Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
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
11mo ago
The whole purpose of a political party is to win elections. Biden isn't being forced out of office, he's stepping down as a candidate for reelection. While these specific circumstances are unique, it's not unprecedented for parties to not renominate a sitting president.
The fact that the Democrats already nominated Biden was a procedural and political problem for them, but if they convinced him to step down voluntarily, there is nothing "illegitimate" about it (though I understand why Trump supporters will be unhappy since it was obviously to Trump's advantage for Biden to stay in).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Because I'm trying to calibrate our understanding of what we can consider "disempowering their outgroup." Caplan is acknowledging ethnic anxieties behind his support for open borders- he doesn't want the legacy majority to have power and organize against him. So in this case the support for demographic change is explicitly based on disempowering the legacy majority.
I think your understanding is hopelessly flawed, and frankly, I think your analysis is as disingenuous as most of these link drops you do.
Bryan Caplan wrote an essay about why he worries about any one ethnic group having too much power. Notice that he included Jews.
From there, you have spun many other conclusions without foundation: (1) That he is motivated by "ethnic anxiety"; (2) That this is why he supports open borders; (3) That he feels this way specifically because he is Jewish; (4) This his particular concern is "the legacy majority" (I notice how you sneakily slipped that buzz phrase in there, even though, as I noted, he actually said he is worried about any majority, including his own); (5) That all this is a Jewish trait which he shares with other Jews; (6) That this does not arise merely from shared cultural experiences, but their DNA.
I mean, any or all of those things could theoretically be true. But put together it's a narrative that obviously fits your ZOG worldview, but it is all nothing more than a just-so story. You're pointing at random Jews who say things in the media and saying "See? See???" like this is supposed to convince us of the --Joo--Cylon menace. When you can't even avoid ignoring points in the very examples you cite (like Caplan himself not excluding Jews from his point), it becomes patently obvious how you are ignoring, say, all the Jews who don't conveniently say things that pattern-match to "Cylon" and even say things that contradict it.
What about anti-racism, where disempowering white people is the specific goal of that cultural movement?
I am not particularly interested in steelmanning "anti-racism," because we'd get bogged down in definitions starting with "racism" and not ending with "disempowering" or "white people." But you are still overgeneralizing. Not every person, Jewish or otherwise, who is "anti-racist" is Ibrim X Kendi or subscribes to Kendism, and even of those who do, your assumption is that they actually support that because they consider white people their enemy and they are waging tribal warfare against them. And not, say, because some people actually believe racism is a bad thing and this is the best way to combat it.
Say theoretically there are Jewish professors or Hollywood producers who prioritize the production of anti-racist content. Would you agree that they are being hostile and subversive?
No. I actually think racism is a bad thing and fighting racism is a good thing. I'm certainly not a Kendiist, but I do not classify everyone producing anti-racist content as "hostile and subversive" and my racial enemy.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
All he did was verbalize a reasonable request.
You think asking a female classmate "Hey, wanna be my fuck buddy?" is a reasonable request?
If he’d made a physical move, it would have amounted to the same thing, except it might have worked.
I'm not sure what you mean by "physical move" here. The only thing I can think of is pretty uncharitable - surely, you're not suggesting he should have just grabbed her?
You serve him the ‘freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences’ hogwash. “This is sad”, indeed.
You know, sometimes that's actually true. If I approach a woman and say "Hi, wanna fuck?" I am not breaking any laws, but I am certainly committing an egregious faux pas and should expect consequences for that.
People decided to punish him. Should he be punished for such a crime?
Yes. Not literally, since it's not literally a crime. But yes, if you fuck up socially, you get punished socially.
Do you think it should be socially acceptable for men to just straight up ask women for sex without fear of women finding that creepy?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Don't proselytize for it and belittle those that believe differently or not at all, don't propose it as a solution to poorly understood problems of modernity. If you do those things then no one will push back with upsetting comments like " it is all make pretend".
We have a thing called freedom of speech (which the founders also believed in). Religious people are allowed to proselytize, so long as no one is forced to listen to them. You and I may find being preached at annoying, but so long as I can walk away, they are not doing you harm. As for people proposing religion as a solution here, they are allowed to do that, and you are expected to respond the same way you would respond to any other ideas people propose, whether or not you find them silly.
Don't bring it up and neither will I. But people always bring it up here, and it makes them look silly for believing in fiction, and I am not out of line for pointing that out.
You are not out of line for saying "I think religion is nonsense and not a realistic solution to anything." You are out of line for being antagonistic about it.
Stop telling people "not to bring things up" that you don't like, and then claiming that their bringing it up entitles you to insult them.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
The only way to stop antisemitism is identical to the only way to stop racism, for Jews to assimilate.
Jews have assimilated pretty well in the US. Unless you mean they should literally stop being Jews?
While Jews enjoy a pretty comfortable situation at the top of American society, from an economic, social, prestige pov, they are not satisfied until the goyim grovel and endlessly apologize
This is just vilifying your outgroup without evidence. (Not modhatted, because I'm in the conversation, but you should know better.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2mo ago
I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry.
So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer. I would not call them "erotica." It's supposed to be a coming-of-age novel about a queer kid experimenting with sex acts that she ultimately finds unappealing.
Would I want my pre-teen kids to read it? No. It definitely should be age-restricted. But "This shouldn't even exist in a public library" seems a bit much.
Influencing my opinion is the fact that I distinctly remember books like Flowers in the Attic and the John Norman Gor series existing in my school library when I was a kid. Now maybe you can make a case that text is less harmful/dangerous than images, but I would contest that. Those books had some fucked up themes and scenes, and the sex scenes weren't even explicit.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Just so you know, this is under discussion by the mods. There is a serious argument for permabanning you. Not so much for this post alone (which is clearly intended to be provocative but "I am one of the Elect and fully in favor of crushing the white peasants" is not a forbidden opinion), but because your record is terrible, you've been skirting a permaban for a while now, and the fact that you clearly play this card whenever you want to see how much indignation you can stir up is something that rhymes with rolling.
This post is mostly so the 14(!) people who have reported it so far (granted a couple were AAQCs) know that we're not ignoring it. But since the post in itself is sort of borderline and you've been a 50/50 good contributor/absolute shitheel until now, no one wants to pull the trigger unless/until we have a quorum.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Every discussion with you reaches this point, where I observe that for post after post, you have ignored all my direct and specific challenges to each point you made, and simply try to grab the ball and run in a different direction with it.
Until next time, I am done playing "Look, squirrel!"
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
1yr ago
You're stating as fact the thing that is disputed. You are the kind of atheist I despise, the kind who convinced me that "atheist gatherings" and atheist orgs are mostly time-wasting circle jerks. The smugness, the sneering, the self-righteous certitude, the dripping condescension, the sheer joy in pushing buttons by "just stating reality" and then playing the wide-eyed affronted innocent when people take offense at being directly insulted.
I am very confident in my lack of belief. I have no impulse at all to seek religious solutions, nor any sympathy for those beliefs per se. I too think they are mostly fiction and cope for people who need that in their lives, for whatever reason.
What I don't feel is a need to go rub their noses in it or make sure that every time they bring it up, I do not let the opportunity pass to let them know just how much contempt and disrespect I feel for them. People believe a lot of things I disagree with, even things for which I feel contempt. They believe them for lots of reasons. Some people probably really do "need" religion in their lives. But that's neither here nor there.
What I am telling you is to stop being an obnoxious prick. You get reported regularly because you keep doing this. If you genuinely and sincerely want to debate religion or discuss whether it's a good thing to have in society, do so by engaging people in good faith, not by saying "You know your beliefs are stupid and make believe, right?" Because you don't for one second believe that will result in a productive conversation, and you certainly aren't going to convince anyone that way. Therefore you are doing it solely and intentionally to be offensive. When you deliberately choose an offensive tactic because you want to offend, and the people you set out to offend are offended, that's not on them- that's on you.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
If by 'being Jews' you refer to '(1)only allowing blood-related people into your religion, claiming that only blood-relation can make you Jewish
This is not a requirement to be Jewish. They do not go looking for converts, but it is possible to convert into Judaism.
and (2) the whole other host of beliefs associated with the Holocaust/progressive worldview related to white people and institutions they like being intrinsically racist'.
This isn't a component of Judaism, and while it may be a fair description of many (not all) socially liberal Jews, it's not a defining characteristic of "Jewishness."
Your main objection seems to be specifically about contemporary leftist SJ-aligned Jews, yet you made reference to historical "ferocious" refusal to assimilate.
Well then not all Jews (NAJ).
Just the handful of ones that hold such power that they can get a beloved entertainment billionaire African-American to lose a money-printing contract with a sports clothing company.
Even if we go with "Jews control Hollywood," yeah, that's still a long shot from saying "Jews cause anti-Semitism because they all cancelled Kanye and are afraid of being Holocausted and won't assimilate."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Among other, more obvious mistakes, Edmiston’s most grievous error was not pretending to believe the lie.
This is something that has seemed obviously true to me for a while, but of course you can't prove it unless you are deeply inside the system. You express concerns about children being casually, almost instantly, referred for "gender affirming care" up to and including surgery, and clinicians and trans activists say "Don't be ridiculous, of course we don't think doctors should just write blank prescriptions everyone's needs are carefully assessed they get a comprehensive evaluation it's all very cautious and evidence-based blah blah blah..."
Every bit of anecdotal evidence I have ever read - but it's still anecdotal! - is that in practice a trans-identifying kid will be "confirmed" as trans basically on their say-so. I've never actually heard of a doctor at one of these clinics saying, "Well, actually, have you considered you might not be trans? Let's work on some of your other mental health issues and then revisit this."
I'd love to find out I am wrong, that the typical clinician is in fact cautious about going along with every child who presents as "trans" and pursues other avenues of care first. But I have yet to see any evidence that this happens... anywhere. Rather, it seems increasingly like anything other than immediate and unreserved validation of any child who presents as trans is treated as transphobic and life-threatening.
Jesse Singal does the lord's work, and he has two problems.
The first is that his work is very wonky. Like, he does deep dives into statistics, he actually reads the charts in the papers cited (and mis-cited) by activists, and points out all the errors, but it's not something easily summarizable if you really want to have an understanding of what he's saying. All his opponents see is "There goes Jesse Singal, known transphobe, obsessively bullying a marginalized community again." Who actually reads and parses his work in detail?
I'll admit while this whole thing was happening on Twitter, I didn't quite get the back and forth the first few times until I finally sighed, dug in, and reread the entire comment chain to figure out who said who said who said what about what when. And I'm fairly current on the issues, reasonably intelligent, and sympathetic to Singal. Meanwhile, everyone else is just posting dunks and high fives and "yikes!" And even after this fairly comprehensive vindication of Singal, I doubt a single person on the other side actually had their mind changed or their priors shifted an iota. What I have seen in response has been a lot of tepid "Well, obviously it's a very complex topic mumble mumble but jeez why does Jesse Singal care so much anyway?"
Which brings me to my second point: Jesse Singal does himself no favors fighting these things out on Twitter. I get it - I understand his mindset. "People are lying about me on the Internet! People are saying I said things I clearly did not say! They're also wrong about the facts! They're saying things that aren't true, just read this damn paper right here that proves it!"
He cannot shake the conviction that if he yells this often and loudly enough, he will make them see. And he won't. Ever. So he ends up looking like deranged Reply Guy who is obsessed with this topic and wants to fight everybody. Meanwhile, his enemies, who don't actually care whether he's right or not, only that he's on the wrong side, see that they can keep winding him up by saying "Look at Jesse Singal being transphobic again."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Breaking it down into specific rules which are questioned on the basis of the justice of the particular rule changes the framing of the question from one that is fundamentally about results - "we care that we have cities that don't drive whites out through targeted robbery, rape and murder" to one about process and procedure - "the most important thing is that our procedures be found valid by a cabal of people - but those people aren't responsible for the results of the system as a whole".
I admire the skillful tap dancing you are doing, but this is merely using a lot of circumlocution to avoid stating your premise explicitly. If you believe that forced segregation and unequal treatment is the only practical way to avoid "cities that don't drive whites out through targeted robbery, rape and murder," then you need to make that argument explicitly, you don't get to handwave in the direction of "results" and therefore claim that forced segregation and unequal treatment was justified based on what you perceive to be the downstream effects of not doing that.
Stopping that is more important than the details of the rules.
Actually, no, it isn't, because that's an infinitely generalizable argument. "Stopping rape and murder is more important than the details of the rules." "Stopping terrorist attacks is more important than the details of the rules." "Stopping narcotics trafficking is more important than the details of the rules."
The details of the rules matter a great deal. They matter even when you think they will only be applied to your outgroup.
I could say that this is just as much found in the Constitution as any of the things that the Regime has found in it in since FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court and Earl Warren decided to totally re-write American law but instead I'll be honest - I don't care at all if it's "a legal principle that can be found under the Constitution" because I have observed that my enemies don't care about that either and they don't care about having a functioning society either.
I think this is nonsense, but even if it's not, until you get your white nationalist revolution and get to impose your will by force of arms, you are arguing for a position that can only be defended and implemented through the laws in existence.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
You never even bothered answering my question re: Caplan
This is a falsehood. I wrote an entire paragraph in response, which you have chosen to ignore. "Caplan directly contradicted your entire premise, and also you snuck in a lot of assumptions that weren't actually there" is not a non-answer.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Language Learning
I've always loved languages. I had aspirations when I was younger to become a polyglot. I had (according to the DLAB) a high aptitude for language learning.
Unfortunately, I have also always been a lazy student, and so initial enthusiasm always ran into the reality that learning languages, especially to anything approaching fluency, is hard. (Yes, I know a lot of you non-Americans grew up in multilingual environments and spoke two or three languages by the time you were in high school. Americans generally have to make a serious effort, outside of our sparse language offerings in high school, to acquire another language.)
Over many years, I have acquired bits and pieces of nearly a dozen languages, and true proficiency in none of them. I can read Cyrillic, Hangul, Arabic, Hiragana and Katakana and a few Kanji. I know enough Russian, German, Korean, and Japanese to express my ignorance.
Over the years, I have dabbled or studied in:
French: One semester in junior high school. I remember "Marie est une fille" and "je nais parle pas Francais."
German: In my opinion, the easiest language for English speakers to learn. With my rusty high school German, I retain the basic grammar and can still occasionally pick up phrases, and if I studied in earnest and built up my vocabulary, I think I could quickly reach at least conversational fluency.
Russian: Oh my god. Second hardest language I ever studied. I began studying Russian because my first girlfriend was Russian, and I took a few semesters in college. What are these cases? How do Russians even verb? And what am I supposed to do with my tongue? (My girlfriend endlessly made fun of my pronunciation, said I couldn't even pronounce her name in Russian correctly.) I am never, ever in a million years going to read War and Peace in the original Russian. (I am actually reading the Maude translation now.)
Irish: Too bad @FarNearEverywhere isn't around anymore to make fun of me. I took a semester of Irish Gaelic in college. Fucking incomprehensible. I remember zero grammar and maybe two words (including my username). They should never have used the English alphabet for written Irish; borrowing Chinese characters, or just refining ogham, would have made as much sense.
Esperanto: Yes, I also took a semester of Esperanto in college, for fun. One of the first conlangs, it was meant to be an easy-to-learn universal language, made simple with the absence of irregular verbs or complicated grammatical rules or any of the other things that make most languages difficult. It still has a fairly large global community of enthusiasts (though maybe now they are outnumbered by fluent speakers of Klingon or Dothraki), most of whom are still living the pre-USSR socialist dream. Fun fact: William Shatner starred in a 1966 horror film called Incubus, with dialog entirely in Esperanto. You can watch the whole movie (yes, including William Shatner speaking in Esperanto!) on YouTube.
Japanese: Took several semesters in college. Did terribly, but despite not practicing it since then, I can still read hiragana and katakana and remember a few kanji, and even manage some basic polite phrases. Although many people say Japanese is hard, I actually found it surprisingly - I would not say easy, but practical. There are no sounds in Japanese that do not exist in English, so it's not hard to pronounce, and I find the grammar to actually be pretty logical. The hardest part is the many different pronouns and inflections to indicate different politeness levels, and of course, fucking kanji. Chinese characters that the Japanese borrowed, much the same way Irish borrowed Latin characters, but to be literate in Japanese you need to know both the Japanese and the Chinese readings, and Japanese elementary school students are expected to know over a thousand. I remember maybe 20.
Korean: I never studied it very intensely, but I can still read Hangul (which is much easier than Japanese hiragana and katakana). The funny thing about Korean and Japanese is that linguists say they are completely unrelated languages. I suspect some cultural bias is at play here (Japanese and Koreans accuse each other of stealing pretty much everything from one another). It's true that Korean and Japanese share very little vocabulary (unlike, say, English and German or Spanish and French), but I found the grammar to be very similar.
Arabic: The language I have the most experience with. It's hard to pronounce, many sounds are difficult to distinguish for English speakers, the script is difficult and non-standardized, the grammar is complicated, and verbs have a billion different inflections. Also, you usually learn Modern Standard Arabic (or "Fusha") in class, which is basically media Arabic that zero native speakers actually use in conversation. Dialectal Arabic is broken into several different regional variants that are sometimes mutually unintelligible.
Of course I hadn't actually practiced any of them in many years, and language skills deteriorate rapidly without practice. So I occasionally looked at my shelves of books and told myself someday, I would brush up and get back into language learning. Realistically, though, it was never going to happen.
But recently I got on a language kick again. It started with DuoLingo ("Let's see how well I do with all those languages I studied back in the day") and now I am seriously cracking books again, watching YouTube videos, and even considering italki lessons.
I am concentrating on Arabic and Japanese. (Yes, for really serious language learning I'd stick with one; expert opinion is mixed on the effectiveness of studying multiple languages at once, but there's no question that it means dividing your time.) If I can stay motivated, I have decided to set a goal of someday achieving a CEFR level of C1 in Arabic. (Currently, I am, generously, at A2-B1.) I would like to do the same in Japanese, but right now I am actually doing a lot of Arabic practice and just dabbling in Japanese.
If I stick with it, I may post updates on my progress.
Correct if I am incorrect, but don't democrats deny any right to the father of child and the family of the mother to determine if it should live or die? Because if neither her husband nor her family should have any say, the "home" part is deceitful. Only the "heart" (of the mother) decides.
The assumption is that the decision to abort is a discussion between the involved parties (mainly, the prospective mother and father). Legally, the woman has final say, but in any remotely healthy relationship, one would assume that she does not just make the decision without any input or consideration for her partner's opinion. I think most men would be pretty upset (and probably consider it a relationship-ender) if their girlfriend or wife said "I'm pregnant and I'm going to abort, don't bother telling me what you think because you don't get a say." Even if he's pro-choice, and probably even if he would be in favor of aborting in the situation also! That's just not the sort of decision that people in an actual partnership make unilaterally.
I emphasize again: in a healthy relationship. Harris isn't talking about either the abusive ones that the left likes to bring up or the she-demons who LOL at their exes on their way to the abortion clinic that the right (probably thinks exist in larger numbers than they do).
That being the case, that only one person has the deciding vote under the law doesn't make it "deceitful" to argue that for most people it is a decision of "heart and home."
Perhaps a similar solution could be adopted in Palestinian Territories: P5+regional islamic powers+EU+Israel each send representative to Steering Board, which elects a viceroy. He would be given a range of powers and would tasked to make sure violent extremists do not gain power, and to slowly accustom Palestinians to a free and democratic society.
Have you read about the history of Palestine? That's not too far from what the British originally tried to do with Mandatory Palestine (albeit with less finesse or consideration for anyone there, since the British had no love for either Jews or Arabs and basically wanted to wash their hands of the whole matter).
While the Bosnian and Second World wars both saw brutality, Germans in the war just prior to the one which earned them the occupation (WWI) behaved in a honourable and admirable manner
So did the Japanese. Before the invasion of China and WWII, the Japanese were known for being exemplary in their treatment of civilians and POWs. Things can change a lot in a decade or two.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Entertaining rant, as always. Also a juvenile preoccupation with aesthetics and going out in a blaze of glory as if everyone in the world should aspire to be a Shonen manga character like you do, as always.
I find some germs of agreement in your disgust with state-sanctioned suicide and asking someone else to do the job for you. That said, I wonder if you've ever known any genuinely suicidally depressed people? Your uncharitable projection of a pathetic need for validation and someone to "rescue" them may be true for some of the people seeking this last resort, but I would guess that many of them really, truly are in so much pain that dying seems like the only escape from an existence of undending, hopeless misery. Whether they are entirely rational (some are, some aren't) and whether there might be some cure for them (in some cases there is not) is beside the point. They really are, subjectively, suffering as much as someone with locked-in syndrome or constant physical pain.
There are a number of good arguments for requiring that people "do it themselves," but "don't be a pussy!" isn't one of them, and neither is "make it awesome." These people aren't you. They don't care about whether they make a grand statement or go out in a blaze of glory. This is like demanding that someone who doesn't believe in or care about God say a prayer before dying. Your aesthetics are not theirs, nor should your aesthetics shape public policy. Go ahead and beat your chest and use every muscle in your face to produce a sneer of epic proportions, they don't care because they are so depressed that they don't care to the nth degree. Fortunately I have never suffered from suicidal depression but I know enough people who have that I can easily imagine the response to one of them finally taking this step of asking for state assistance, and KulakRevolt sneering at them that they're pathetic pussies. Their response will be, quite simply, "Yes, and?"
From a somewhat more rational perspective, as others have pointed out, the usual suicide methods have a high enough failure rate, with the possibility of winding up not dead but maimed, paralyzed, or brain-dead, inflicting further suffering on both yourself and your loved ones, that it's not unreasonable for someone who lacks your go-jump-in-a-volcano aesthetic to prefer a surer, safer method. And the more spectacular methods (jumping in a volcano, walking off an ice flow, swimming with great whites) similarly seem to be unreliable and/or gruesome. (Ironically enough, while suicidally depressed people generally care not at all about their own lives, they do often still care about the people they will leave behind, the people who will have to clean up the mess they make, etc., which is often the only small deterrent that does keep them from doing it themselves.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
fwiw, I was on the fence about whether this post should be approved. First-time poster with a rather dry summary of a 2014, very academic book. Huh.
My first thought was that this was generated by an LLM, probably by someone establishing a new alt with innocuous posts. I realize that's somewhat uncharitable to you, @radar, but experience makes me suspicious of someone who appears out of nowhere to drop a post like this, with no introduction. There is nothing rule-breaking about the post itself (unless it was written by ChatGPT, and I'd be surprised if you admit it), but while we're going to leave the post up, if you keep posting things like this that tell us nothing about you and seem like an LLM could have written them, I will shadowban you.
This is one of the things I hate about the dawn of AI. This post could have been written by a human. It could have been written by an LLM. We can't know for sure. From what I hear, a lot of teachers who require written essays in their classes are pretty near to giving up because they can't ever be sure (or prove their suspicions) either.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6mo ago
This is true, but you are overlooking the fact that the average American in the past was very poor compared to Americans now. Yes, even poor people could buy houses and raise large families back then, but the standard of living was much lower. How many Americans would really be willing to pick fruit or lay roof for contemporary fruit-picker or roofing wages today if we just magically departed all the illegal immigrants? You might like to go back to the demographics of the 1950s, but you can't magically unroll immigration but not all the economic and technological changes since then as well.
Personally, I'd be willing to bite that bullet and say yes, let's deport illegals, pay Americans living wages, and eat the price increases in the grocery store and service industries. But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
However, is he responsible at all for the fact that his followers went too far and harassed those people?
I have only kind of paid attention to this case so I will not claim deep legal knowledge here, but I suspect this case is, like so many others, one in which the deep legal details matter, and are mostly ignored by partisans in favor of "He's being punished by the Elites for offending the NWO" or "He's an evil monster who mocked dead children."
A number like $1.5 billion is basically saying "We're taking everything you have (except your home)." Is that a fair judgment? Eh. I don't feel sorry for him, and not just because he's a crank.
My understanding is that the huge judgment was not so much because he claimed Sandy Hook was a hoax and told parents their children didn't really die (vile and obnoxious and possibly cause for a defamation suit, but not $1.5 billion), but because of all those followers of his who harassed and threatened the parents for years. So as to whether he is responsible at all: having some crazy followers who do things without your knowledge or instigation is one thing, but if you keep beating the "crisis actor" drums for years, until you know darn well what your followers are doing to those parents, then at some point yeah, I think you become responsible for continuing to egg them on. That and his legal fuckery with the court makes me think he FAAFO.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
I've been reading a lot about this conflict, and the history of Israel and Palestine. I've read books by Israeli historians and by Palestinian historians and by American historians and journalists. I've followed pro-Israeli channels and pro-Palestinian channels. I've also spoken to no small number of Arabs (since I am studying Arabic).
It's messy and complicated all around. What strikes me in every narrative is that most of them tell a more-or-less accurate version of known historical events, but always leaving out a few bits that make their side look less noble and less like the victim. The Israelis talk endlessly about how five Arab nations declared war on them the day after they declared independence, and they offered full citizenship rights to those Palestinians who stayed instead of fleeing (in the expectation that the Jews would soon be exterminated and they could return home). They don't talk about how there were explicit plans to remove even peaceful Palestinians and some of those expulsions were performed under presumed military necessity and with the full foreknowledge that they were uprooting locals from their land. They don't talk about some of the outright terrorist actions of their predecessors, and some of the atrocities that Israelis committed. (It was war, the Israeli army mostly conducted itself in a modern, disciplined fashion, but there were some civilian massacres, and other war crimes. The Israelis will retort that the Arabs did far more and far worse, which is probably true but doesn't make what they did not happen.)
The Palestinians talk endlessly about the Nakba and how 750,000 Palestinians were forced off their land. They don't talk about the fact that yes, many of them did explicitly leave so the Arab armies could exterminate the Jews, and thus they obtained the fate of a people who lost a war they started.
Dig into that event, and then you have to dig deeper - why did the Jews arrive in the first place, who was behind it, did they acquire land legally or did they forcefully occupy it? (They mostly acquired the land legally by purchase, prior to 1948, but Palestinians will then retort, accurately, that the Jews often bought the land from wealthy absentee Turkish (former Ottoman) landlords and then expelled the villagers who'd been living on that land for generations.) Was the Zionist movement an organic Jewish nationalist movement or was it a "Colonialist-Settler project" by Europeans whose motivation was essentially to get Jews out of Europe? (Answer: a little of all this and more.)
"It's complicated." People who want a clear right-and-wrong narrative hate that phrase, but it is. Move forward into all the many failed peace processes; Israelis claim Palestinians have been handed opportunities for peace over and over and rejected them. Palestinians claim all those peace offers were either made in bad faith or were very bad deals for the Palestinians. Who's right? A little of both. Palestinians have turned down deals that would have been objectively far better for them than what they have now, or have ever had. These agreements have also always been, at best, offers of divided rump territories with very little chance to ever develop into real countries. Many Palestinians feel that the offers themselves are fundamentally illegitimate because Palestine was stolen from them and only full restoration can make things right again. Regardless of whether you think this is a morally correct argument, it unfortunately carries the logical conclusion that there is literally no peace agreement they will accept that allows Israel to continue to exist. No matter how convincingly you argue that your people and your ancestors were screwed over and robbed and are entitled to reparations, if it ends with "... and therefore Israel must cease to exist," it's just a non-starter. But Palestinians (and many of their supporters), either out of stubbornness, or a belief that somehow either Hamas and Iran will actually succeed in destroying Israel, or else Israelis will somehow all be persuaded that they must dissolve the nation-state of Israel, persist.
You basically have three options: one state, two state, no state. The latter ("no state") is basically one side exterminates the other. Israelis are being accused of trying to do this now. I don't really think that's true, but certainly some elements of Israeli society and the government would not mind literally wiping out the Palestinians if they thought they could get away with it. Hamas is pretty explicit about wanting to eradicate Israel. Some of their more savvy apologists will say no, they just don't want Israel to exist "in its current form." Usually, if you pin them down, what they propose is something like the "one state" solution, where "From the river to the sea," the entire country becomes a multi-ethnic non-Jewish state with Jews and Arabs having full equal citizenship rights. Essentially, merge Israel and Palestine into one country. In theory, doesn't sound like a terrible idea (as long as you're not a Jew who is invested in a Jewish nation state), but it just sort of assumes that at that point, all the Palestinian Arabs (who outnumber the Jews considerably), who for generations have been openly calling for the literal extermination of all Israelis and claiming that every last Israeli is living on stolen land that must be given back, will say "Okay, we're cool now, you can live here with us. Let's all build a progressive multicultural society together." Let's just say I cannot blame the Israelis for considering that a non-starter.
That leaves the two state solution, which was fraught and unlikely before October 7 and pretty much impossible now, at least for a generation or two. The various schemes to apportion land to a new Palestinian nation have always struggled with Palestine being divided between Gaza and the West Bank - obviously not much of a country if you're divided between two regions with a historically hostile neighbor controlling all the land and travel between them. Also there's the problem of whether the Palestinian nation gets to have its own military, and build whatever they want in the way of weapons. Israelis have pretty good reasons to say hell no to that, at least until maybe we have a generation or two of peace convincing them that any new Palestinian army will not promptly start lobbing rockets and artillery shells at them. So the Palestinians argue (with some justification) that every offer they've been given has been for a fragment of a country that will still for all practical purposes be a protectorate under the military control of Israel, and the Israelis argue (with some justification) that the Palestinians have to prove they aren't going to keep trying to kill Israelis before they can have more.
Bringing us to today. Most people in the West are more sympathetic to the overall perspective of the Israelis, because we can see that yes, historically the Arabs really have been trying to kill them for decades now, and the Israelis have made at least some attempts to ease up on the Palestinians and let them try to build a society, and every such easing up has resulted in more suicide bombings or October 7. Leftists say, well, the Palestinians are an oppressed people, they are entitled to armed resistance. I always try to get them to say the unspoken part, to reveal their power level (just like I do with our friend @SecureSignals): okay, what is the end goal? Tell me what you really, really want to happen if you "win"? Most leftists won't come out and say "I want Israel to be destroyed." Some of them will give some sort of pie-in-the-sky one state answer, like above. But the reality is that the literal destruction of Israel is the only real "win condition" for them.
For those people like you (@4bpp) who I assume does not actually want the destruction of Israel, what do you see as a solution? Besides just "Stop the bombing now," which I can sympathize with, but let's say Israel stops the war in Gaza today and withdraws, and promptly allows unlimited international support in to rebuild. What happens next? What I think happens next is that Hamas grabs as much of that as they can and plans the next October 7, which will happen sooner rather than later. As much as I would like to see Gazan civilians not being bombed (and I do not care if "80% of them support Hamas," which is a frequent justification for why, essentially, we should not feel bad about them being slaughtered), I can understand why Israelis are not willing to accept a stopping point that just returns to the status quo and another October 7.
The more peaceful leftists will then say "They should cease fire now and then negotiate a real peace that gives Palestinians a real state so there is no need for Hamas etc etc etc." Okay, great idea. Everyone's been trying to do that for decades. See above.
So, simply saying "The Palestinians have a clear moral case," even if you're right, does not solve the current problem. Unless you are willing to bite the bullet and say "Yes, actually, I think Israel needs to cease to exist." Followed by either how you think peaceful coexistence between former Israelis and Palestinians will be accomplished, or your plan for forcibly resettling all the Israelis to another continent. Some would at this point show their power level and say "Yeah, actually, just let them slaughter all the Jews, they have it coming." But that would make the Palestinians' clear moral case a little less clear.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Man, the OP has generated some of the worst discussion here in recent memory.
I'm just going to tag this response as one of the worst offenders because you're the most blatant about it without actually being willing to speak plainly.
If you want to say "All our problems are because black people are stupid criminals," you need to say that (and then be able to defend it, because just saying that is clearly a sweeping generalization, so get your arguments properly formed rather than just taking the opportunity to vent your hatred of black people).
Hello, welcome to the Motte.
Putting cards on the table here, I was a little suspicious of you (not many people just independently "discover" us, and announcing yourself with a username guaranteed to set off a lot of folks here is a little suspicious), but I appreciate the discussion you have generated so far, and I will go with my presumption of good faith. Genuinely, I would like to see more posters like you.
So as you have probably figured out by now, the majority of people here are... not very friendly to trans identities. This ranges from "Thinks trans women are men but don't feel a need to start fights over it" to "Believes trans women are all AGP perverts who should be mocked and shunned and they really want you to know it."
Our rules require everyone to be treated civilly, so no is allowed to directly insult you just for being trans or advancing trans views, but nonetheless you probably will receive some vigorous challenges, so I hope you are prepared for that and have a thick skin. I am being sincere here - I would like you to be able to stick around despite what you will probably perceive as an adversarial environment. Because this is also one of the few places on the Internet where people are allowed to say "Trans women are men" without being banned.
Which, bringing this around to my point, is part of the reason even many more moderate folks like myself have become, if not radicalized, then rather more hostile to trans people than we once were. Putting cards on the table again, my own personal opinion is that gender dysphoria is real and I think people should be allowed to live and identify as they wish, but they shouldn't be able to force other people to accept their internal identification as biological reality. More concretely, I think people should address you as "Ma'am" out of politeness and people who go out of their way to "misgender" you are being hostile assholes. But most people don't really believe you're a woman and you shouldn't expect them to feel obligated to update their mental model on demand, nor should you try to sniff out signs of heresy (i.e., clues that they don't actually think of you as a woman, for which you would then try to socially punish them). I am not saying you do this - but many trans people do do this, and that is the cause of the much of the present hostility towards trans people.
In my opinion, until a decade or so ago, most people (at least on the liberal side) were much more accepting of trans identity because trans people sold themselves the way gay people did - "We just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace." Which is no doubt true of most trans people! But then we started seeing increasing pressure not just to accept, but to validate. Increasing demands to proactively affirm that we really, really see you as a woman, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a hateful bigot. Then came trans women who used to be mediocre middle aged male athletes suddenly joining a woman's sports league and crushing lifetime competitors. Trans women who were men until five minutes after their conviction for a violent sex felony, whereupon they discovered their female identity and a need to be housed in women's prisons. Trans women who really want to show off their erections in women's locker rooms and force low-wage immigrant women to wax their female balls. Trans women who transition after a lifetime of being a husband and a father and dress like minimal-effort clowns while representing the US government. Trans women who want you to be fired if you won't put pronouns in your email signature.
These are undoubtedly a tiny minority of trans people. But it doesn't take very many bad actors to cause a lot of disturbance and distress, and more importantly, the reaction from the trans community has been largely, not acknowledgment that there are bad actors and maybe it's appropriate to not assume "good faith" on the part of every single man who suddenly realizes he's a woman in his 50s. Not to allow us to apply some... gatekeeping and to acknowledge that biological sex is a thing and you can let trans women live as women and be polite to them without letting them compete against women in the Olympics. But instead, to double down on all these issues and say "No, a trans woman is a real biological woman and should be able to show off their female penis in front of teenage girls, should be able to beat up women in sports, should be able to share a cell with women in a prison."
And that... is why I personally have lost a lot of my sympathy for the trans movement. I still am polite to trans people I know personally. I would use your preferred name and pronouns in person. Even though I would not actually think of you as a woman. And I would treat you as a very dangerous person to interact with, socially and professionally, on the assumption that a slip on my part would result in you trying to bring down sanctions upon me.
I am interested in your thoughts on this. Do you think the trans community has "gone too far"? Or do you think this is an exaggeration and we just see the worst and most extreme outliers? Do you think people should be required to actually think of you as a woman (to the degree that you can police someone's thoughts)? I won't demand you defend trans women in women's sports or prisons, though I am kind of interested in that, but that's a very familiar discussion we've had before (albeit rarely with trans people actually participating).
More options
Context Copy link