Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
I'd say that if you think that "throwing all their money into a bonfire and basking at the flames as it all burns" is not only a reasonable standard, but apparently the bare minimum, for the claim "they are not primarily motivated by profit", I think you are the one being hyperbolic and irrational, which makes your claims of projection extra-ironic.
Obviously I do not think anyone literally burns money (I dunno, is making cigars out of $100 bills still a thing)? I do think your claim amounts to people willing to knowingly and intentionally waste millions of dollars in their industry making a shit product just to piss off people they don't like. Your evidence that this is a common practice - standard procedure in Hollywood even - is some actors and writers saying snarky things when told their product is shit.
Is there any field where you hold yourself to this standard? To me it looks like the same type of argument as "trans women aren't winning at every competition, so it's not a problem they're competing with women" that Darwin used on you once.
I can't help you when you make wild and ridiculous leaps of logic like this. Can you show me one unambiguous example of what you are claiming? That is, a major production that was made (by the admission of someone big enough to be credibly responsible) for the purposes of saying fuck you to the fans and without any consideration for being monetarily successful?
This claim is trotted out regularly as if it's evidence in itself, but it has literally no backing.
I cannot prove what is in the hearts of Hollywood producers. Neither can you. So we can both only guess, and my claim is based on what motivates most normal human beings (especially amoral and greedy ones); your claim is based on assuming that they are alien-like caricatures.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
Cool, so tell me how would the world look different if you were wrong about this?
If I were wrong about this, we'd see nothing but woke replacements and writers and directors being overt about their intentions, no retrenchments or cancellations by studios when a property fails to earn, and massively budgeted productions like "Captain America: Gay As You Want To Be." I am saying you are not wrong that wokeness is a pervasive influence in Hollywood; I am saying you are hyperbolic and irrational about the degree to which every single person top-down prioritizes petty vengeance against their ideological enemies over profits or even production quality. I suspect this is projection, because it's what a lot of the people being so shrill about this would do if they were in charge: fuck money, let's rub the hottest culture war we can in our enemies' faces. It's not a rational way to view the world, but it's emotionally satisfying.
When you get to the level of big Hollywood moneymaking, you care more about money than whether you pissed off some incels on Twitter.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
No, under this theory, if I repeatedly use my public platform to say "@MaiqTheTrue is murdering children in his basement," and I continue making this claim for years, even knowing that some of my followers are now harassing you (and the Sandy Hook parents weren't just having mean things said about them on the Internet, they were being followed and harassed and physically threatened in meat-space), you can hold me responsible. There is a difference between having total control over your followers and knowing what your followers are doing and not only saying nothing to discourage them, but continuing to do what you know is encouraging them.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
If you accuse me of being bad-faith, and I ask you to point out where exactly in this conversation I have been bad-faith, and you reply like this then I think it's fair for me to complain about this moderator intervention here...
You can complain. Clearly you are complaining.
How about you just let this conversation happen
If by that you mean "How about you just let me continue to do the same thing," no.
There are two possibilities here:
- You genuinely believe you aren't doing what we described.
- You know you're doing what we described, but you think you can litigate it in such a way that we are forced to "acquit" you.
I personally believe it's 2, but if it's 1, you're just going to have to spend some time figuring out what you're doing wrong, because I am not willing to extend the necessary charity it would require for me to walk you through it (again).
If it's 2, well, short of persuading @ZorbaTHut to overrule us, no, there is no other avenue of appeals.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
It's not calculated to piss people off, it's a space-claiming strategy that works in tandem with Zorba decreeing that "misgendering" is now a bannable offense
Being an asshole is a bannable offense. You're allowed to say you don't think trans women are women. You're not allowed to make a point of "misgendering" someone to be a dick and express your contempt.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Reading comprehension test:
Who is "them"?
(a) Leftists' political enemies. (b) The top 1%-2% of Southern landowners during the Civil War.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
So why do you think I "hit peak trans recently"? In what way do you think my views shifted?
I already explained my take on their encounter. As several other people have pointed out to you, both parties can be acting kind of like jerks, that doesn't mean one party (in this case, the kids) wasn't acting like bigger jerks. You don't have to agree with me that the nurse was not 100% innocent and in completely in the right, but at least recognize this is more like a melodrama where people are getting heated up over what's ultimately a nothingburger, and not a court case where one side is Right and the other side is Wrong. There are situations where even if you are legally and morally in the right, you can be an ass about it and deal with the other party in a less than ideal fashion. That you seem unwilling to even engage with any premise other than one that colors strictly within black and white borders is, well, if I were going to be as snarky and uncharitable as you, I would say "in character." Instead, I don't think you actually think that way, I think you are just seeing this encounter entirely through a tribal lens.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Come on, dude. It's a slur everywhere. Nobody uses it except to be insulting. (No, don't point to the handful of trans people who use it to refer to themselves. You also can't call black people "niggers" here just because some black people use it amongst themselves.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
True enough. But "A homeless black guy harassed me, this is why I wish we could go all Turner Diaries" is the direction I see.
Outrage at being bullied and essentially rendered helpless by a criminal psychopath in public is understandable, but all the stuff about "large, high-testosterone, social and biological inferiors" is just racial seething.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
White people pretty well accept it, though.
They accept it because, as I said, it doesn't harm them. Even if you want to be a musician, comic, or dancer (accepting your premise for the moment, and "white men can't dance" jokes aside, I don't think anyone seriously believes white people have a genetic disadvantage in the performative arts), white people are obviously able to succeed there as well.
I see no evidence for any race having a "civilizationally-challenged level of narcissim."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
You have no evidence for this. You're just assuming everyone is a bad-faith conflict theorist because you are unable to envision how anyone else could be otherwise.
When your model of your enemies is such that if they do what you expect, it affirms your beliefs, and when they don't do what you expect, you assume they made a mistake and thus it affirms your beliefs, consider the possibility that your model is wrong.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
25d ago
It's amazing to me how often a conversation like this happens.
"Well, what he said was bad, but he wasn't actually calling for genocide." "So you think what he said wasn't bad. I guess you are pro-genocide."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
25d ago
Well, the problem is for SS, all Jews (modulo some tiny fringe who agree with him that yes indeed, we Jews are awful!) are evil.
It's rough! Ignatiev's beliefs are awful. But not Jewishly awful. Still, SS is more sympathetic than Ignatiev.
Eh. They both basically want to eliminate their outgroup. I suspect Ignatiev's agenda is probably not literally exterminationist, so fwiw I find him more sympathetic, but that's like choosing which woman on The View is more intelligent.
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
Have you lived recent American history?
Indeed I have, and I'm older than you.
The administrative state is not, formally, a branch outside the Executive.
No, but we have laws (which the other two formal branches have a say in) which the Executive can't just override. Just as every military officer, in theory, serves at the pleasure of the President, his ability to unilaterally dismiss officers has been constrained by law (since around 1950, IIRC). The civil service works for the President, but he can't just order them to ignore laws imposed on them by Congress and Supreme Court rulings, or fire people because they aren't personally loyal to him.
I am not against the president "reigning in" a bureaucratic state out of control and probably agree with you about some of the ways federal agencies have inappropriately balked his intentions in the past (so I understand, if not agree, with why he's acting the way he is now). But either we actually have laws and a Constitution, or else stop talking about laws and civil society and admit you just want to be the boot.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
There are two possible outcomes. One: The Democrats do it when they are in power, and the Republicans refrain when they are in power. Two: Both do it when they are in power. The second is less bad, unless you're a Democrat.
There is another possible outcome. Can you see the one you are missing?
And this was a major error. Better that the civil service change political valence with elections than it become a power bloc of its own which remains aligned with one side regardless of who is in power now.
Having actually read American history, I strongly disagree. There are ways to rein in excesses by any branch or segment of the government that doesn't require the entire government simply become spoils for the victor, or one branch ignoring the other two. Of course I don't think you have an accurate conception of the "Deep State" any more than you have an accurate conception of people who are not aligned with you.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
Well, I do have criteria beyond seriousness. Like I'd actually like to be ideologically aligned with them. Obviously I'm unlikely to vote for a right-winger unless he's just that awesome or his opponent is just that terrible.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
I don't have an obligation to be a single-issue voter, nor do I have an obligation to vote for anyone.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
There is absolutely no way Hollywood looks the way it looks like right now, if their primary motivation is profit.
Their primary motivation is profit and status, and for the money people behind the scenes, it's profit. They care a lot less about culture war than you do.
Hollywood looks the way it does because Hollywood has always been full of both "creatives" and studio execs who are actually very bad at their jobs and make bombs regularly. (And, in fairness, sometimes they just genuinely mistime or miscalculate the appeal of a film.) It's a very Current Year thing for you to read every box office failure as an intentional devious scheme by the studios to set money on fire just because they hate you.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
The mod queue being how we decide if someone gets banned is just dumb.
The mod queue is not how "we" decide if someone gets banned. It is one of several things that the mods consider. It is never the sole consideration, but if you have a whole bunch of comments in the mod queue because you're on a rage-posting spree, we are more likely to say "This guy needs a time out." @SteveKirk's post above was bad enough to earn a ban (because of his growing record of tantrums, which incidentally precede this account, because I know exactly which previous permabanned account he used), but the fact that he was posting many comments like this certainly warranted mention.
I check the user/janitor thing every time I'm here and it's like half of the reported comments (which I assume is how they get there) is because someone disagreed with them and they're using the report as an extra downvote.
This is true, unfortunately.
And it's obvious that is skews in one political direction as well, maybe because they're a smaller portion of the people here or maybe it's just their way because it certainly is on places like reddit.
This is absolutely not true. You see the volunteer queue; we see the actual reports and who made them. The majority of reports are indeed from individuals who use the report tool as a super-downvote button or to express their dislike of the poster. (Waves to all my haters.) I can assure you there are plenty of rightists who do this. In fact, I think you have the numbers reversed; leftists are a smaller portion of posters here, hence the majority of reports come from right-leaning people, and rightists are definitely not less prone to reporting posts because someone disagreed with them. There are a number of people who seem to reflexively report anyone arguing with them as "antagonistic." (You know who you are. Yes, we notice.) Most of them are not lefties.
But using that as an excuse is surely just going to end up with people deciding the only way to decide what is acceptable on the site is just mass reporting everything they disagree with.
There are people who do this. We are not stupid and we see the reports.
I still don't understand why the mods here can't ever ban people for the things they do that are bad but instead keep a secret tally of bad things that they don't disclose and then ban them for all those things when they do something less egregious.
Again, untrue. Contra @The_Nybbler's usual ankle-biting (he's been singing this same song for years even though he's been very patiently walked through the errors in his thinking multiple times), it's not an "authority tactic." Our moderation is about as transparent as it can be; we post warnings and bans publicly. Our tally is not "secret" except in the sense that only mods can see your mod log (in which we record all past infractions so that we have them to refer to and know if we've seen this behavior before). We tell you when you are accumulating a record that's likely to result in increased consequences. We usually point to those past infractions when we start applying them.
When someone gets banned for something "less egregious" it's because they've been a persistent bad actor and told to stop doing that. There is such a thing as "the last straw." If you call me a jerk once, you'll probably get a warning. If you've been namecalling for months and getting repeatedly warned and banned for it, then the next time you call me a jerk, you might get a permaban. Anyone who claims this comes as a surprise is not being honest.
We are not secret police collecting dossiers on people we don't like; we tell you what you're doing and why you're being modded (and ask you to stop). Almost always, the people who get permabanned are the people who tell us (implicitly or explicitly) "Fuck you and your rules."
And almost always in a baited argument where the person doing the baiting does not even get a warning.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of moderation occurs in the context of a heated argument, and equally unsurprisingly, the person modded (and his supporters) almost always think the other guy started it. Sometimes we agree and warn both participants; sometimes we don't.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Go to Google.com and type "attempted assassination of Donald" or "of Trum" and look at the predictions.
Also, I did this just to indulge you (I assume "Trum" was a typo, or is that supposed to be some new meme I am not familiar with?), and the top results were the latest AP, CNN, ABC, and Fox News stories, followed by links from the FBI and Wikipedia. What new Dem Orwellian nefariousness am I supposed to be seeing, exactly?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
This is nothing but personal antagonism.
Which since you have a long record of this, gets you a ban for another week.
Maybe stop dancing to @BurdensomeCount's tune, since he clearly knows exactly how to make you lose it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Okay, that was definitely antagonistic. If you got the impression from my exchange with @guesswho below that it's open season on him just because a lot of people have old grudges, you are wrong.
And blowing flames on old grudges seems to be your thing.
You are obviously an alt who's here to stir shit, and so far you've contributed nothing but trolling and knife-throwing. Banned for a week, and I'm going to recommend we just burn this alt next time you pop off.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
No, my point is that you've consistently and commonly argued #2, against people who clearly aren't bringing that position.
No, it is not clear to me that people are not bringing that position. You just (re)quoted FCfromSSC and yourself providing a long list of how conservatives are being persecuted and deprived of their rights. If all you're claiming is #1, then what are we disagreeing about?
I have not, at any point, compared what conservatives today are encountering with concentration camps, even in the figurative sense. At no point in this thread have I gotten anywhere near that. Neither has the_nybbler nor fcfromssc since the move.
You may not literally have invoked concentration camps, but the whole point of @FCfromSSC's accelerationism has been, as I understand it, that he sees peaceful coexistence becoming impossible in the near future. Actual concentration camps? Maybe not, but if we can't even share a country and accord each other civil rights, that seems pretty damn concentration camp-adjacent to me. And the @The_Nybbler's entire schtick is whining that the Left has won, laws and democracy are fake and gay, and the boot is already stomping on his face forever and ever.
You do realize that anyone watching can notice that you're endlessly retreating from specific ground points presented by the people you're talking with, to this?
No, I do not realize this. I think this is a claim you keep repeating because you're playing to the crowd. What specific ground points do you think I am retreating from?
I honestly can't tell if you genuinely believe you're scoring gotchas, or if you've just (correctly) deduced that accusing me of lying annoys me, so you keep doing it for the lulz. I can entertain the possibility that I am misunderstanding you, that I missed the point, hell, maybe even that I'm just too dim to understand your argument. But I don't lie or argue in bad faith or play "word games."
I can point to the OP of this very subthread claiming that conservatives no longer exist as a group in federal administrative infrastructure, in a way that will prevent them from achieving their goals (or, implicitly, seriously slowing the goals of their opponents), in a way that lacks parallels since the end of the South as a racial institution (coincidentally, a time where this meant far less). I can provide a dozen significant tactical or strategic differences, some wildly different, in powers that the progressive movement is actively using today, if they matter.
Do they?
I don't know, it depends on what you want me to do with these examples. Agree that they happened? Agree that they are bad? Or agree that they constitute the Right being oppressed? To what level do you want me to agree that the Right is being oppressed? Apparently invoking Orwell and disenfranchisement is too far, but just agreeing that the Right is losing the Culture War at the moment is not enough. What do you want? (Besides to goad me, so, mission accomplished I guess.)
Sure, I hate them too. All of them. I blame your Republicans more for where we are now, but I've got plenty of hate to go around.
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