Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
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User ID: 297
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.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Link what, exactly? @FCfromSSC's now-infamous "I don't want to live with you people" post, or Trace's post announcing he was creating the Schism, or rightists being petty, or what?
If you really want me to do that, and can explain why, I will consider digging for them, but frankly I don't believe you actually doubt any of these things happened. You remember them as well as I do. Your peremptory "Link it" demand appears be an attempt at a "gotcha" because I have called you out in the past for making things up. So before you convince me to jump through your hoops and look for years-old posts, please be specific and tell me exactly what it is that you think I am being untruthful about, and what exactly you think I am misrepresenting.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
The United States has not experienced "leftist authoritarianism." Not if you're talking about real, government-boots-kicking-in-doors, authoritarianism. Woke HR and university struggle sessions and online cancellations are annoying, even career-damaging, but they are not even in the same category as actual Maoist struggle sessions or gulags.
Not that I think this is likely to happen under Trump either, but when @Goodguy says "a true authoritarian/populist revolution," he's not talking about Biden or Trump being elected, he's talking about Ceaușescu or Pinochet coming to power. He has a valid point; people on both sides (most especially including you, here) tend to get histrionic about the tyranny of their political opponents, with no perspective on what actual tyranny looks like.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
@The_Nybbler is not being accurate; the proximate cause of Trace creating the Schism was people literally suggesting they wanted to kill him and everyone on his side. It wasn't about "advocating for lethal self-defense." Trace undoubtedly disagrees with most rightists about exactly when lethal self defense is justified (such as in the Rittenhouse case), but he didn't leave the forum because of people advocating for lethal self-defense. He initially created the Schism (while still remaining on the Motte) because of accelerationist fedposting, and he left the Motte for good because of rightists still holding a grudge against him years later and being extremely petty about it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
or that one time when a card-carrying pedophile dropped by and ran a sort of AMA. (I'm still resentful of the mods for not cracking down harder on the hostile reactions at that time, since it was such a rare perspective to get. Probably the clearest sign that their problem is not so much a shared hatred of the left as it is an excess of sympathy for resident posters who lean right.)
IIRC, we did mod a couple of people who said things like "You should go kill yourself" or made woodchipper references, but we don't mod people for having "hostile reactions" as long as they aren't directly attacking people.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
I don't think I did ("compromise and coexist" to me is pretty much the same as "leave you alone, and you leave them alone, and you both get to have spheres that are in accordance with your values", unless you think you're all going to be living on different continents or something). But using your specific wording, I will state the same thing: I think some liberals would agree to that and some would not, and some rightists would agree to that, and some (most, IMO) would not.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Ok, now you're just making stuff up.
I'm making up the fact that there are a lot of rightists who do not believe in compromise or coexistence with leftists? Really?
"Most" is my opinion, but I don't see how you deny "many."
If you mean dial the extremist rhetoric, I'm sorry I am an extremist, and I'm in no mood to come back to le moderat centrism.
Okay, so you just said "We are not the same" (about my liberal friends who you think are uncompromising extremists).
If by your own admission you are an uncompromising extremist, well, you are the same. Which places neither of you on higher moral ground.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Fwiw, I don't think we are facing a "Constitutional crisis" (yet) but I do think Trump is acting capriciously, harmfully, and (probably) unlawfully.
That is, you seem to want business as usual in Washington where they start with last years budget and try to find something that may not fit. They are zero baseline budgeting.
Yes, but they're also terminating federal employees who cannot (under current law) be terminated like this. Maybe you think the law should be changed so the President can summarily fire anyone he wants to, but that's not what the law is right now.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
So, again, if the Republicans were pushing re-institution of Jim Crow, would you argue that the Democrats should compromise and work with them? How about if they were pushing for something worse, like slavery or mass "eugenic" culling of the population?
Yes, but compromise and work together means defining what can be negotiated and what can't. Of course each side is going to have red lines, and if the Republicans were seriously proposing reinstituting slavery, I would hope the Democrats would not compromise on that. If you want to define certain things you think the Republicans should not compromise on, fine. If your certain things are literally "everything Democrats want," then expect them to do the same.
Also, however much I dislike the current DEI regime and trans ideology, I do not think they are equivalent to reinstituting slavery or mass eugenic culling. Come on. You might as well ask "What if they were proposing we make worship of the Aztec gods a state religion and practice mass human sacrifice on the National Mall?" You're resorting to argumentum ad absurdum.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Even though by now they came up with things that warrant a holy crusade, and a declaration that the child sacrifices will stop (and this is more literal than some might expect), I'm willing to accept a cease fire where they their thing in peace, as long as I'm allowed the same. Would you say your liberal friends would find those terms acceptable? If not, than I'm sorry, but we are not the same, and any implication that we are equivalent is false.
I think some of them would, and some of them would not. Just as you personally might be willing to live and let live, but many (most) of your fellow rightists would not. So yes, I think you are equivalent, and the way out is either war or the "moderates" among us persuading the majority to curb the extremists. I do what little I can (I have had relationships suffer as a result); do you ever tell your side "Hey, maybe dial it down a bit"?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Or do what Johnson did: Defy Congress and win.
Well, sure, but that's a high risk strategy. Johnson survived impeachment by one vote. It's also basically saying "It's only illegal if you lose."
I think it is a violation of separation of powers that the President cannot fire employees of the executive branch.
Well then change the laws, or else the Supreme Court will have to agree that the civil service reforms of the last 150 years are unconstitutional. But believing the President should be able to fire any civil servant at will does not make it legal.
Certainly he should not be able to e.g. order them to spend money not appropriated, but that's a different matter.
It actually isn't. If a civil servant in theory can't be ordered to commit an illegal act, but if he refuses to commit an illegal act ordered to by the president, the president can fire him, what do you think happens? Especially if the president is telling an entire agency "Do what I want or I will fire you all?" We might hope some brave souls will refuse on principal, and some probably would, but you are clearly setting up a system where in practice the president has the power to direct the entire government to do whatever he wants regardless of what Congress or the Supreme Court says. More indirectly, this is why they changed the system so that federal positions can't all be patronage appointments.
As I said, a check that only checks one side is no balance at all.
I would like to check both sides. Accelerationism checks neither. And your view that it's only ever Republicans who make concessions and it's only ever Democrats who go too far is ahistorical claptrap.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
You seem to be giving into unfounded fears. The bureaucratic state isn’t what stops Trump from having all of this power.
No, it's the Constitution, which allocates powers to Congress and the Supreme Court as well, which is what you seem to want Trump to (sorry, can't resist) trump.
Also the president absolutely can stop funding for an agency without congressional action and is probably required to do so. Again let’s say Congress said “50b to USAOD to accomplish Y.” But USAID spent it to accomplish Z. The president would actually be failing his required duty by not stopping USAID from spending on Z. Full stop. And if you determine the people in that agency are lawless then you need to fire them.
Okay. Agreed. But what I have seen so far is a lot of outrage bait and not much evidence that there's been a sober, meticulous audit of what USAID was authorized to spend money on and what it wasn't. Congress almost certainly did not issue a bullet-pointed list of what USAID was supposed to fund, but a more general mission with probably a lot of discretion (quite likely too much discretion). Before you hop up and get het up, I am not, in principal, against curbing USAID. It looks to me like it's overreached and needs a much tighter leash, and I'd be fine with Trump putting the agency under a freeze while they go through things. Instead we have Musk tweeting outrage fodder about trans operas in Brazil and thus shutting down everything. I think it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and you may disagree and think whatever good USAID does is vastly outweighed by Brazilian trans operas, but I don't think the President has the authority to just decide "I don't like what this agency is doing because I'm ideologically opposed to it so I will summarily decide they're breaking the law." Same deal with the FBI; if you want to investigate their prosecution of Jan. 6 because you think it was politically motivated and it made Trump's life difficult, go ahead and investigate. It's good for federal agencies to be put under the spotlight. But unilaterally declaring that everyone who was involved at all (even agents who were assigned to that case - what were they supposed to do, declare "This is an unlawful investigation?" and refuse? Do you think that is actually true?) gets fired (illegally) is not how it's supposed to work.
Re birthright citizenship I think you are probably right but the president’s position is colorable (even Richard Posner seems to think the better view is the constitution doesn’t require birthright citizenship)
I've read pro and con arguments and agree that the case for birthright citizenship is muddy. But given that the current state of things is Constitutional law as enforced today, do you think the President should be able to say "I think the Supreme Court was wrong so I'm overruling them"? If you want to end birthright citizenship you need to either pass a Constitutional amendment or bring it before the Supreme Court with a new argument.
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.
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).
So are you saying that the majority of the male feminists you knew turned out to be sex pests?
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