Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Well, I don’t appreciate being insulted by being called naive
Well, the alternative is believing you're just being disingenuous, which is more insulting imo.
You seem to define a lot of things according to how you personally feel about them. JK Rowling definitely considers herself a feminist, and on every single issue except trans women, she is probably on the same page as you. Yet you feel comfortable asserting that she is not a feminist because you are a third wave postmodernist feminist.
My opinion is that you are in fact a woman because you have "titties and estrogen" and that woman is not purely a social construct. You can disagree, and maybe there is some way you could prove me wrong, though I doubt it. But it doesn't mean I cease to consider you a person.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I think you are being a little naive here. Not disingenuous, but you are presenting something of a straw man. You're basically making the Marie Shear argument: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."
Now to steelman this, I know what feminists would say is "Duh, we know anti-feminists don't think we're literally not human, we mean they don't treat us as people like themselves with agency and full equal rights." Which would be fair enough, but if you look around (even in a place like the Motte with no shortage of anti-feminists), you will find very few people who think women aren't "people." Yes, we do have a few posters who literally do think women are p-zombies or should be property, but they are a minority.
The people here who oppose feminism are mostly not tradcons who want to repeal the 19th (though there are some of those too). They are people who have grievances with feminism as it manifests today, particularly third wave or "intersectional" feminism. Such "currently-not-widely-adopted" feminist philosophies would be things like #BelieveWomen, which is a classic case of motte-and-bailey, the Motte being "take women's claims of being harassed or assaulted seriously and don't assume they're making it up," the bailey being "Believe any woman uncritically and never express doubt about a rape story," even if it doesn't pass the sniff test.
Intersectional feminism is what also brought us trans ideology, which got many previously feminist women terfed out. JK Rowling, unambiguously a committed feminist, is now called a fascist and worst by many modern feminists, simply because she doesn't agree that trans women are women.
I try to be sympathetic to feminist arguments, because I do in fact believe women are people, but very much of modern feminist writing seems to fall within the stereotype often described here of women wanting all the privileges, none of the responsibility. The memes are kind of mean, but they also aren't... wrong. (I note that the linked article makes an earnest argument that "AKSHUALLY the problem is when men flirt and it's unreciprocated!" Which entirely misses the point.) I think of people like Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valente, who were vanguards of modern third wave feminism and are some of the most bad faith writers I've ever had the misfortune of once taking seriously. They are practically memes themselves, with zero self-awareness.
Saying "feminism is feminism" and you don't split it into "waves" is kind of like a Christian saying he doesn't split Christianity into denominations. Well, great, you can say "Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship with God" all you want, but it is, in fact, a religion, and people ostracize, cancel, and even kill each other over denominational differences. I don't know if I can think of examples of feminists literally killing each other over sectarian differences, but as JK Rowling would point out, they most certainly care about them even if you claim they don't exist.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
It's not 80%-90%, but yes, someone who is a consistently liberal poster will unfortunately stay in the new user filter because they get downvoted so much the system cannot distinguish between "someone with unpopular opinions" and "troll." We're actually working on a solution.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
At this point I am so exasperated with the moderation that the answer to that is "yes", which of course categorically disqualifies me. So, reinterpreting your question, the reason I am reporting is not that I want to be a moderator. If I were to aim to become one, what I did (picking fights with and getting myself personally loathed by most of the current staff, antagonizing the ideological core of the community and saying we actually need more of that, ...) would be among the dumber approaches - I should instead have made a point to defend the mods in public, posted solidly right-wing but slightly more thoughtfully and measuredly than everyone else, and perhaps helped Zorba with backend work at some juncture.
Why do you think the current staff loathes you? I have no negative feelings about you. Your record is 2 AAQCs and no warnings! You're a good poster. You're just on the left which means you get downvoted a lot. Sorry about that, but that is how the community is, as you've observed.
Whether or not Zorba uses his "doge" mechanism next time he needs new mods, the way to become a mod is not by kissing our asses.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
@Amadan I am aware that being a rightist partisan is not very conducive to the kind of space that the moderates wish to nurture.
We aren't trying to nurture a "moderate" space. I personally am a moderate, but many of the mods are not and being "moderate" is not the Motte's ethos. We have lots of rightist partisans here (and a few leftist ones). The problem is not being partisan; the problem is being antagonistic and inflammatory just to dunk on your enemies.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
You quoted my point. Yes, most people choose a narrative that flatters their biases. My biases are that male feminists are mostly performative but many are sincere, and anti-wokes tend to rely on Chinese robber fallacies.
There is, imo, no evidence to support the theory that male feminists are more likely to be sex pests, nor any evidence that they are less likely.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
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No.
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I disagree with you that we treat Jewposters differently.
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No.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Speaking for myself, free speech is one of my highest principles. I don't know if it's literally my highest principle - no, I probably wouldn't die for it or give up my career to defend Holocaust deniers - but I have been as principled as I can be for much longer than I've been a mod.
That you keep accusing me and netstack and other people of doing things we clearly and objectively have not done says quite a bit about your principled commitment to truth or lack thereof.
It may interest you to know that @netstack recently chided me for being too aggressive towards you, so I have been trying to go easier on you, but when every time you jump into a thread it's yet another round of "You mods (and especially Amadan) are secretly trying to purge all the witches and get rid of everyone whose values don't align with yours" - well, this is so obviously false, it's hard not to see this as anything other than you making shit up because you want to pick a fight.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Would it be possible for the mods to aim to make a public statement on every post that receives more than a certain number of reports, even if just to explain why they disagree with the reporters' view of it violating rules?
Fuck no.
Well, maybe if someone else wants to do it. But no, we get enough flack when we do mod posts and people are unhappy about it; now you want an open forum for people to bitch every time we don't mod a post? Fuck if I'm going to explain myself for every post I mod or don't mod. (As for "a certain number of reports," it's pretty rare for a post to receive a large number of reports and not get modded. Usually those are unambiguously pretty bad.)
Look, I think we are pretty damn transparent. We usually explain ourselves, we let people argue with us, we engage civilly on threads where people are calling us shitty mods. Sometimes we are too transparent, because it just invites ankle-biting and rules-lawyering. I go through phases where I will patiently explain to someone why I modded them and let them argue with me for an entire thread, and phases where I just say "Banned, bye" because I feel like it's a waste of time explaining things to bad-faith grudge-holders who don't really care about our reasoning, only that we didn't mod the way they think we should.
We do read every single report. Including yours. I would guess we actually act on about 5% of all reports.
Why does any particular mod not mod a particular post? It might be because the mod thinks it's okay, it might be because it's borderline and the mod isn't sure whether they think it merits action. It might be because the mod thinks it merits action but doesn't want to be the one to make the call, for various reasons. I will frequently look at a mod queue full of "borderline" posts and think "I don't want to deal with these right now." Maybe I don't have time to think about them, or maybe I'm in a bad mood and am afraid I might be too trigger-happy, so I will hope some other mod makes the decision. Then maybe I see three days later no one has made the call and it's still in the queue, and I sigh and approve it because clearly no one felt strongly about it and I'm not going to come and ban them three days later.
As it happens, that particular post by @crushedoranges was discussed in the mod channel. It was definitely borderline. We were split about 50/50 between "It's a bad post but not a rules violation" and "This deserves a warning." In the end we defaulted to no action. On a different day, a different mod might have warned or banned him. @crushedoranges posts a lot of crappy comments like that so he's on thin ice, but this time he skated. Does that mean we are not always 100% consistent and that sometimes a much worse comment will pass while a less bad comment earns the poster a ban? Yes, yes it does mean that! Yes, that definitely happens!
So it goes.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Statistically we can say that most such terrorists are Muslims, and we can point to clear and historical causes for this which even terrorists themselves would agree with. They actually tell us their motivations!
Is there any statistical evidence of most sex pests (however you want to define that) identify as feminists?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I think you are at the very least negatively predisposed to the anti-woke
Not really, or at least, no more than I am negatively predisposed to the woke. As I suspected, you have a poor understanding of what I think. That's okay, I get that a lot.
You say that based on no more evidence than the anti-woke say 'hey why do all these male feminists keep turning out to be sex pests?' but it must flatter your biases as you don't look any deeper.
I just wrote about all the theories that both feminists and anti-feminists present as to why "all these male feminists keep turning out to be sex pests," and why I think they are basically Chinese robber fallacies. Unless you have some stronger evidence. It's not about my biases (because you are wrong about them). It's because there isn't really any evidence that I am aware of that male feminists are more likely to be sex pests (or that sex pests are more likely to be male feminists).
I do have some friends like that, but before the meme I thought male feminists were sycophantic, sanctimonious and misled but trying their best like everyone else. At that time, pretty much every man I knew called himself a male feminist. It was noticing how my pattern recognition system for believing stories about sex pestery kept getting tripped up if the accused was a male feminist that made the meme resonate.
So are you saying that the majority of the male feminists you knew turned out to be sex pests?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
This is pretty low effort and is nothing more than you using your hammer on anything that looks like a nail. Nothing in your post is directly relevant to male feminists (except the word "feminist"). That sign meme you are so fond of pointing at - what kids are being diddled here?
You've been warned about this before, quite a few times, but it's been a while since your last ban so I'm just warning you not to start up again with the stream-of-consciousness snarling at your enemies or the bans will resume and escalate steeply.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
The Jew-haters' brigade is right, tbh. Their comments mostly aren't treated the same. I just happen to think that's a good thing and think you should just ban anything that crosses the line to clear anti-semitism, while they don't.
Should we also ban anything that crosses the line to clear racism, misogyny, *phobia, etc.?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Well, you can assume that, but I think you'd be making a few incorrect assumptions. Like for starters, do you think you know what my biases are regarding male feminists?
I would start with the null hypothesis: being a self-proclaimed male feminist provides no information one way or the other about a man's likelihood to be a sex pest.
All the theories about why it's a "red flag" (theories that are popular with both feminists and anti-feminists) seem to be largely anecdotal. I don't find those theories implausible, necessarily, but they all sound like just so stories. You know this male feminist, he turns out to be a creep, you invent a story to explain why a male feminist would turn out to be a sex pest. For feminists, it's to make sense of why a man who's supposed to be one of the "good ones" isn't; for anti-feminists, it's to explain why there must be something wrong with a man who'd embrace feminism.
This is no different than liberals and conservatives who make up theories about What's Wrong With Those People, shellacking a coat of evolutionary psychology onto it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I agree with @2rafa that these are all different archetypes who are seen in the wild, but I don't think there is any reason to believe that being a "male feminist" says much at all about how likely any particular man is to be a sex pest. Obviously people who dislike feminism and/or male feminists love theories that flatter this bias: of course they're predators; of course their feminism is performative; of course they don't actually believe what they're saying and it's just another tactic to get into women's pants; of course they act just like any other man and delude themselves that being a "feminist" absolves them. I doubt male feminists are more (or less) predatory in general, though. It's just when a particularly famous one (like Neil Gaiman or Joss Whedon) is found sticking his dick in someone he shouldn't have, it's broadcast widely because (a) they're famous! and (b) given their loud, performative feminism, which annoys anti-feminists, of course the latter will delight in crowing about their downfall and holding them up as a "typical" male feminist when in fact they are not.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Second, excluding the very top tiers of government, the job is one that you take as a middle class job of last resort.
In addition to what @SSCReader said, this is simply incorrect. And kind of ironic, because when people complain about the "generous salaries and great benefits" that feds get, that is only kind of true with respect to feds doing blue collar or very light white collar work. Admin assistants, HR people (hate them all you want but someone has to actually process paperwork for new hires, retirees, pay issues, etc.), installation and logistics, motor pool and janitorial services, etc., as well as many specialized government functions like IRS auditors and accountants - these are jobs where a GS employee might make more that his or her private sector counterpart. The job stability is a further bonus, which means many people do not see a government job as a "middle class job of last resort."
Now if you look at tech workers- software developers, engineers, research scientists, etc. - they are usually making considerably less than their private sector counterpart. They might take the government job because they want the stability and to get out of the contractor look-for-a-new-job-every-two-years rat race, they might take it because they want the work-life balance (government workers are almost never required to work more than a standard 40 hour week), they might genuinely believe in the mission of the agency they are with or find it to be interesting work. But they are generally speaking not losers who couldn't get a job anywhere else either.
Your "isolated mandarins" mostly applies to the folks at the top who do nothing but attend meetings all day in DC, or a certain tier of low-level workers who got an in early (maybe with a "useless communications degree" but often with no degree at all) and have never known anything but government work.
These people mostly don't live in ghettos (though many do live in working class neighborhoods in Baltimore or DC), but they mostly aren't living in those McMansions in NOVA either (those aren't government workers, those are lobbyists, contractors, lawyers, and other politician-adjacent people). They know plenty about the area and have plenty of contact with "the real world." I don't know where you get this fantasy that all government workers are "true believers" living in some rarefied academic bubble, and as for the idea that they just "uncritically believe anything popular that they've been told" - well, speaking of generalizations based on anecdata, have you ever actually met a FAANG employee? (Yeah, we have some here - and my point stands. Everyone, especially here, thinks they are an independent critical thinker unswayed by what moves the herd.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Uh, speak for yourself, dude.
Not everyone who's a military vet or into guns makes a big deal out of it.
We definitely also have a fair number of Super Bowl appreciators and Sunday church service attendees.
You're right that Scott's original classification of Red and Blue tribe now tends to get inaccurately rounded to "conservatives and liberals." But I'm not sure how many Red Tribe liberals or Blue Tribe conservatives we have here. (Certainly more of the latter than the former.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Please don't post low-effort one liners just to express your outrage.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Okay, but are we also going to stop subsidizing treatment for smokers with lung cancer, alcoholics with cirrhosis, and fat people with ... everything?
Yes.chad is an argument I'll accept (though not agree with). But if you start finely parsing which people should be let die for their moral failures, then you're just making disgust-based judgments. There is much more of a public health argument to be made for treating STDs. (The health problems of smokers, drunks, and fatties generally do not impact other people directly.)
(That said, yeah, I also find it galling to pay for treatment for people who have preventable catastrophic health bills.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
The post in which he announced The Schism points to a Rittenhouse thread (NOT a boogaloo thread, though he has on other occasions referenced those)
Really. Let's take a look.
- Why are you building this?
While /r/TheMotte is and will always be intended as a neutral meeting ground for divergent perspectives, it's developed a strong consensus on a wide range of issues. I—like, I suspect, many of you—identify strongly with this comment on political affiliation from /u/cincilator. /u/RulerFrank expanded on a similar point the other day. I'm not here to raise the tired debate of whether or how right-wing /r/themotte is. Instead, I'll simply say that a large chunk of the prevailing culture here is overtly hostile towards my strongly-felt values, as illustrated most eloquently by this comment.
"This comment" being (sorry FC):
I wrote a long reply to this, and given my heart rate and breathing by the end of it, it's probably for the best that I accidentally deleted it before I could post. I was literally seething.
I think I understand where you're coming from pretty well, but I likewise find your views profoundly repugnant, to a degree that charity becomes difficult. Specifically, the appeal to statistics is a complete non-starter for me. The attacker is the one choosing to roll the dice, and the defender is the one being forced to live with the consequences. Even if the chances of death are fairly low, the person who gets a bad roll is still absolutely fucked, and even the people who get a good roll are still significantly worse off than they should be... and for what? So that people who deliberately chose to force the roll can rest assured that they will never have to deal with the consequences? And don't appeal to the police and the legal process. I've been watching the police stand down for these rioters for half a decade. I've been watching the few who do get arrested plea-bargain for probation, or be simply released with no charges. I've been watching their victims suck it up with no recourse, or attempt to defend themselves and then get hit with the full force of the criminal justice system.
You appear to want a system where the overall danger is as low as possible. I want a system where the danger is apportioned to the people who volunteer to experience it. I have axiomatic faith that my system will result in lower overall danger as well, given the incentives, and seeing people arguing for the welfare of violent criminals over that of their victims- and I see no other way to interpret your argument- prompts instant volcanic rage. Especially since this violence is so culturally and politically partisan in nature.
...I'm not sure where to go with the conversation at this point. I do not think I share a common understanding of peace and justice with you. I don't want to live in the same country as people like you. I don't want people like you to rule people like me anywhere, ever. Preventing such an outcome seems like a moral imperative.
...And this is the result given that I know in my bones that you are a deeply, uncommonly decent and good person, at least in the abstract. This is mistake theory breaking down in the best possible scenario.
I'll leave it there. Stay safe and be well.
That was in response to a Rittenhouse thread, but it was the "I don't want to live in the same country as people like you" post.
TW, referring to that post immediately after linking to it, said:
More alarming for me is the feeling that there's a sharp uptick in what I'd describe as radicalization here: people proposing, and cheering, violent conflict against their enemies in a number of ways, including groups that viewed widely include my loved ones. It's hard to look at people the same way after that sort of line has been crossed, you know?
I'd rather not get into another back-and-forth like I had with Steve and Arjin below, in which we're both dissecting what other people actually meant when they posted something four years ago, but it is plainly obvious to me that TW created the Schism because in his own words, he felt that too many people (including FC) were expressing a desire for violent conflict, including against his ingroup.
This is not me saying Trace was right, or that FC meant to do violence to him, or that I agree with him about Rittenhouse, or any of the other things I have already rebutted. It is me saying you are wrong that Trace's problem was "people advocating for lethal self-defense." That's an extremely disingenuous way to frame a post about a specific case, and how he responded to others' reaction to it, as Trace creating the Schism and leaving the Motte because he had an ideological opposition to any use of lethal force in self-defense.
Also: your "gay furry" crack is in fact a cheap shot. Yes, everyone knows he is a gay furry. He says he's a gay furry. He's not ashamed of it. But calling him a gay furry every time you to refer to why you don't respect him is not just a "by the way, he's a gay furry." Come on. If you want to keep highlighting how contemptible he is because you consider him a sexual deviant, do that, but don't keep calling him a gay furry and then deny why you're doing it. Why don't you ever refer to him as an "ex-Mormon" or "military veteran," which he also is? Not the same valence.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Okay, well - at this point we're both kind of speaking after the fact about what we think other parties meant. I personally read FC's post at the time as someone about to go off the deep end and basically saying "I hate you all!" but I did not think he was literally threatening to go kill people (though I was worried he was starting to consider it). I read Trace's response as saying that he felt, not personally threatened by FC, but that FC (and other accelerationists) were no longer interested in good faith discussion or coexistence, were at least hinting at violence, and thus he no longer wanted to interact with them.
It probably would do us well to actually go reread the original posts (I'm sure my memory could stand to be refreshed as well) if we are going to keep referring to them, but unless I can plead for someone else with bookmarks to post them, you're gonna have to wait until I have the time to go looking.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I know what you're talking about, and I'm asking you to link it, so others can make up their mind if it actually says anything about killing Trace
I'll give you and @SteveAgain the benefit of the doubt and assume I communicated poorly: I do not think FC at any point said he wanted to personally kill Trace or anyone else.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
See my reply to @ArjinFerman. I didn't say FC literally said he wanted to kill Trace, and you know that isn't what I was saying. FC posted about not wanting to share a country with him (or me, or anyone else on the left), and Trace took that (and similar sentiments other people were posting at the time) as a message that FC and other accelerationists were advocating violence against him, or at least moving in that direction.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
The one that comes to mind is the one we have already discussed several times (and I hate feeling like I am repeatedly calling him out), but FCfromSSC's post about not wanting to share a country with him. You may consider Trace to have been inaccurate (or even disingenuous) in claiming FC was saying he wanted to kill him (there was extensive discussion about this later, and someone even directly asked FC if he really wanted to murder people in their homes, to which FC firmly said no), but that was the discourse at the time. (FC was the most notable, but there was a regular drumbeat of other rightist posters edging up to and occasionally crossing the line into fedposting - we still see it occasionally here.) This was certainly the sort of thing Trace said was the reason he created the Schism - that he no longer wanted to share a forum with accelerationists who implied they wanted him dead.
If I have to I will find the link, but I don't bookmark things and it seems like a demand I waste my time for your entertainment, as I told @SteveAgain, when I have a hard time believing anyone who's been around for a while doesn't remember it.
To be clear, my statement regarding the fact that you are naive or insincere concerned specifically your claim that "feminism is feminism" and that you don't consider there to be divisions or different schools of thought within them. You may genuinely believe that, but it's so obvious that these divisions do exist (and that other feminists are very aware of them) that it just seems kind of silly to claim you are following the One True Feminism and everyone else is either also on the same team as youor they've got it wrong.
... Have you ever actually talked to a TERF?
They very much do believe that gender roles are social constructs. That is their primary objection to men claiming to be women! They consider sex to be a biological reality, and gender roles to be social constructs, and from their point of view, trans women willingly adopt, play act and reify gender roles while claiming that they are based on some innate property. It's trans women who claim that wearing a skirt makes you a woman, and being a woman makes you want to wear a skirt.
Even if this is true, while I'm perfectly willing to have the Rowling debate again, it's irrelevant to whether or not she's a feminist, unless you think being a bad person (according to your ethics) means someone can't be a feminist.
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