Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
Once again, the rules of this site are extremely tiresome at times.
Tough.
I know you're sick of reading this same complaint, and I'm sorry for that.
Yes we are, and no you're not.
But this news was going to get posted here one way or another,
Yes. There are good and acceptable ways to post it that require a minimal amount of effort, and there are bad and unacceptable ways to post it because someone wants to be First!!!
and forcing people to jump through hoops to talk about current events while they're happening right now is bad.
No, it is not.
We've explained why the rule exists. We've explained why you can't do what you want to do. You can accept this or not.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
Why not just let them come back?
He's been told, privately and publicly, that we'd probably let him come back if he did so honestly, and promised he'd make some effort not to behave in the same way that got him banned last time. And this is not some special offer for Hlynka: almost any permabanned member, if they came to us and asked to be reinstated and promised to follow the rules, would at least be considered for amnesty. In case @The_Nybbler decides to lie again about what I just said, let me clear: that doesn't mean "if they grovel enough" or kiss our asses or whatever. It means convince us you want to participate in good faith, you understand why you were banned, and whether you agree with the rules or not, you are willing to abide by them. Someone last time I mentioned this got very upset that this implies "permaban" is not really permanent. Like we are not allowed to say "permanent" if we are willing to consider undoing it. I don't understand autists and anklebiters sometimes.
Anyway, Hylnka knows this, and his response has been to say (in various ways) "Fuck you and your rules."
There's another person active in the thread today who's so blatantly a banned user that I'm shocked nobody else has said anything, but they haven't been banned yet.
Generally speaking, we don't ban people we suspect of being banned users without a very high degree of certainty. This is mostly per @ZorbaTHut's guidance (if it were up to me, I'd be quicker to ban newly-rolled alts that are obviously just a troll recycling.) When I see someone beating a very familiar drum I may or may not ban them, depending on how well they are behaving, but mostly we'll let an obvious alt have enough rope to hang themselves with. This of course means we have many alts and returned permabanned users here right now, some of which I am very much aware of and some of which I haven't noticed or who've managed to fly under the radar thus far. No doubt they think they are very clever and have totally fooled us, but mostly we just don't find it worth our time to spend too much effort playing whack-a-mole. But we will whack them when they make themselves too obvious.
I remember an unofficial policy that if someone came back under a new pseudonym and changed their behavior sufficiently to plausibly avoid detection, that was a win too?
Yes, but you also have to not be determined to flip off the mods because you really want to let us know it's you and you're back neener fucking neener. Which is something Hlynka so far has been unable to do.
Not to mention if most people don't realize it's hlynka he can shed all the baggage of people who hated him for his mod decisions.
That would be credible, again, if he asked us. But I suspect Hlynka would never be able to stop being Hlynka. He'd be pretty obvious to most people quickly enough.
And I know you're reading this, Hlynka, and I'll say again what I've said before: I regret you had to be banned, I wish you hadn't forced us to do it, and I wish you would try to come back under honorable circumstances. But it's never going to happen while you're determined to show us how much contempt you have for us. It doesn't hurt my feelings, but I see no reason why we should consider amnesty for someone who very intentionally keeps trying to stick thumbs in our eyes.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
This is exactly the kind of disingenuous argumentation I'm talking about.
Your wording is very precise, yet weaselly: "a high up political figure." It implies much but says nothing. Because "high up political figure" implies a politician, or a government official, or at least someone with major influence over the government. But Charlie Kirk was mostly known for debating college students on YouTube and getting out the vote for Donald Trump. Sure, that makes him a public figure with some political influence, but he wasn't the chair of the Republican Party. He was a commentator. A gadfly. That's not what you meant when you tried to equate him with, say, a Hezballah commander or an Iranian state official.
It is a legitimate moral argument to make that the US or Israel should not target the latter with drone strikes. We can debate that. We can disagree about that. But show me the US assassinating a YouTuber.
So once again, let's be clear here: you are arguing that any US public figure, like, say, Ben Shapiro or Ezra Klein, would be legitimate targets because of US policies in the Middle East?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
Is your position that the US doesn't follow international rules of war and therefore all US citizens are legitimate targets of violence anywhere?
If so, I think that's a really stupid and immoral position to hold, but it's internally consistent. That said, you still can't argue that your enemies are being inconsistent because they don't agree with you.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
I have long been in disagreement with @FCfromSSC about this, and I tend to agree with your rebuttal in general. However, we really do seem to be moving apart in ways that at least could eventually end in the sort of worst-case scenario he is predicting. Your argument that "This will be forgotten in a few months, this incident is not actually going to set anything off" is the sort of thing that's true until it's not. This incident probably won't be the one that triggers a civil war. The next one probably won't be. The US is stable enough that we can have many, many such incidents accumulate and fade into the news cycle. But no one can predict the exact confluence of circumstances that will make that one time be the one that does it. How confident are you, really, that the Next Big Thing has a zero percent chance of being the torch that lights everything on fire?
I still don't think we're going to see a violent Red/Blue civil war in my lifetime. Or more accurately, I hope we don't, but I actually don't think it's likely. But I admit my priors have updated to it being less unlikely than I once thought.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
I'm regularly dismayed at the low quality of thinking displayed on topics like this. From you, from leftists in my feed, from general discourse. This sort of absurd equivalence is a case in point. You can absolutely believe any combination of "Assassinating people is good/bad" + "Killing people with drones is good/bad" without conflict. It all depends on the premises you start with. And you don't have to agree with any of those premises, but what you are doing is what a lot of the low-reflection normies do, which is pretend that everyone shares their premises, point out that the beliefs of other people do not match those premises, and then scream "Aha! Hypocrite!"
It is not hypocritical to believe something based on premises different from yours. It may be wrong, and you can absolutely make an argument that your position is moral and someone else's position is immoral. But that doesn't mean their beliefs are inconsistent.
So "Assassination versus drone strikes." The pro-drone strike "political class" thinks drone strikes are okay because they believe drone strikes are being used for a legitimate war purpose against military targets. If some civilians die, that is unfortunate collateral damage. Again (I will say this sloooowly): you don't have to agree with that. But that's the defense of drone strikes, and it doesn't make "Therefore they should be okay with public assassinations" some kind of gotcha. If you want to make that argument connect you have to make an argument that there is no moral distinction between drone strikes in a conflict zone (I say "conflict zone" and not "war zone" because a more sophisticated argument could actually present arguments for why some of these conflict zones should not be legitimate zones for military actions) and shooting people on college campuses with a rifle. It is an argument you can make! You could argue it from pacifism, or from the perspective that politics is war by other means, or any number of other angles that actually put a meaningful analysis behind "Why is shooting your enemy on a college campus worse than drone-striking him in a combat zone?" Or "How do we distinguish between combatants and non-combatants?"
But somehow I don't think that is actually your argument.
It is disingenuous to argue "They believe killing in one situation is right, therefore they cannot object to killing in any situation." It's like arguing "You think killing in self-defense is moral, therefore murder should be moral." Or conversely, "If murder is immoral, then capital punishment is immoral." The latter is absolutely something many people believe, but they are disingenuous when they claim pro-death penalty people are pro-murder, because pro-death penalty people do not agree with them about what constitutes murder.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
P.S. mild suspicion of Hlynka resurgence
Good eye.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
What is the purpose of this question? If he didn't post on these topics on reddit at the time, does that mean he's a hypocrite and his post is invalid?
If so, state that directly rather than asking passive-aggressive "gotcha" questions.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10d ago
Who is "they"?
One of the stated purposes of this place is for testing your shady thinking so if you want to concoct conspiracy theories and throw them against the wall to see if they stick, that's allowed, but you should put more effort into making them plausible enough to be worth debating. There's a difference between "testing your thinking" and "posting shower thoughts." And say what you mean directly.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10d ago
You know, I will go against the grain here and say I don't think using an AI to vet your posts is necessarily a bad thing. Especially if you're literally unable to tell in the heat of the moment that an invective-filled response will read as "heated," having an AI on your shoulder to say "Hey there bub, might want to dial that down" is, IMO, a very valid use case for AIs.
That said, having played with LLMs a lot, if you want it to tell you whether or not you are being "lucid" or "unreasonable," you really do need to have some very careful prompting techniques, because if you ask Grok or ChatGPT something like "Please read this post and tell me if I'm being calm and reasonable," the default response will tend to be validation and affirmation: it's not impossible to get an LLM to actually criticize or challenge you, but it's difficult to get something that really approximates "honest and objective feedback."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10d ago
Lots of fawning identity-related media coverage despite a marked lack of sales numbers makes Felker-Martin the sort of "stunt-casting" writer who generates buzz about an equally C-list title.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10d ago
In related but "lighter" news (if such can be said): y'all remember Gretchen Felker-Martin, the transwoman who wrote that post-apocalyptic zombie novel in which all men (technically anyone with testosterone) turn into monsters and there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion? Felker-Martin has in the past publicly advocated killing people such as JK Rowling and Jesse Singhal, and recently went on a rant about Brandon Sanderson and how he shouldn't be "tolerated" in the SFF community (because he's a Mormon, therefore he is funding "conversion camps").
So anyway, as I pointed out recently, C-list writers like Felker-Martin often get a gig writing superhero comics, and Felker-Martin was writing a new series for DC about Red Hood (a vigilante anti-hero who used to be one of the Robins). It got cancelled after one issue. Guess why?
Very on-brand. Bluesky account is now suspended. I am not sure this represents a "vibe shift" (DC and Marvel would always be likely to fire a writer who openly cheers an assassination) but it is interesting how quickly Felker-Martin got "cancelled."
By the way, @gattsuru, I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
Yes, the alternative to calming down and ceasing your belligerence is a timeout. That is always the alternative.
I do not think you are unhinged. I think you're angry and you're angry-posting. You may think your replies are perfectly lucid and even-tempered. They are not. I'm really trying to cut people some slack right now, but I'm running out of slack.
Because the alternative is a ban.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
The only valid presumption to be made by anyone who has watched the murder in question is that every single person there outside of the victim is a subhuman. Maybe they were born that way, maybe they were radicalized by media, or maybe it's a combination of both! But the display speaks for itself.
Does it? This is a pretty poor argument for such a broad generalization- yes, yes, I'm sure you only meant those exact people on that particular train.
This whole thread is full of people who really, really want to trot out their favorite race-war talking points. Some are doing so more or less calmly if unkindly, some are just throwing heat and flashing gang signs and boo lights. This response falls into the latter category. Knock it off.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
What if it did? Is this a question? A hope? An accusation? It looks to me like bait. Knock it off.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
You are both making shitty arguments, and between @Skibboleth's low-effort dismissiveness, your stooping to personal attacks, and the crappy quality of this thread in general, I am exercising great restraint in not handing out bans even to people who really probably need at least a day or two to go sit in a corner and take deep breaths. So this is your opportunity to back off and take deep breaths voluntarily.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
At a certain point in every fundamental disagreement, one person will say "I think X is true" and the other person will say "I think X is not true," and both parties have a choice of either pressing their point, with arguments and reasons, or saying "Nuh uh, you're wrong."
If you reach the latter stage, just stop. You do not win Motte Points for having the Official Last Word. If someone asserts something you think is incorrect and you can't be bothered to continue arguing why he's wrong, the correct follow-up is not "Reality says you're wrong."
These highly emotive threads are producing highly emotional arguments and the quality of argumentation is in inverse proportion to its heat.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11d ago
This is so low-effort it provides no argument, just a hiss. Other people are making actual arguments, including the one you are hissing in the direction of.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
13d ago
gobbledegook languages
Your posting is just the usual garden-variety xenophobia and racism, which is not in itself against the rules, but your sneering is getting over the top and bordering on pure culture warring, and given your history, I'm warning you now to dial it down because I can see you getting amped up and a ban is next.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
13d ago
This would be a fully generalizable argument that all group hatreds are justifiable and deserved reactions. The specific word choices you use make it obvious which group(s) you are referring to, but that does not make such reactions rational or earned. Jim, no doubt, did not "wake up one day and for no reason at all" decide to hate women and minorities. He will of course say it's because they oppress him, because giving them rights has made his life worse, because they are wicked and inferior and the world would be better if they didn't exist. But of course groups who hate all white people or men or Christians on general principle will likewise tell a story of being oppressed by their existence and gradually beginning to hate them through exposure, not "we just woke up one day and for no reason at all decided we hate you."
From right wing outlets, yes, I see a lot of lionizing about what a great guy he was. From left wing outlets, barely-restrained grave dancing following throat-clearing about how murder is bad. Mostly what I see from mainstream news is "This is awful and says something about politics/free speech/gun control in America right now" followed by a lot of throat-clearing about how Kirk was "controversial."
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