Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
So far, nothing has really clicked with me I've tried Reverend Insanity, Cradle, Worth the Candle, and a few others.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
I enjoyed your review, but it doesn't change my opinion. I think our tastes are pretty fundamentally different. I don't want a story that goes on and on forever. I want an arc, a climax, and a resolution. I also actually care about prose, and maybe it's because the translation is subpar, but I found reading Reverend Insanity to be painful. Like fanfic-level bad.
Your review, I admit, does certainly make it sound intriguing and if I hadn't already given it a shot I would definitely go try it out now. But the other problem is that while I don't need "sympathetic" or "relatable" protagonists, I probably wouldn't enjoy hundreds of pages of reading how an amoral asshole will fuck over the next person in his way.
I keep trying progression fantasies and Wuxia novels, and the bar just seems to be very low in general.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
This is basically just the modern progressive Christianity that dominates many denominations in the US and Europe, with a shiny new label. (American Christianity in particular is very fond of coming up with shiny new labels for not particularly new ideas.) I would say that the majority of these congregations don't really "believe" in any serious way, either emotionally or intellectually. In the abstract, they believe in God because the universe is a big dark scary place without some supreme being giving reason to it all, and they believe in an afterlife because just ceasing to exist like a snuffed candle after a few brief years is a pretty scary thing to wrap your head around, and they believe in Jesus because he said we should all be nice to each other, which is nice. But do they have any serious expectation that they will ever witness miracles or angels, or hear God speaking to them, or really think about whether heaven and hell are real places? I don't think so.
I am more familiar with Protestantism than Catholicism, but I suspect it's not dissimilar there; the Catholic Church at least puts on an outward show of being more Serious about the whole thing, but I'll bet even the average Catholic priest doesn't really, truly believe in angels and demons and would freak out as much as any secular person if he experienced something actually supernatural.
So I remain unconvinced by this attempt to reconcile religion and reason. You might as well call it "Secular Christianity."
There are people who are very serious and sincerely believe, and on the one hand, I have a little more respect for them for really committing to the bit, and also find them a little less trustworthy.
I understand the concept of a "God-shaped hole," but I think it's mostly both a desire for a shared community (I do not doubt all the surveys showing religious people are on the whole happier and mentally healthier than secular people) and the need for Answers (see above, the fear of death and an empty, unfeeling universe that doesn't care about a speck of atoms like you).
I was never an Angry Atheist, but I did go through my smarmy, condescending Internet Atheist phase where dunking on creationists and born-agains was fun. Since then I have mellowed out and I have more understanding for the religious, and am kind of perversely fascinated with @WhiningCoil's trajectory, but while I've gone through phases where I've thought that joining a church might be "good" for me in some sense, I remain a materialist atheist and it's very unlikely anything will convince me to change. @FCfromSSC writes some very cogent criticisms of materialism and I get his point that materialists often base their "knowledge" on constructs no more inherently trustworthy than faith, but that just tells me no one can really "know" anything. Maybe for some people that leaves belief wide open as a choose-your-own-adventure, but I find myself unable to just make myself believe things. "You don't have an answer for how the universe started, therefore Jesus" is such a huge leap that I don't understand how people get there, though clearly many do.
No argument will convince me to just "reason" my way into accepting Jesus or Mohammad PBUH or the Tao. (Don't try; you do not have an argument I have not heard before.) The only thing that would trigger a conversion in me is witnessing something with my own eyes. Show me an angel, so to speak. Which means going to a church would always seem fake and disrespectful to me, even if the church somehow accorded with my beliefs in every other way and my intentions were pro-social.
So back to this "Mystical Christianity." I could get more or less the same experience at a United Methodist church. Or, stripped of even the pretense of Christianity, a Unitarian Universalist congregation. (I've actually checked them out. They are nice people but the utter lack of seriousness makes me think I'd rather become Mennonite or Mormon if I were going to go that route. At least those people really believe something. Also, UUs are the very wokest of wokes nowadays.) Freemasonry, yeah, has some of that mysticism and ritual but strikes me as sort of Boy Scouts for areligious grownups.
Does being "religious" actually change anyone's beliefs or behavior? Not really. I've long been of the opinion that being religious has almost no impact on an individual's character and says little about him. Christianity seems particularly adept at molding itself to the beliefs of the believer, but in essentially every religion, you see that kind, compassionate, charitable people say their religion tells them they are supposed to be kind, compassionate, and charitable, and cruel, judgmental, and punitive people say that their religion says they are supposed to be cruel, judgmental and punitive. That God always has a tendency to coincidentally agree with his followers' beliefs is not a new observation. That some people want to believe there is some kind of God-shaped thing that doesn't actually make any demands of them, either to believe uncomfortable things or change their behavior, is also not new. It's "spiritual but not religious" dressed up as being kinda religious because they like the costume. I think these people grasping for "mystical Christianity" or some other dressed up weak tea New Age spirituality should either commit and go to a real hardcore trad church that will make them study and do some theology, or admit they just want a social circle that will help soothe their existential angst.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
If the user deletes them, I don't think we can undelete them. Maybe Zorba can.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
Ideally, the responsibility is not imposed. In practice, people pollute the commons and infringe upon others' freedoms.
This is why we have laws and governments. All laws and governments are restrictions on liberty.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
It's a sliding scale, as all things are.
If I have to choose between people having too much freedom to do things I disapprove of, or people being forbidden to do things you disapprove of, I choose freedom.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
No one is disputing that Democratic politicians are more likely than not to be pro-choice. That wasn't the boo outgroup part.
Please (I mean this sincerely) don't start playing this game again just because you're back under a new alt.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
I do not like @Fruck's antagonism (borderline, but saying your argument is dishonest is allowed even if I wish he'd be more charitable). However, while I think immigration advocates mostly do believe in humanitarian and economic justifications, your arguments that there can't possibly be any self-serving motives seem either naive or, well, the less charitable option Fruck pointed at.
I will make three counterarguments:
*. "Illegal immigrants can't vote." This is true, and I tend to mostly think claims of widespread voter fraud are unsupported. That said, to claim it absolutely does not or could not happen, and cannot be an intentional policy, is to ignore history. I've mentioned this before (because it's one of my favorite books) but Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson talks a lot about his 1948 Senate race in Texas. It was quite eye-opening. At that time, shipping large numbers of Mexicans across the border to vote illegally was in fact something party bosses did routinely (both parties). Everyone knew this. And it certainly wasn't happening only in Texas.
I'm going to say this probably doesn't happen today, at least not on a large scale, but the fact that it did happen within living memory, and clearly there are politicians who would be quite happy to game the system like that if they could find an exploit, means I do not think you can so casually dismiss the possibility, and the concern. I don't know if pro-immigrationists are finding ways to get illegals to vote in significant numbers, but I believe they absolutely would. Especially given that many pro-immigrationists basically believe in open borders and we've seen more than one politician openly advocate for letting illegals vote, since they literally don't think anyone should be "illegal."
*. Even charitably assuming most of them aren't angling to get illegal immigrant votes, most of them do expect anyone who comes and settles here illegally to eventually be legalized. They don't want anyone to ever be deported, and again, they don't actually believe anyone should be illegal. So yes, people who can't technically vote now are very much seen as future votes, at least.
*. "The xenophobe vote." This assumes they would not advocate for more immigration and illegal immigrant rights because it would hurt them electorally; the "xenophobes" would vote against them. Sorry, but Fruck is right here. The xenophobes are already not going to vote Democrat (or Green, or Peace and Freedom, or Socialist). They aren't losing any votes they might otherwise have gained. Maybe if the Democrats were actually the party of the working class again they'd have to worry about blue collar and farm workers worried about their jobs, but they don't actually care about those people anymore, and haven't for a generation.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
Well, it is, actually. Some people just misunderstand "freedom" as an unalloyed good. Freedoms come with responsibility, as they say, which is why a lot of people like libertarianism in theory but find it's completely nonviable in practice, and anarchists are just profoundly unserious people.
Put another way, your argument would also be made by Muslims who claim that making women wear burkas actually gives them more freedom, since they are protected from the lustful gazes of men. (I have actually known Western progressive female converts to Islam who argued this, happy in their burkas, and ignoring the key word making.)
Getting back to @KMC's point, he's right in the sense that a man in 1875 could ride out into the frontier and build, explore, or taking another path, rob, rape and pillage, with much more impunity than today. That was certainly more "freedom" and some men fancy themselves born into the wrong age, but yes, freedom comes with tradeoffs. And wealth, safety, and security is very much a kind of freedom! Sure, a man starving in the wilds is more "free" than me in the sense he has no legal authorities "surveilling" him.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
Or he's one of those political oddballs who cannot be neatly categorized as "red-blue." A pro-life Democrat who hates Trump but who also has idiosyncratic reasons for hating particular Democrats? Not impossible.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
I am happy to trivially inconvenience people who would otherwise lower the quality of conversation. That's the point.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
Note: top-level post about breaking event. Basically just a summary of what happened, but with the poster's own thoughts about it. Not a huge effortpost, no brilliantly original ideas. Just some musings on current events and enough to hang a discussion on.
It's not hard, folks. We don't ask for more than this.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
I am qualitatively annoyed by the situation, which is independent of the frequency. However, you have the mod history, so if you'd like to provide numbers to supplement the conceptual-level discussion, that would be appreciated.
We don't have a record of "How many times someone was banned for a low effort top level post," but it's not common. Pretty much only when someone is a repeat offender after being warned, or being a deliberate jerk about it.
Moreover, I prefer a world where this distinction is overt in policy.
This is in the general category of requests we receive from time to time to, essentially, codify in minute detail the exact rubric we shall use to decide whether or not someone gets banned in every possible situation, and then consider ourselves bound to it so if someone makes a convincing enough case that "Actually, per clause 3 in paragraph 4, the offender did not meet the necessary threshold for banning" we will be forced to acquit. That's not how it works and it's not how it's ever going to work. "Low effort" is subjective, and it's always going to be subjective. Over time the mods have converged on something like a general consensus (not just on "low effort") such that most of the time, when we ask each other "Hey, do you think this post merits a ban?" there will be general agreement as to whether it does or doesn't. But it's not always unanimous, and depending who mods you, Amadan might decide on Tuesday to just give you a warning, and netstack might decide on Thursday to ban you for a week.
I understand this may be frustrating to those who have an autistic need to have the exact decision process mapped out for them, but you're just going to have to negotiate that. We're not a court of law, we respond to general community feeling, our own intuitions, and history, and trying to keep an interesting place running with maximal freedom of speech without letting people shit on the commons is more important than writing rules for autists.
(I am not calling you autistic; I have no idea whether you are or not. I'm just saying that the need to have all vagaries and subjectivity removed from human decision-making strikes me as a very autistic desire.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
Fake history. The Six-Day War was started by Israel and they were the aggressor in Suez.
This is, at the very least, debatable. Egypt massed troops on the border and was making threats (and closed the Straits of Tiran after Israel said they would consider this an act of war). Whether Nasser was just saber-rattling for appearances, or really meant to attack Israel we may never know, but if you mass troops on the border of a hostile neighbor and talk about how you're going to finish the job you failed to do last war, you should not be surprised if your neighbor decides to take you seriously.
The guerilla tactics used in Israel's early days were not nice. Nor is the ongoing occupation. Israelis and Arabs are certainly both guilty of war crimes. That said, you seem like most dedicated Israel-haters to take every Hamas PR release at face value while playing down Palestinian atrocities. Israel might not have a lot of charity left for Palestinians, but they'd still take even a disadvantageous deal if they actually believed it would lead to peace. (Obviously, the likelihood of this now is very close to zero.)
Israel isn't pure good facing pure evil. Israel has as much blood on their hands as every other country, and more than most, but they're facing people who are even worse. Sorry, that's the truth, and I have sympathy for Palestinians, but both their government (what there is of it) and, frankly, their culture, is terrible. Even other Arabs hate Palestinians and couldn't care less about dead Palestinian children except as props to make Israel look bad.
Maybe we should just abandon Israel and let them sink or swim on their own. I'd actually be okay with that, as long as there are no crocodile tears when Israel says "Fine, we'll show you what a genocide actually looks like."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
He made it personal first?
Are you a nation? Or are you unable to parse grammatical structures such as the general "you"?
Maybe you should stop making it personal. Have a vendetta since I think your forum's rules are garbage and are strangling this place into irrelevancy.
People have been saying this since years before we left reddit.
Never liked you on the old forum either before you made mod since all the regulars quit.
Stop, you'll hurt my feelings.
You've been told many times to stop doubling down and stop trying to antagonize us because you don't like the modding. You don't have to like the modding, or me. I don't care because you're a very low-value poster. But keep coming at me and other posters like this and you will start getting longer bans.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
There are a lot of Ayatollahs. There have been two "Supreme Leaders" who we usually know as the "Grand Ayatollah" but Grand Ayatollah isn't an exclusive rank either.
I used the plural because I was specifically referring to Iran's entire (religious) leadership.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
Is your real name remzem? How do you know "Hadad" actually represents his ethnicity? Maybe it does, maybe not, but it's a thin pretext to start declaiming the purity of your bloodline. Stop making things personal.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
Well, to also be fair, every Ayatollah since the Shah was overthrown has called for death to America, and we know that the Iranian government, by and large, is on board with this. The grudge certainly runs both ways, but Obama did make some half-assed attempts at normalization and look what that got us.
I kind of feel about Iran the same way I feel about Israel and Palestine - there is a lot of wrongdoing and doublespeak on both sides, but there is one side that really could have peace if they wanted it, but they clearly do not actually want it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
I am genuinely shaking my head in amazement that you wrote such a long wall of text to defend such an absurd argument and expect it to be taken seriously.
Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.
What are you even talking about? How many times has someone been banned for this? Any guesses? You talk like this is how it usually goes down, that when a big breaking news event happens, everyone wants to talk about it and someone has "take one for the team" and post a thread-starter they will get banned for.
Of course when big events happen, there will inevitably be a thread about it. Because someone will write about it. And they will, hopefully, write at least a measly paragraph or two that is something beyond just "HEY GUYS SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING I WANT TO BE THE FIRST TO START A THREAD SO MY THREAD WILL THE THREAD ABOUT IT!"
Our standards are not high. They are not unreasonable. You do not have to write an essay, a flowery effortpost, or come up with some wildly innovative idea. You just have to not look like an attention whore on Twitter.
There is a very simple solution for a major event worthy of discussion: write something about it. If it's too low effort, we'll probably clear our throats and say "Low effort, don't do this." Sometimes we will create a mega thread, like for elections and other predictable events. If next week, World War III has started, we will probably create a mega thread for it (you know, if we're alive and the Internet is still up and stuff).
@ABigGuy4U ate a ban because he was so blatant, so deliberate, so "Tee hee ain't I clever guys!" about it. I explained this. Normally if someone rushed to be FIRST! we'd just warn them not to do it again (as I said!) and let the thread continue. But someone who goes out of his way to be obnoxious about it, yeah, he's going to eat a ban. Don't tell us "I'm breaking the rules on purpose because the rules are stupid and I want attention." Of course I'm going to be inclined to respond harshly to that.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
At this point it just signals your support for Israel. It is more dignified to just post the 🇮🇱 emoji.
Dude, you and your fellow Jew-posters turn everything into a story about Da Joos, ask anyone who questions you as to their Jewish affiliations, and are quick to post the most thinly-sourced claims about Jewish direction as proven fact while sneeringly dismissing anything contrary to that narrative no matter how well reasoned or documented.
Look in a mirror. You are the very reverse image of the pro-Israel partisan who deflects every criticism of Israel with bad faith accusations of anti-semitism. (An accusation that, frankly, seems less often bad faith than merely overly broad nowadays.)
Someone whose posts are full of thinly-veiled 1488 content is not in a position to snarkily comment on other people's lack of dignity and imply they are just 🇮🇱 wavers.
Sigh. Yes, as I said, I've heard this before. Most nonbelievers or lapsed believers who've made a sincere attempt at belief have. "Read these books. Try meditating. Try prayer. Try fasting. Try LSD." It's always that one thing you haven't tried that will convince you, and if you have tried them, well, you didn't do it right, or you didn't approach it with a truly open mind.
I believe it changed your actions. I doubt it really changed your character. Were you a bastard who turned into a nice guy? Or did you just stop swearing and cheating on your wife? I mean, I've heard of people who went from amoral monsters to devout good samaritans after a road to Damascus experience, but it seems pretty rare and most often involves coming off a drug or alcohol addiction, which brings into question whether it was the drugs or the lack of religion making them a bastard before
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