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Amadan

"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"

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joined 2022 September 05 00:23:21 UTC
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User ID: 297

Amadan

"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"

5 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 00:23:21 UTC

					

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User ID: 297

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Update on the Black Teens Versus Pregnant Nurse story.

This twitter thread seems like a reasonable summary. I know it's not entirely unbiased, but absent additional contradictory evidence, the story seems to basically check out like this:

  1. Kids had checked out the ebikes for a ride, and docked them before the 45-minute "free" period ended, planning to undock them to resume riding. (This is apparently a pretty common practice?)

  2. They're sitting on the bikes chilling, when Comrie, the pregnant nurse, approaches and asks to have one of the bikes.

  3. The teens say no, unmoved by her appeals for consideration for her pregnancy.

  4. She scans (checks out) a bike one of the kids is sitting on, and tries to take it.

  5. The kerfluffle we saw on video ensues. The kids apparently filmed it with a legitimate fear that she would turn it into "gang of teens harasses pregnant white lady."

So basically, no one looks like an entirely innocent victim here. The kids were just hanging out in preparation to check out the bikes again, but since they were docked, you don't really get to "call dibs" on a bike you are not currently renting. Technically Comrie was entitled to take an available bike; the kids shouldn't have been squatting on them. They were also kind of jerks for not showing a little compassion for an obviously pregnant woman (their version is that if they'd given up the bike, one of them would have had to find some other way to get back to the Bronx).

That said, deciding "Screw you, I'm taking your bike anyway, get off" wasn't great behavior on her part, even if legally justified. I cut her more slack because apparently she just got off a 12-hour shift, and she was pregnant.

However, even if the teens were perhaps being inconsiderate and less than gentlemanly, the narrative that's basically portrayed them as ganging up on her and trying to steal her bike appears to be inaccurate.

I'm a little bit surprised that Ilhan Omar came to Marbach's defense.

Optimistically, I'd like to think she actually believes that stuff about freedom of religion.

Cynically, I suspect she is just anticipating a fight over what her religion believes about LGBT folks.

Even more cynically, I wonder if she just saw an opportunity to slag a Republican Jew.

But I am often surprised that people are surprised that yes, orthodox Christians do in fact believe you (yes, you) are going to go to hell if you do not accept Jesus Christ. Yes, that means they literally believe every last atheist and Muslim and Jew and pagan and Hindu and Buddhist is going to burn in hell forever. (And a lot of the Protestant denominations include Catholics, Mormons, and JWs in that bucket.)

It's almost as amusing as watching liberals in Virginia discover recently that mainstream Muslims are mostly not, in fact, "queer-friendly."

Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.

Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people

All right, you have hit one of my pet peeves, because I hear this shit all the time from my nice progressive friends. It's just repeated ad infinitum, as an article of faith, as a proven, established fac, that JK Rowling "hates trans people," that she "wants to slander and eradicate them," etc. In unrelated hobby spaces, I've seen it argued unironically, in all seriousness, that she literally advocates "genocide of trans people" (and also that Harry Potter goblins were intended to be metaphors for Jews because she also hates Jews).

I have been a Rowling fan since before she got on Twitter. Yes, I actually like the Harry Potter books (despite being way too old for them). I've read all her Cormoran Strike novels, and even The Casual Vacancy. I follow her on Twitter and I read her blog. So I know whereof I speak, though I won't claim I can remember every single thing she's ever said in public.

I have never seen her say anything that approaches "hate" or "wanting to eradicate" trans people. She has said the opposite many times. She is a standard issue very liberal second wave feminist.

What does she say?

  1. She does not believe trans women are women.
  2. Therefore she does not believe trans women should play in women's sports or go to women's prisons.
  3. She believes trans people should be free to live their lives in peace without harassment.
  4. Some so-called trans women (like the sexual predators she highlighted) are bad faith opportunists claiming trans status for political purposes or because they would prefer to go to women's prison rather than men's prison.

I think all of these points are reasonable, and even if you disagree with some or all of them, none of them resemble anything like "hate" or wishing for a "trans genocide."

I would love it if you could point to me any public statement of hers, or even a reliable second-hand account of some alleged private statement, in which she's said anything that resembles what you are claiming.

The Joo-posters are constantly arguing that Jews are essentially a malignant invasive species working for the benefit of their in-group (Jews) to the detriment of non-Jews, and that undermining Western civilization and trying to destroy white society is something they are naturally driven to do. In olden times, they would have just said this is because Jews are inherently wicked because God hates them. Nowadays, that doesn't sound very persuasive, especially to rationalists, so instead they make up HBD theories for why Jews are a uniquely pernicious tribe following biological imperatives.

I know this because it's not exactly a new argument, and you know this because you've been around long enough to have seen it yourself. Why are you pretending that HBD has only ever been about IQ? Even the people whose HBD arguments are primarily focused on blacks are quite open about their belief that HBD says blacks aren't just low IQ, but also impulsive, violent, criminally inclined, etc.

Generic in-group bias would be a fully-formed explanation if the complaints about Jews were limited to their overrepresentation in banking and Hollywood, but the Jew-baiting posts very regularly make much broader assertions, that Jews are responsible for desegregation, affirmative action, increased immigration, laxer criminal justice, pornography, sexual liberation, feminism, and essentially, the entire liberal project, up to and including wokeism. Which is assumed to be a deliberate multigenerational campaign to undermine their neighbors and destroy their host society.

This only makes sense if you believe (a) Jews are just naturally evil for some reason; (b) it's some sort of biological imperative to conduct tribal warfare at a level that goes well beyond any "in-group bias" one sees in other ethnic groups. And some of the Joo-posters have made explicit HBD arguments to the effect that Jews just "evolved that way."

I have a genuine question, because I haven't been able to find a reliable answer:

Is the "blue octopus" actually an anti-Semitic dogwhiste, like, anywhere? Or is this an association that was just invented yesterday to pile on Greta Thunberg?

I've seen the infamous Nazi cartoon, of course, and it's not unique, but octopuses have long been used to symbolize conspiracies. A fishy alien thing with lots of tentacles reaching everywhere makes a pretty convenient metaphor for any group you're accusing of being sinister infiltrators.

I have never before yesterday, however, seen the claim that blue octopus plushies, specifically, are some sort of secret mascot used by white nationalists.

If they are, I seriously doubt that Thunberg was aware of it and deliberately signaling her own hatred of Jews. So this seems a lot like people freaking out over the "okay" signal.

I also suspect that, just like the "okay" signal, we're now going to see actual white nationalists unironically adopting blue octopus plushies as mascots.

To be fair, you can hear that right from the horse's mouth. She herself relates this behavior directly to Tikkun Olam:

Whether or not you agree with individual Jews who believe that things that like gay rights and affirmative action are good, there is still a disconnect between "They're doing these things because they believe they're good" and "They're doing these things because they are driven by a Jewish impulse to corrupt and destroy." But I take it that you are, in fact, endorsing the HBD theory of Jewish nefariousness?

In other words, when all the people of the world abandon false gods and recognize the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, the world will have been perfected.

This is essentially what most religious adherents believe.

You have a talent for writing lots of words, throwing down links, and copypastaing walls of text that dance around and suggestively pantomime a statement without actually directly answering the question. And as many other people have pointed out, selectively ignoring every time one of your arguments or citations is disproven, only to come back to it next time hoping no one will notice or remember.

So, I asked you if there is something specially malignant about Jews, and if you believe it's biological, and you give me a bunch of stuff about Tikkun Olam (yes, yes, we all know about Tikkun Olam, it's at this point a meme so old it's practically Boomer DR) and how it "suggests" that maybe in fact yes, Jews have evolved over thousands of years to become a uniquely insidious race with characteristics more threatening and hostile to outsiders than any other practitioners of a monotheistic religion. Such that it is now a biological imperative among anyone with Jewish DNA to try to subvert and destroy the society in which they live.

Would you say that is a fair characterization of what you believe? And if not, could you please be specific in explaining in what way I have misunderstood you?

Note that I am not even disputing, at the moment, your implicit equation of "supports liberal causes" with "wants to destroy civilization," though of course that is highly disputable as well. I'm giving you "Tikkun Olam" and asking what you think this actually says about Jews as a species.

Don't you see you are misrepresenting my point in the exact same way others misrepresent HBD: "Oh, so you're saying because of HBD there are no intelligent people in such-and-such group, and absolutely everyone from this group is smarter than that group." You are just using the exact same strategy here.

No, I'm sure you don't believe that literally everyone with Jewish DNA is a (figurative) lizard person.

What it appears you believe is that Jewish DNA means the "modal" Jew (the middle of the bell curve, if you will) is a lizard person.

When Jews are telling you they are promoting anti-racism because of Tikkun Olam why don't you believe them? I do.

Of course I believe that, but that doesn't say any of the things about Jews, or even Judaism, that you are extrapolating.

This reminds me of my tenure on the Atheism+ forums, back before my redpilling/blackpilling (I don't know what to call it, since I didn't really change my beliefs, I just realized the people I thought were on my side, aren't).

A+, as you know, was woker than woke before "woke" became a thing. And one of my "WTF?" moments when I realized these people are fucking crazy is when they went hard on defending... Muslims. Not against general racism and bigotry, but against criticisms that the "New Atheists" had no problem applying to every other religion.

At one point, the forum got trolled hard by a poster from one of the hater-forums who monitored them, a set of people running an account that adopted the persona of a gay man who proceeded to post long effort-posts about the connection between homophobia and Islamophobia, and how seeing the latter "triggered" him, as a gay man, despite the fact that he was an atheist.

The mods on the A+ forum proceeded to take him very seriously and started modding comments that were too "Islamophobic."

He also declared that the term "homosexual" was homophobic. The mods proceeded to mod anyone who used the word homosexual.

I was one of the few people who pushed back and kept getting in arguments with him, until he eventually DMed me and let me know what the game was. I already suspected something of the sort, because to any sane person his arguments were so transparently nonsensical. But the mods and the other SJWs on the forum ate it up.

As to your broader point, I think liberals like Maher and Harris suffer from a misapprehension that I had myself until recently (my beliefs have changed on this one): that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them until they are just like the rest of us, and we'll have a big joint Christmas/Hannuka/Ramadan holiday season.

This does happen to an extent. Moderate Muslims in the West are... mostly like the rest of us. I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment." (Leaving aside the arguments from some of our resident Christians that post-Enlightenment Christianity isn't real Christianity at all.) I don't think Islam is some sort of unique Neal Stephenson mind virus that turns its followers into violent p-zombies even if many of Islam's critics do.

But I am pessimistic about Islam, in its current form, being capable of coexisting long-term with other ideologies. I have a lot of other uncharitable and blackpilling thoughts I've been tossing around and trying to decide how much of it is Chinese Cardiology and selection bias.

I do think a blanket "Muslim ban" is stupid (and clearly unconstitutional). But a ban on importing large numbers of people from countries that just happen to be dominated by Muslims of an uncompromising, anti-Western, pro-jihadist bent does not seem irrational or bigoted to me, but it would be hard to frame it in a way that would be acceptable to those who believe Islam is "just another religion."

Anti-racism: White people have no ethnic identity, they do not get to ethnically advocate for themselves, they do not get to oppose demographic replacement in polite society, they do not get their own ethnic spaces. At the same time, criticizing Jews is strictly prohibited.

Do you think that anti-racists, and particularly Jewish anti-racists, would agree with you that that is an accurate description of what "anti-racism" means?

If not, do you think the discrepancy is because:

a) They are all lying.

b) They are all acting according to anti-white racial instincts they may not even be conscious of?

c) You are not accurately or charitably describing their actual beliefs?

Bonus question: Since you claim being "anti-racist" and believing in "Tikkun Olam" is a tribal, HBD-determined behavior, how do you explain all the Christians and atheists and agnostics and people of other faiths who are also fully immersed in "anti-racism" (and other liberal projects you ascribe to the Jews)? Are they:

a) Useful fools who've been assimilated and converged by the Jewish agenda?

b) Getting pinged by Jew-signals in their own Jewish DNA?

c) Acting according to their own tribal instincts which might occasionally overlap with those of Jews?

d) Actually formulating beliefs based on their own reason and morality, which might happen to be similar to beliefs that some Jews formulate based on their own reason and morality?

You are doing a lot of subtle shifting of goalposts, as usual.

But I understand your answers to the above questions to be (b) and (a), respectively. So basically, Jews do what they do (specifically: try to destroy non-Jews) because of HBD, and everyone else follows their agenda because Jews have so cleverly crafted and sold a narrative to them. Is that accurate?

Follow-up question: do you have any theories as to why it is only Jews who have this genetic impulse to destroy all members of their outgroup and do so in such insidious ways? Or do all tribes have this impulse, but Jews have some special advantage that makes them better at it?

These words like "genetic impulse to destroy all members of their outgroup" and many others you've scattered through your posts is just your own weak-manning, feel free to copy + paste anything I've said that you object to because you aren't characterizing my position accurately.

I am obviously phrasing it in a more blunt way, because you try to put it in a more evasive and less obviously culture warry way, but I genuinely do not see how my characterization is inaccurate. Why don't you explain it to me, as I've asked you to do numerous times? You do believe Jews act as they do for reasons that can be ascribed to HBD (i.e, genetics), yes? You do believe that Jews act to undermine and disempower their outgroup, yes? (Perhaps "destroy" assumes too much - maybe they'd be satisfied with complete subjugation?) I understand why you don't want to be pinned down admitting, in those words, that you believe Jews have a genetic impulse to destroy all members of their outgroup, because that would require showing your power level too blatantly, but no, I do not believe I am weakmanning you. You believe Jews are hostile and dangerous to non-Jews, that they are this way for genetic reasons and therefore it is a predilection that all Jews possess, even if they deny it or are unaware of it, and they are, if not uniquely so, then at least unusually energetic and successful at prosecuting tribal warfare, with the end goal of suppressing or extirpating rival tribes, across a span of millennia. Is any of that not correct?

IIRC, it was Neil Gaiman who first wrote "the problem of Susan." It's been repeated endlessly, of course.

I liked the Narnia books as a kid, but they are much too earnestly Sunday School for me now. However, I always assumed that the line about "lipstick and nylons and invitations" was not about Susan becoming "sexual," but about her becoming too worldly. The whole Narnia series is of course a Christian metaphor, so Susan is a metaphor for the person who has left the church to become "of the world." (IIRC there is even a line about how it's possible she'll eventually get her head out of her ass and return to Narnia, i.e., repent and come back to the church.)

Like @self_made_human says, the part that bugged me was that it completely fails to pass the suspension of disbelief. Very young children might believe in magical kingdoms and talking animals and then grow out of it, but when you're a teenager who's literally ruled a magical kingdom and been there long enough to know it's not just a big game of make believe, I don't buy that she "grew up" and convinced herself it was all pretend. If Lewis had been writing for an older audience, maybe he'd have explored her psychological state in more detail and it would have emerged that yes, she knew Narnia was real but she turned her back on it for more complicated reasons, not just because she wanted to go to parties.

I’ve stewed and ideated about what I could have done differently, why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way except for that I’m diminutive and even-tempered while they’re large, high-testosterone, and well-acquainted with violence because it’s literally the only tool in their toolbox.

Amusingly enough, there is a sentiment in much of the alt right, from the likes of Vox Day and even our own @KulakRevolt, that is basically "Yup, if you're small and weak, suck it up and endure whatever your more powerful superiors choose to inflict upon you. It sucks to suck."

Your power fantasies are just that, the revenge fantasies of every bullied nerd ever, the copes of someone telling himself he's smarter and better and "biologically superior" to the jocks picking on him.

Now, I say this not out of a lack of sympathy for your experience (I am hardly a Batman or Punisher myself), or even disagreement with your central point (that it's terrible that we allow schizophrenic homeless losers to threaten people because we don't have the political will to do something about them, especially when they're black). But to point out that basically, you're not complaining that it's bad for the strong to dominate the weak. You're just complaining that the current social order doesn't put you among the strong.

You have a point about people kneejerk complaining about "white progressives," but while you can argue all you like that it's a handful of POC dominating and terrorizing nice white boys like yourself, they would have no power if not for all the white progressives abetting them. You stay in these ultra-woke environments but keep complaining about the wokeness. You can't like everything about the white progressive environment except for the fact that they allow non-whites to have influence. That's part of the environment.

I'm just going to say that I do not believe you are a "former leftist and atheist who's cringing at other atheists." This looks like the umpteenth iteration of a particular persona who keeps returning here.

As an atheist myself, I could never help but cringe when atheists responded to the “without God how are you moral” of the Christian evangelicals with the “Are you saying the only thing stopping you from murder is God’s judgment”?

The rejoinder you are complaining about is indeed a certain kind of smug gotcha line that's kind of cringe, but it's a rejoinder to an equally smug and cringeworthy argument. When theists try to play gotcha like that, they invite gotchas in return. This is why atheists who've gotten over their "arguing with evangelicals" phase usually aren't interested in that kind of debate. I'm fine actually talking about why I do or do not believe in God. But the sort of Christian who uses the "How can you be moral without God?" argument (usually followed by some variant of "You don't actually believe there is no God, you're just pretending") isn't interested in genuine discussion, but in seeing who can win the gotcha contest.

I think your Lizzo/Muslim analogy is kind of ridiculous. I don't personally care whether or not Ayan Hirsi Ali really believes in Christianity, but I can see why actual believers would care if someone is just wearing Christianity as a skin suit. You are overthinking the attraction to Islam; it's been pointed out here plenty of times that the left's infatuation with Islam isn't because of any intrinsic qualities of Islam (if it were practiced mostly by white people, they'd be condemning it as a Bronze age death cult). It's purely and solely because Islam is mostly practiced by brown third-worlders.

Yes, do you not?

I do not. Or rather, I do not thing the things you believe Jews specifically do are part of a biological imperative. If you're asking do I think Jews are human beings whose behavior has been shaped by evolution, well yes, of course, but that's not really what you're asking, is it?

Yes, do you not?

No, I do not think Jews act to undermine and disempower their outgroup, or at least, no more so than any other human beings.

You keep throwing chaff in response to questions by quoting more Jews who endorse policies you consider inimical to you. Why should I care what Bryan Caplan thinks? Why is what Bryan Caplan thinks a statement about the malignant evolutionary path of the Jewish race?

More to the point, if all you are saying is that Jews act like every other human being, why do you care about them so much, and why do you think I should care about them in particular?

I don't believe it's a predilection that "all Jews possess", sometimes it's a psychology that manifests in different ways, even as Jews who are especially contrarian and themselves anti-Semitic. Many Jews are apolitical altogether. Why is it when we talk about IQ you understand we ware talking about averages and distributions, but when it comes to talking about Jews we can only be talking about every single one at the same time? Why do you insist on pushing this fallacy that is pushed by the IQ deniers all the time?

I've already addressed this. I understand you don't think literally every Jew is a Cylon. (Probably a better metaphor than "lizard person.") But you think the "Jew average and distribution" is such that most Jews are basically Cylons - meaning, they will naturally act as hostile, subversive agents among non-Jews.

This is what you believe, and you believe this is true of Jews generally and not true of non-Jews generally. True or false?

Have you uh… forgotten whom you’re speaking to?

No, I have not. That's my point. As I understand it, you still live and work in that same environment (I don't know how much progress you have made in leaving it, but you seem like you are still very much a theater kid).

Again, an incredibly bizarre accusation to make toward me in particular. You actually believe that my only complaint about wokeness is that some non-white people believe in it?

No, I think you basically like the white progressive environment, you just don't like the non-white people in it (and all the things they bring), and you think non-white people invented wokeness. Well, in a sense they did ("woke" was originally African-American vernacular), but we have had many people here over the years write extensively about how wokeness is just the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment. Which is quintessential white progressivism. Maybe you disagree with that take, but I haven't seen you offer an alternate hypothesis.

I’m responding to a specific claim that “privileged white people” are the ones primarily responsible for driving wokeness.

Yes, and I think that claim is correct.

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.

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!"

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.

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).

I can go into further detail if @Amadan wants to do the "you are not oppressed" deal

Years later, you are still beefing about this, seriously?

Tell you what - when you answer some of my direct questions, I'll take up the task of dissecting yours again.