between married and unmarried people.
Notice how she says "The differences aren't all up to men forcing their wives to vote for the candidate of their choice" as if we should just take it for granted that most married women who vote differently than unmarried women obviously do so because their husbands make them.
There's also a whole range of ways men exert power over women that fall short of outright abuse. Educating the public about their secret ballot rights is good, but don't expect it to have a measurable impact on the 2024 outcome.
Indeed, we shouldn't expect it to have a measurable impact on the 2024 outcome. How does voting work where Marcotte lives, exactly? Every poll I've ever been to had very strict rules about not allowing other people to enter the voting booth with you, not even family members, and no way for an abusive husband to "check" how his wife voted. As others have pointed out, if she's really concerned about this, she should be arguing to do away with mail-in ballots (since such a husband really could force his wife to fill out her ballot "correctly" while he watches), but she won't do that because she's dumb and dishonest.
I don't dislike feminists and feminism as much as many people here, but Amanda Marcotte really comes pretty close to the caricatured archetype of a narcissistic self-regarding man-hating harpy for whom "feminism" means "Everything I do should be celebrated and anything that makes me unhappy should be banned."
I can't remember if it was her or Valenti who wrote the article complaining that she was sad that men no longer wolf-whistled at her, and then made it the Patriarchy's fault that this was a thing that made her sad.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Tell you what - if you survive, let us know, and I will unban you. I'm banning you now because you've been warned and at this point you seem to just be trolling for attention, and frankly, I don't want to indulge you any further in your strange suicidal fetish.
All the questions you ask aren't really questions because you don't actually listen to what anyone says.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
My take is that posting the same thing over and over is annoying and borders on egregiously obnoxious.
Look man, I believe you really feel these things and you're unhappy. But this place isn't a therapy group, and while people are usually pretty willing to offer advice and feedback when someone posts about their personal struggles, when someone whines about the exact same thing over and over again, using exactly the same examples and verbiage, it becomes self-indulgent and a bit selfish. Your exercises in self-pity are beginning to look like some sort of shame kink in which you're making us all unwilling participants.
I'm loathe to invoke the single issue posting rule and ban you, or tell you you're just not allowed to talk about this anymore. But find some other things to talk about, and if you are going to post about the despair of being unlaid, stop reposting essentially the same thing over and over.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
"Why does my outgroup push for obviously terrible things when we all know they don't actually believe the things they say they do?" Bonus: "Let me ask a leading question suggesting the uncharitable answer."
(Before you get indignant at my steelmanning the other side, I'll stipulate that I am not personally in favor of either open borders or lax criminal prosecution. Policy-wise, and probably even politically, I am probably much closer to you than the single college-educated women you so despise.)
Here's the actual answer: people in favor of open borders actually believe open borders are good. They are not nationalists and largely regard nationalism with distrust if not contempt; they believe freedom of movement, and particularly the freedom of people to seek better economic opportunities in wealthier countries, should not be hindered. They largely see Westerners living in wealthy nations as benefiting from a manifestly unfair birthplace luck-of-the-draw, and don't see why Guatemalans or Bangladeshis or Nigerians or Syrians should have to suffer just because they were not so lucky.
They (including even the women) do not think in terms of "military-aged men" (and definitely not in terms of "third-world men") and its implications.
They support lax prosecution of criminals for similar bleeding-heart reasons: they really do believe the rhetoric that fuels "defund the police" and BLM and "disproportionate impact on marginalized communities." They think they are being compassionate to the oppressed.
Stated more bluntly, you are asking "Why do they want to unleash hordes of violent rapists upon themselves?" You are "confused" because you don't believe that their motives are actually what they say they are, and you don't believe that they don't perceive the same outcome (hordes of violent rapists) that you do. Even if what you believe is actually correct, they don't believe that. They aren't endorsing it for some secret unstated reason they won't admit to.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7mo ago
I wonder if their genius idea was to stage a "predator catch," but they went full vigilante with it (because young dumb males).
If you're not aware, there are a ton of "pred-catcher" YouTube and Rumble channels. Basically doing the Chris Hansen thing (who has his own channel now as well): a decoy pretending to be a minor will hang out on dating apps or social media sites until some guy (a guy 99.9% of the time) takes the bait, and then they set him up to come meet the minor. They confront him, try to get him to confess, and then call the police - filming the entire thing.
The YouTubers, however, are familiar with the law and are generally very careful not to do anything that could get them arrested (especially not putting hands on the pred). They also make very sure their targets have thoroughly and unambiguously incriminated themselves. Their decoys usually pretend to be 12 or 13 - well below any possible age of consent - and they wait until they have hours and hours of sexually explicit messages, with the perp clearly stating he's aware of the decoy's (supposed) age.
Usually these are straight men going after young girls, but sometimes they get a gay guy trying to hook up with a boy.
Anyway, that's what this looks like to me: they got the idea from watching a pred-catcher video, but decided to beat the shit out of the perp instead. Very stupid, but probably not a hate crime, although since they found the perp on Grindr, I can imagine a DA who wants to make it a hate crime arguing that they were specifically targeting gay men.
I'm (unfortunately) not surprised that mentioning FIRE probably tanked any chance you had right from the beginning. Yeah, FIRE is basically right-coded nowadays, and frankly I suspect it will suffer from the same sort of institutional capture in reverse that swallowed the ACLU. (That said, it's one of the few charities I still donate to.)
I first noticed "free speech" being treated as basically code for "right winger who wants to call people the n-word" back in the A+ "Freeze Peaches!" days, but it's still been shocking to me how many progressives now literally consider "free speech" or "academic freedom" to be a right-wing talking point.
Anecdotally, I feel like even in the tech industry I am seeing a lower quality of college graduates the last few years, though it's hard to say how much of that is them being put through too many woke hoops and how much was Covid laying waste to academic rigor and accountability.
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