Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
15d ago
Yes, I know who Maimonides is. I also know you're giving a hostile reading of what "Jews believe and are taught" that Jews would not agree with. Why should I take your word over a rabbi's? Is your premise (1) You actually know Jewish law better than Jews do or (2) Yeah, that's what they actually believe and they're lying to the goyim?
Your entire argument, from the hostile readings of selected Talmudic passages to Ben Shapiro's involvement in a shady charity, is nutpicking. Sure, there are slimy evil Jews. There are also slimy evil Christians, Muslims and atheists.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
15d ago
That's an easy setup with an obvious answer. But "Obey the little shit who got elected as our sandlot 'king' no matter how tired you get of this game" is not showing agency, persistence, or drilling and practice. It's just being a submissive bootlicker.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
16d ago
Yes, buddy, I know about the New Covenant. And I'm also quite familiar with Islamic jurisprudence and interpretation (and disputes) over hadiths.
The problem is, the vast majority of religious practitioners of all faiths are not theologians or lawyers. This is why some Christians actually quote those Old Testament verses when it's convenient, and then fall back on "But Jesus" when the ones they'd rather not follow are quoted back at them. I don't think Christians are particularly hypocritical or unlearned about this, relative to anyone else. But by the same token, some Muslims and Jews are aware of the bad stuff in their holy books and handwave it away, and some don't. Most Muslims don't approve of marrying 9-year-olds, most Jews don't approve of taking gentile slave girls, most Christians don't approve of stoning children to death.
There is no difference, except the artificial one you create in an attempt to gotcha Jews.
Now, you can claim that means most Muslims and Jews aren't really following their orthodox doctrines (though I don't know why we should consider a hostile outsider more qualified to interpret their scriptural fidelity). Maybe you can even make a theological argument that under the letter of their respective laws, Christians are correct to ignore their bronze age genocidal covenants while Muslims and Jews are incorrect to ignore their bronze age genocidal covenants. But that would presumably be between them and their gods. If you want to convince us that Jews don't really follow the Talmud, go argue with a rabbi. If you want to convince us that Jews are actually that evil and slimy because they secretly follow all your uncharitable Talmudic interpretations, your case is entirely scriptural nutpicking, and it's fair to ask if you've stoned any children or damned yourself with polyester lately.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
16d ago
The Jewish examples from the Talmud have been given above - lots of rules about how you can treat gentiles (badly). The Bible has Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with the various laws about what you can and cannot eat, and also that you should put to death adulterers or disobedient children, and exhortations to slaughter enemy tribes. There are also some ugly stories in Judges. The Quran and the hadiths, likewise have verses about taking women as sex slaves, slaughtering the Jews, and everyone's favorite story about Mohammad and Aisha.
All three religions have a large body of jurisprudence explaining how these laws or parables were very specific and contextual, or were superseded by later precedents, or by the New Testament, and so on. So no, you don't need to explain to me that the Bible does not actually require you to stone your disobedient son or prohibit you from eating shrimp. I know that. But all these apologetics require accepting that these prescriptions were, in fact, contextual and open to interpretation, and just taking one snippet all by itself and its literal meaning is basically scriptural nutpicking.
People like @coffee_enjoyer who enjoy those long lists of horrible Talmudic prescriptions as evidence of all the secret evil things Jews believe are doing exactly this (and will likewise happily take at face value the less savory Quranic verses and hadiths). But of course Deuteronomy 21 and Leviticus 20 and all the stories in Judges about enslavement, rape, and genocide, those are nuanced.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
16d ago
More shaking my head than curling my upper lip. I mean, I'm part of the problem by responding to you because I know you will keep going as long as I respond, but you really should try to step back and realize how nuts you've become on this. You're not going to get satisfaction, no one is going to validate your version of this absurd grudge you're holding, and trying to rekindle it in random threads just makes you look like a crazy person. And I'm guilty of indulging you because I always want to futilely talk down the crazy people.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
16d ago
Do you know how crazy you sound?
I did not take the strawberries.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
16d ago
Cyrus was not the only one displaying agency here, all the boys were displaying their agency, except the son of Artembares who was displaying cowardice and weakness.
Taking this apocryphal story at face value, Artembares clearly displayed agency by refusing to obey. The argument that he agreed to the rules and helped elect the "king" and then refused to go along seems a little suspicious and convenient; one would suspect something else happened that made him say "Nah," but to call refusing to go along with the crowd a lack of agency is quite a weird argument. Yes, you gotta serve someone (in some sense), but refusing to serve a particular person is a choice.
Arguably running to daddy to complain is cowardly and weak. But if instead he'd knocked Cyrus in the dirt, I don't think you'd be saying he lacked agency.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
16d ago
An obsessive making everything about his obsession and trying to make it the topic regardless of context is on point, though it's not the point you think you're making.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
17d ago
Jews, Christians, and Muslims all conveniently ignore some of the uglier stuff in their holy books that if taken literally would oblige and/or excuse them from behavior considered repellent in the modern age. And all three love to point at the ugly stuff in the other religions' scriptures as some kind of gotcha: either they are not "really" following their own religion, or they secretly practice and defend this stuff and hide it from outsiders.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
17d ago
Asylum Tourism. The degree to which this was a "popular middle-class pastime" has been a little exaggerated, but it was certainly a thing.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
17d ago
Oh, I'd be happy to see @SecureSignals actually answer the question, and he wouldn't be banned for answering honestly. But he's too strategic for that and he's never going to spell out here on the Motte why he hates Jews so much and what he wants done with them. I'm pretty sure he uses places like this to quietly draw in fellow travelers, and saves the ho- scaring shit for more private venues.
To clarify: actually calling for violence (eg "We should kill the Jews") or making statements that are just boo outgroup (eg "I hate Jews because they're sneaky cunning vermin who hate me") would be against the rules. But going into detail about what you believe Jews have supposedly done, or even genetic theories about their natural animosity for gentiles, would be allowed even if the reasoning is specious.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
17d ago
You can sit with them, as patiently as you can, for literally hours on end, forcing them to stop changing the subject and actually explain how the different parts of their ‘theory’ fit together, to verbalise each step and watch as it dissolves into undeniable incoherence, and then later the same week they’ll be back with the exact same thing.
Yes. This is why I go so hard on our Joo-posters. Because they do this every damn time. Doesn't matter how calmly and politely you ask them to explain why it's always Da Joos. They'll give you an eliiptical theory of Jewness that doesn't hold together, cobbled together bits of Holocaust apocrypha, and when someone bothers to patiently disassemble it, they curl their upper lip, go silent, and then come back in a couple of weeks repeating the same thing.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
17d ago
It's actually "not being a religious bigot" that's a historical anomaly. Europeans were not historically more tolerant of Muslims or pagans or Hindus, etc. The reason antisemitism happened more is because there were more Jews around, not because Jews "did" something to make themselves more unlikeable.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
18d ago
So, speaking as someone who's been accused of giving special protection to Jews on the Motte and even being a Zionist myself:
I've been a subscriber to Bari Weiss's Free Press for a while but I'm cancelling my subscription. Why? Because every damn issue is about how Nick Fuentes or Zohran Mandani or whoever said anything negative about Jews or Israel is an existential threat. I have mostly enjoyed the Free Press's coverage on issues, but it became very, very noticeable that they're iconoclasts and contrarians (or at least willing to platform heretical views) about everything except Jews and Israel. On that topic, any synagogue in the country being spray-painted is worthy of a headline, and no article will ever suggest Israel is anything but a victim of calumny.
I get that it is personal for Weiss, but it's like every Jew became unhinged after October 7. To be fair, so did the Left, and now the Right's anti-Semites are crawling out of the woodwork. It's hard to blame Jews too much for feeling like everyone is out to get them more than ever when it really does seem like everyone is out to get them more than ever. But it's also a little hard to feel sympathetic to people like Weiss who think articles mocking everyone else's idpol are hilarious but don't you dare make light of hers.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
18d ago
Monsieur's dissatisfied snapping of fingers is duly noted.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
18d ago
Debatable. It looks like he wrote or edited some of it himself, and like I told him, we don't really have a rule about how much of your post can be written with AI assistance. Also, since I've already talked to him about it, it seems kind of unfair to go back and delete the post now.
If he keeps doing this, the mods will discuss it and we will likely remove such posts in the future.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
18d ago
Well, FWIW, I unfortunately have now flagged you as "that guy who uses AI" and I will skip over your posts without reading them from now on, unless I am required to skim them because you've been reported.
It's one thing to use AI to do grammar checking or even bounce ideas off of. But it's pretty clear you used AI to do large chunks of your writing for you.
Right now our rules about AI usage are sort of fuzzy; someone obviously posting an AI-generated post is going to have that post removed, but it's hard to prove something is AI-generated, and we don't really have a rule about how much AI is too much. You deserve credit for owning it, but you need to know most people don't want to read what an AI thinks, or what an AI writes after you typed what you think into a prompt.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
18d ago
My stance: It shouldn’t have been a QC
No comment on the rest of your post, but I will comment on this.
First, complaining that a post you didn't like or think was deserving received a QC is one of the most tedious of complaints. QCs are necessarily subjective. Not everything that gets nominated is selected for a QC, I assure you. There are people who automatically AAQC any post that expresses a view they agree with. Even the shittiest boo outgroup hot take will get some AAQCs from certain people, just because it validates their feelings and they love seeing their outgroup get shat on. @naraburns is the one responsible for choosing which nominated posts actually get listed. Obviously that means the list leans towards what he deems to be worthy, but I know he does not just choose posts he likes or agrees with.
You thought a particular QC wasn't interesting enough or didn't really support its argument? Okay. Whatever. That's just, like, your opinion, man.
But more importantly, it inspired you to write this long post in response, which is very much the raison d'etre of the Motte. To get people to test their ideas and receive effortful responses. Now, we've seen the argument before "If a terrible, low effort post provokes a lot of discussion, doesn't that make it a good post?" Well, no, but on the other hand, you complaining that a QC didn't measure up and then writing a long rebuttal to explain why... sort of does make that argument.
I also want to add that your mention of using AI made me raise my eyebrow, because a lot of this text looks kind of like AI generation. I don't think you wrote it entirely with AI, but if you are using AI to "fill out" the volume of your post, then you don't really have any standing to be complaining about the quality of someone else's post.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
20d ago
I always thought Eowyn was Tolkein's weakest character. Iron age aristocrat women didn't sit around demanding the right to kill and die like their menfolk.
Do we really know that? I mean, undoubtedly very few did. But Eowyn is an exceptional character. I'd be willing to bet that a tiny percentage of women throughout history did indeed wish they could go out and fight and do glorious deeds. Probably a very tiny percentage - but it's not so silly to make one such woman a character in a fantasy novel.
It's funny, Tolkien gets a lot of flack from leftists for being "too white" and his problematic depictions of brown people (the usual accusation being that orcs are meant to represent POC), and also for being "too male" (not enough Strong Female Characters).
Yet when you point out that in fact he did have a handful of Strong Female Characters, and that he even admitted that one shouldn't assume that orcs are all born evil - rightists will scoff and say it's totally unrealistic to have a woman who ever wants to take up arms, or orcs who aren't mindless spear-fodder.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
20d ago
The factual history is:
You were banned for an uncharitable bad faith post. I added in the ban message that factoring into the ban was the fact that multiple people had noted the nature of your post, and your responses were belligerent and filled the queue with reports.
You demanded that I point specifically to the other posts that were bad.
I declined, because I wasn't going to argue with you about each post in the thread.
You claimed this was unfair.
You still think this is unfair.
Your claim that the mods "Use secret reasons they won't tell you about to ban people they don't like" is false.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
21d ago
ROFL. I can't remember the last time I reported a comment. You're off your rocker. (EDIT: I don't think you can claim with a straight face that there hasn't been even one comment in say, even the last two weeks, that I "didn't like".)
After looking it up, I do owe you an apology for this. I was writing this on the phone (which is no excuse) and I conflated you with another user with a similar name. So I was wrong about your reporting history. Mea culpa.
I stand by everything else I said, though.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
21d ago
Just like ignoring a jury summons, this works until it doesn't. Yes, you can get away with it often. You can also get fucked when someone actually bothers to take the next step instead of saying "Eh, fuck it."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
21d ago
If upvotes mean ‘more of this’ and (like most commenters) fuckduck was largely upvoted, shouldn’t there be a presumption of adding value to the forum, that cannot be annulled by you simply finding me annoying?
No. People can reliably get lots of upvotes with a flaming hot "I hate my outgroup" post. We don't mod by upvotes.
If you're admitting to being fuckduck, consider yourself being given grace for not being given another ban for ban evasion.
Nor is choosing to play inherently more agentic than refusing to play. You can choose not to play. And if that means breaking commitments or you choose not to play because it was too hard, perhaps that speaks poorly of your character. But--
Agreeing to make some other kid "king" is not a commitment as binding and serious as joining a sports team or signing up for calculus or agreeing to start a workout program. The scenario you (Herodotus) present is that some kids made Cyrus king for a day, one kid got sick of it, and you argue that he was wrong to get tired of the game. He should have continued bowing and scraping until Cyrus said the game was over, dammit! Again, I think "running to daddy" was the weak part, not when he got tired of calling Cyrus king. But Cyrus responded to some kid not respecting his "authority" by getting the other kids to gang up on him and beat him, and you (Herodotus) praise him for this!
You are presenting one principle ("You should choose your commitments and stick to them") but supporting it with an entirely different argument ("You must be obedient and you may not change your mind").
I honestly find your entire argument rather baffling. "You gotta serve somebody" is a truism that sounds profound on the surface, but essentially you're saying "Choose your master and obey him." Herodotus presents this as an anecdote about how awesome and naturally kingly young Cyrus was. Not being enamored of kings, or the concept of any man being "born to rule" (and others born to bend the knee), I don't know what to make of your ode to submission except that I reject the premise. We all serve someone, willingly or not. We don't have to make a virtue of it.
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