Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
No bio...
User ID: 297
How is wanting commitment-free sex from a rotating harem of virgins less "stupid and evil" than wanting commitment from a "chad" who probably won't commit?
Women don't want to fuck a beta who fundamentally despises them. Truly a mystery and an injustice wrapped in an enigma.
Are China's economic fundamentals sound? Do they not have a problem with cooked books and all the usual problems of a command economy that can make everything look like it's absolutely splendid until it's not? Do they not have their own demographic issues?
I am not "incurious" or saying I don't think China is a first world power. Of course it is. I am not "looking down" on them. Their technological progress, and their prodigious transformation since the days of the Cultural Revolution, is truly impressive. But that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of rot underneath. Or that they have already become the future hegemon, however much they may intend it.
There is a lot of ruin in a country, as they say- the West, and the US, are arguably coasting now until our own wheels come off, and China may be able to coast longer. Who knows? But it bemuses me that people who are quick to point out all the rot eating away at the West, despite us still being, in most respects, in a much superior position (which I do think is near a tipping point), take every piece of knob-slobbering news about Sino-ascendancy and their roaring economy and industrial output at face value. Because, good gosh, at least they aren't "woke."
Well, I need to disclaim that I have not personally lived in China. But:
Obsequiousness towards the state is the big one, but it's also a very socially conformist society. Uighurs and Tibetans are oppressed, yes, but it's also not a great place to be a Christian (my understanding is that you can pray and go to church, but evangelizing is highly frowned on and anything that smacks of "activism" will get you slapped down in a hurry). The things you cannot talk about except in a state-approved way are numerous-- Tienmen square, Taiwan, anything critical of the government. There is a reason they have the "Great Internet Wall of China" that, while very porous and easy to bypass via VPN, is still a crime which can get you in trouble if caught. If you find yourself in legal trouble, forget about any of the due processes you are accustomed to in the West.
It's honestly baffling to me that anyone would say "China seems fine, better than being forced to pray at the altar of DEI." I mean, even if you are in the wokest of woke companies, no one is forced to "pray at the altar of DEI." You may be risking your career if you share your spiciest takes about HBD or male/female differences, but you cannot literally be arrested. Meanwhile in the street or here on the Internet you can call the president a retard, a corrupt tool of oligarchs, a Zionist agent, a pedophile, or anything else, and nobody can arrest you for that either, and you're highly unlikely to be fired even if you said it publicly on X. Try doing that in China. (I believe they also persecute you for "hate speech" in China as well: they may not care much about "DEI" as such, but start posting about how much you hate Jews or blacks or women and eventually you will attract negative attention with an actual government impact on your life.)
Our 2nd Amendment enthusiasts have many valid complaints about the breaches of their Constitutional rights, but you don't have even a shadow of those rights in China. Right now the USA is in turmoil over protesters versus ICE agents. I think some of the folks in this forum would not be unhappy if the National Guard starting machine-gunning protesters in the streets, but most people, even those who are strongly pro-ICE, agree that annoying purple-haired lesbians should be allowed to protest in a non-vehicular-homicidal way. In China, machine guns and tanks would be a real possibility. And not just for your annoying purple-haired lesbians.
Do they have to "worship at the altar of DEI"? Well, their version of DEI is called the social credit score. Would you like the government tracking everything you do and say and whether it is "anti-social" enough to start limiting your access to services, travel, credit, and being put under increased monitoring by the state? That seems better, really?
Again, for the average Chinese person, most of this is probably invisible, and for the affluent, life in the big cities is fine. Chinese have their own forums and social media and their versions of 4chan and the like. But all the stories we share here, about people being persecuted in various ways for wrongthink? Multiply that by an order of magnitude in China. Try being a "normie" Chinese with a few problems, some grievances about the system, or in a bit of legal and/or financial trouble. Try being a real wrongthinker.
I'll take (often dramatically, hyperbolically, catastrophically overstated) DEI bullshit over that.
Other than being a totalitarian police state with no civil rights except those the government pretends to provisionally grant you, and most of its meritocracy and probably its economic numbers being as fake and gay as ours, sure, China is great.
Look, this gets trotted out fairly regularly about a lot of places that are on the surface technocratic modern states with a glitzy veneer where, as long as you are not a dissident, a minority or outsider, or basically anyone disfavored by the state, things are pretty fine. People say similar things about the Gulf states. I remember a few years ago, a lot of "based" trads were saying similar things about Russia: sure, maybe its kind of a little bit corrupt and run by oligarchs and Putin is a dictator who has people who displease him thrown out of ninth floor windows, but he cosplays as a Christian and they don't put up with woke nonsense.
We don't hear that quite so much since the beginning of the Ukraine war, but you still see a little of it here from our Russophiles, who mostly still love Russia because it's not globohomo woke. Leftists put Ukrainian flags in their profiles, therefore invading Ukraine might be... good?
Even the USSR and Nazi Germany were kind of okay for a lot of the population most of the time, and if the thing you hate above all else is anything that Western leftists like, then you can make a case that they were... good because they didn't have pride parades or hordes of imported Africans, I guess.
But I think very few people moaning about how awful things are in the West would actually find they prefer living in China. Unless you are the sort of person who can keep your head down and eat shit your entire life. People angry about having to sit through DEI sessions really underestimate the level of shit-eating that's required in places like China.
You and @Skibboleth (who are so similar in posting styles that it's not surprising I often confuse your usernames and forget who's the low-effort sneering rightie and who's the low-effort sneering leftie- like seriously, even your mod logs are almost identical):
Shall we just resort to "libtard" and "republithug" now? How about "Magtard" and "shitlib"? Go ahead, bring out all your best disses that really killed it on Twitter in 2016.
No, actually, don't. Go elsewhere for pistols at dawn, or get a room, or whatever, but knock this crap off. Neither of you will be a loss if I just say "Pox on the both of you."
Please stop lying and implying I think something that I did not say I think. ICE never killed anybody "to send the message". The particular officer killed someone to stop that someone from driving over him with her SUV. Lying is bad. Please stop doing it.
People often have radically different takes, so radically different that they think "I cannot believe you actually think that, you are obviously lying." Or someone will say "So it's better to ?" and the indignant response is "I DID NOT SAY THAT YOU LIAR!"
None of this improves the discussion. In fact, it basically ends it. When you're calling each other liars, you're pretty much at the endpoint of the discussion. This is why I almost always mod people for calling someone else a liar. You are not a mindreader. People do usually actually believe the things they are saying. They may be ill-informed. They may be guilty of spurious reasoning. They may be arguing sloppily. And yeah, sometimes they might just be making up shit to win an argument. Not that I am saying any of that is specifically true here, but what I am saying is you'd better be on point when you call someone a liar.
I am not sure why this is the biggest scissor of the year (well, so far) but people need to chill the fuck out.
Elaborate, or refrain from comments that are nothing more than "Nuh uh!"
You're obviously arguing in bad faith
Fuck right off
People need to chill the fuck out, is what they need to do.
You've been warned repeatedly, though the last time was over a year ago. So I'm only giving you a two-day ban. But control your temper.
Since I got tagged in here:
I have no real opinion on your post that set this off, and believe you that you didn't use AI to write it.
I do think your style has gotten worse since you became such an AI enthusiast, mostly in that it is more wordy and "tryhard." I do strongly suspect it's the LLM influence, which you think is a good thing because they "write well," but the thing is, mostly they don't. They write very fluently. They can fill space with words, words that sometimes sound lyrical or profound, but... it's empty.
It's hard to describe without going into a much longer post about writing style, but it's very similar to the debate over AI art. I am not an AI art hater, I think occasionally it can produce really cool stuff, but mostly it's good for outputting placeholder art that gets the job done... you know, D&D characters or "I have a picture in my head that would be cool to see rendered but I don't want to pay someone to draw it" or bland corporate stuff. Notwithstanding Scott's AI Art Turing test, most AI art is very, very recognizeable as AI. You know the look: a little too polished, a little too saturated, a little too uniform in tone and shade and crosshatching (even when prompter tries to make it draw in different styles), an emptiness in the eyes... the illustration might be perfect in form, we don't see six-fingered hands or necklaces that meld with shoulders as much anymore, but it's still full of tiny details and stylistic choices that a human artist wouldn't make. And it's all very samey, like imagine every single artist in the world graduating from CalArts and trying as hard as possible to replicate the CalArts style.
AI writing is the same!
It's not just the tells (em-dashes, "It's not X, it's Y"), which like six-fingered hands and necklaces melding into shoulders, LLMs are starting to be trained not to do so predictably. It's the sameness, the pseudo-profound verbosity, the fluency that mistakes many pretty-sounding-words chained together in grammatically correct sentences as saying something prettily.
You are starting to write like a guy who reads LLM output and thinks "Yeah, that's good writing!" As if all those CalArts students were starting to take their art classes from ChatGPT and imitating LLM style instead.
Maybe in the future, maybe even in the near future, AI will improve enough to make this moot. We don't have LLMs that can write entire novels in one shot yet, and even with lots of prompting, the novels they can write are absolute crap. But I have no doubt people will read them, just like people read progressive fantasies and litrpgs that are absolute crap in terms of writing style (* cough * Reverend Insanity * cough * ) There is no accounting for taste, and some people don't actually care about style and craft and skill beyond basic get-the-job-doneness. "Give me words that tell a story, and make the story interesting. Give me pixels that form big round boobies and a waifu fuck-me face."
That's... fine, I guess? But don't mistake it for good.
I think that fact that you are defensive about this is kind of weird. Like you are insecure either about your own writing, or about the potential of LLMs, or about the intersection of those two things.
There's a writer on Medium I kind of casually follow for his trainwreck-of-a-life stories, and he gets dragged regularly for writing posts that scream "ChatGPT." He has admitted he uses AI for research, outlining, sometimes phrasing, but "he writes it all himself" and after another post that got a bunch of people calling him an LLM, he wrote a long, huffy, defensive post about how this is his writing style, this is how he's always written, ChatGPT is copying him, not the other way around, and fuck the haters. And, well, I guess I believe him if he says he's not actually letting ChatGPT write his posts for him (I don't, really, I think he's letting ChatGPT "outline" his posts and then he does some editing and tweaking and calls it "his writing"). But the degree of his defensiveness really convinced me he knows he's using too much AI in his writing.
Note that I am not saying you're doing the same thing, just... I think you know you're outsourcing too much to AI, and now you're getting pissy when people point it out.
On that note:
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AI detectors are themselves not that reliable, since the ability to detect AI writing is a moving target, so posting "An AI detector said my writing is 100% human" is probably not that convincing to most people. (Just as many people have had the displeasure of seeing something they know they wrote themselves tagged as "almost certainly AI" by an AI detector.)
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I do not think we should be using mod logs to tell people "You are a crap poster so I dismiss your argument."
There are other options besides automatically prosecuting any officer who shoots someone on the assumption that a trial will sort it out. Granted, I doubt ICE's ability to conduct professional internal investigations, but in theory, that is how a professional police force would handle it.
But only one of those sides is making a habit of claiming immunity
Good's side is definitely claiming protesters should be immune from consequences (to include being arrested or forcibly removed from the area, I don't mean they deserve to be shot), and had Good in fact injured or killed the officer and not been shot herself, I am confident you'd see a lot of anti-ICE people saying she should face zero consequences.
No one is really (openly) claiming that the person who killed Charlie Kirk should face zero consequences, because "You should literally be able to murder someone in public and not be charged" is actually insane. (In Good's case, whether it was "murder" is in dispute, in Kirk's case, no one disputes it was murder.) But people were certainly celebrating it, piling on anyone who expressed such tepid sentiments as "Hey, celebrating a husband and father's murder is bad mmkay?", and would almost certainly fist-pump an acquittal for his killer.
You know what you haven't done? Present any evidence that the poster you responded to here made a claim incompatible with the available evidence.
I do not think the poster I responded to here made a claim incompatible with the available evidence.
Regardless of whether it's in the rules or not, what do you think you're even arguing here?
What do you think I'm arguing here?
That's an honest question, because you seem to be accusing me of "pounding the table" for a particular argument, when I have not taken a side on Reed at all, other than gesturing at what I consider to be a number of possibilities, which I explicitly stated were not equally probable.
I infer from your post that you have slotted me into the "anti-ICE, pro-Reed" side, and are seeing everything I post through that lens. Which is what most people do, because if you don't immediately and vigorously sneer and cheer for the right side you're clearly carrying water for the other. This is inane and mindkilling, but here is where even the Motte is now.
If you really wanted to know what I think specifically about any given proposition, you could ask. But people don't do that, they just assume.
My argument is that most of the people on both sides are guilty of motivated reasoning and would change positions if the tribes were reversed, if Reed had been MAGA and Ashli Babbit had been woke. You shouldn't be confused about this, because that's what I said in plain English. But instead you seem to be trying to dig for my unstated tribal priors. You think you know what they are, and you don't.
Yes, so, people may indeed be backing their tribe and justifying actions on that basis. But no one literally believes it's legal to run over a cop. Snarky "hth" "explainers" are a very bad way to engage with someone you think is making a bad argument. Is this what you really want threads to look like here?
So, just to be clear, your mental model of the OP is that he literally believes it's legal to run over police officers?
Even in the unlikely event one believes this, we still wish people to engage without unnecessary sarcasm and condescension.
Do you think he's actually confused about the legality of hitting police officers with your car?
Are you genuinely trying to be helpful? Because you think he genuinely needed that to be explained to him?
No, you are not. You're being sarcastic in a condescending manner, which feels good and snarky and takes much less effort than actually rebutting an argument.
I would in fact wager you didn't even read the entire post. At most you skimmed it while composing your cutting response in your head.
"Do not agree" is not the same as "do not understand." I understand exactly what you are saying. You seem incapable of understanding what I am saying.
First, you are being an ass.
Buddy, I wish I could grant myself as much latitude as I grant you.
I didn’t ask you to mod for an opinion I disliked.
Yes, you did. You do not insist on this scrupulous adherence to legal definitions for arguments you agree with. You want him modded because he annoys you and makes arguments that anger you.
I’m pointing out the other poster made an inflammatory factual claim that is obviously false but you won’t do shit about it.
That's correct. We won't do shit about someone saying something that may or may not be factual.
The factual nature of the claim is the point you should be arguing. We do not adjudicate truth values of claims made by posters.
Second, you stated it would be reasonable to mod if the other poster claimed ICE was killing a bunch of people. Well, if I made that claim and then said “when I use the word kill, I mean arrest” you would rightfully see that as fucking bullshit.
Yes, because that's a specious, inapplicable comparison. Someone who uses "kidnap" referring to arrests they consider to be immoral and illegitimate (but are legal under the law) may be legally inaccurate but everyone understands what the meaning and intent is, and if you think "That's stupid, that's not kidnapping!" you are allowed to rebut with that. But you don't want to rebut, you just want us to tell him he's not allowed to use words in a way that grinds your gears. No, we will not do that.
You are pretending (I use that word intentionally) that it's the same thing as saying "kill" to mean "arrest." But doing that would be legitimately confusing. No one would understand you actually meant "arrest." When @LiberalRetvrn says "Kidnapping" you know exactly what he means. You are not confused, and he is not trying to confuse you. You disagree with how he's using the term. Fine.
Now let it go, you have nothing else to say on this that will be anything other than (more) annoying.
Kidnapping suggests illegal. Where is the illegality?
That's a fair question. Address it to the person you are arguing with.
Oh, I see. You don't want to argue with him. You just want us to shut him up.
You are failing to articulate a broader principle than "This poster annoys me, make him stop." But sure, if it soothes you to believe it's about protecting lefties, you go right ahead and tell yourself that.
This is particularly amusing given the guff we're taking elsewhere.
You mod for much less absurd things.
I am sure your opinion of what other absurd things I have modded for is equally reasonable and principled.
Do you actually have a case in mind where a pro-life activist drove a car at the police and got shot? I can't recall any, but maybe I missed it.
But the entire dispute is whether Good used violent action. I don't see any leftists who are saying "Yes, she tried to run down an ICE officer and she was justified." Rather, they are claiming she panicked/she didn't see him/he wasn't in danger and shooting her was unnecessary.
In the equivalent situation, no, I don't think the pro-life community would defend a pro-life activist who was actually trying to run over a cop, but they would defend someone in an ambiguous situation like this, where it is not at all clear what anyone's intentions or situational awareness was.
I thought about suggesting a megathread and then didn't get to it. My bad, but you're right, it would have been better to create a megathread than having a dozen people each creating a new top level post.
I apologize for going in on you so hard. Against my initial, wiser judgment, I have found myself invested in this ridiculous case, and the more I am assailed by what I perceive to be low-effort culture warring bombs thrown by rightists and leftists alike (I genuinely do consider both sides at this point-at least at the edges of the argument-to be bad faith, dishonest, and actively destructive to this country), the more disgusted I am. For some reason that manifested in my response to your post, which I really did perceive to be kind of dismissive of the brutality of the police and the state wielded against its "enemies." While I do think you are frequently oblivious (or at least, indifferent) to people outside your social class, it was unfair of me to accuse you of being pro-tyranny.
I'm not in any way endorsing anarchy. On the oppression-anarchy spectrum I'd be closer to @2rafa's POV than the typical DSA or antifa or what-have-you activist (and they would consider me as fascist as her). I agree that at a certain level of anarchy, it's better to have a brutal warlord who at least keeps the bandits at bay than a hellscape of marauding gangs.
That said, tyranny is bad too, and the Warlord's friends telling me life is better under the Warlord's absolute rule is not going to be very convincing.
"Inflammatory" is subjective. We don't apply it every time someone says something that pisses you off. Arguably almost every argument made here is inflammatory to someone, and unsurprisingly, people who don't agree with the argument made typically consider it to have been presented with insufficient evidence.
I already pointed out the answer to your specific case: charitably, @LiberalRetvrn does consider the people ICE is arresting to be "us" and he does consider their actions to be lawless and tantamount to "kidnapping." I am not speaking for @LiberalRetvrn here, but this is definitely a perspective common on the left, and I'm sure you know this. That this make you angry does not make it "inflammatory" such that we're going to mod people who say it. (Nor should you make any assumptions about whether or not I personally agree with the argument.)
As a meta-comment, one of the failures of the Motte is that while in theory, we are here to debate and argue and test ideas, in principal most people just want validation, venting, and affirmation. When they see an argument they don't like- especially from an ideological opponent, especially someone whose tone or style or specific POV really pisses them off - rather than saying "Ah, someone with a challenging perspective to take on!" or "Hmm, a worthy opponent?" they rush for the report button, and then yell at the mods for not shutting the mf up.
Now here's a concrete example: "ICE is killing dozens of people every day!" would be an inflammatory and falsifiable claim that you could legitimately demand some evidence for. "ICE is kidnapping people" - well, you're going to have an argument over what constitutes "kidnapping." And that's okay.

You're missing the underlying point because I was being sardonic. Most women do not, in fact, refuse to settle for anything less than a 6/6/6. Even nice and pretty women!
I do not believe the incel exists who couldn't find a woman, and probably a pleasant enough woman, to be a partner. What they generally can't find is a woman who meets their various standards of attractiveness, personality, virginal shy-yet-freakiness, and willingness to be a bangmaid.
Somehow having standards that may be out of your league is evil and unjust on the part of women, but reasonable and tragic on the part of men.
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