Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
I agree that we should bring back "cad" as a condemnatory term.
This whole case makes me see nothing but bad faith on all sides. Lefties want women to be able to retroactively retract consent for sex that days, months, or years later they decided they didn't like. Righties don't want men to be held responsible ever for wanting to get their dicks wet, not even to the degree that we might say "Tut tut" and socially shun him. Or I guess we can do that but if and only if we also agree that women are property.
( * Not all lefties, not all righties. Just the ones who seem to have very strong feelings about whether it's okay to criticize either Neil Gaiman's life choices or his ex-lovers'.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Using your pure conflict theory approach, only one side can ever be wrong and the other side must be 0% wrong. Which is both morally and logically wrong.
"Both sides wrong" doesn't mean both sides equally wrong. I have seen no allegations that make me think Neil Gaiman should be arrested, and I'm not in favor of "cancelling." But saying he's a skeevy perv you probably wouldn't want your 21-year-old daughter going to work for as a nanny? Yes, heavens forbid we so much as waggle a disapproving finger in a way that might grant some tiny bit of support to your political enemies.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
No, that is not how it works. I don't even believe that you don't actually believe Neil Gaiman did anything wrong. You have just identified his accusers as being your enemies, and fuck your enemies, therefore we must not admit Neil Gaiman might have done something wrong.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
There's a difference between focusing on his "offenses" and saying "If you weren't a skeev then you wouldn't inevitably catch accusations like this."
I'm very comfortable saying I feel little sympathy for these women's accusations, and I feel little sympathy for Gaiman being accused. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, FAFO, he fucked the leopards... Pick your meme.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Well, theoretically I could ban you and then unban you 1 minute later.
But 1 day is the lowest setting.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
If you think that these women are probably making bad faith accusations about consensual relationships and Neil Gaiman is probably a creep who shouldn't have been messing with them, then we don't really disagree.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Which prominent case are you referring to? If you're accusing me of hypocrisy or changing my position, you will have to be more specific.
I wouldn't consider Neil Gaiman going postal and shooting his accusers dead a likely or predictable consequence of being a starfucker.
My position is that he probably is guilty of, at the very least, being a skeevy old dude who's not above banging star struck young fans, but probably did nothing illegal and we should regard his accusers' claims skeptically.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Sure, but asserting "Homosexual child molesters exist" is not the same thing as asserting "Homosexuals are child molesters."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Please link to the post where I asserted "If you do not engage in this behavior, you are immune to accusations."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
You're not being a tad pedantic here? The point of your comments isn't to say something like "this wouldn't have happened to him, if he wasn't acting like that"?
Russel conjugation: you are being precise, I am being pedantic. The point of my comment is indeed that this probably wouldn't have happened to him if he weren't acting like that. That's not the same as claiming that baseless accusations never happen.
I can link the post where you say that accusations are an inevitable result of the sort of behavior he was engaging in
Would it make you feel better if I bowed to your pedantism and edited the post to remove "inevitably"? I mean, you know I did not literally mean absolutely 100% of the time with zero exceptions, right?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
These are the same thing. It's like on 9/11, saying "Well, if the Americans hadn't been messing around in the Middle East, this wouldn't have happened."
Both statements are literally true (although @ArjinFerman has convinced me that terms like "inevitably" are too prone to bad faith literal interpretations). So the question then becomes "Was Neil Gaiman's behavior inappropriate (or at least unwise)?" and "Was American intervention in the Middle East inappropriate/unwise?" If you have principles of any sort, your answer will depend on what your principles say about sexual behavior and/or foreign policy. If you don't have principles, your answer will depend on who got got.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Man, you read my clarification, right? And yet still I use the word and get the inevitable (another cursed word) "Not all righties." I know not all righties.
Of course I know most "righties" don't literally want to make women property. I know there's a large gulf between your first group and your second. I am talking about the first, and for all their verboseness about the dangerous power of female sexuality and how all ancient societies wisely "controlled" it, yes, what they really want is infinite women to abuse without blame. They pretend that the social controls they advocate are about preventing abuse of women, but just as they will be quick to point out that men will always act stupid about sex regardless of social rules, they also pretend that this doesn't apply to women as well, and therefore their rules just create a permanent class of "legal to abuse" women (a class into which any woman can fall if she strays outside the controlling structure).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Ironically enough, it appeared for janitor evaluation because it got an AAQC (I think Zorba should fix the system so that AAQCs don't get flagged the same as "Reported").
Also fwiw, while we do frown on implicit threats or wishes for violence, context and tone matters. So I agree he could probably have omitted that last comment, but as a mod, I would not read it as "Calling for Gaiman's murder."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Dude. You've been told and told. Against my better judgment, this comment just seems too petty to permaban you over it, but I'm giving you a 1-day ban because there was absolutely no point in posting this. If @urquan blocked you then he can't read it, so all you're doing is letting everyone else know "I really want to fight this guy but he won't let me."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Don't uncharitably put words in someone else's mouth. Don't do this sort of "Rewriting someone else's post to make it sound simplistic and dumb and what I think they actually meant."
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
A man can be reasonably expected to be up to no good towards any woman not outside of his immediate family
If you do not believe you are capable of controlling yourself, I will not argue with you. But you should not typical-mind yourself into believing that no man can resist fucking a woman if he thinks he can get away with it. If this were true, there would be almost zero fidelitous married men in the modern age, and rape would be much more common than it is.
We are subject to many primal urges. Greed, lust, gluttony, pride, etc. Maybe lust is the strongest, I don't know, but yes, "be moral" is actually the response to those asking "How can you expect me to resist temptation?" "Lock the temptation away and keep it tightly controlled" is not.
Yes, men can be manipulated with sex, and women can be manipulated with promises and threats, and I agree that the current state of affairs (driven heavily by modern feminism) is not healthy, but "retvrn to treating women as property" is immoral, impractical, and frankly, ahistorical.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
You misunderstand me.
I don't think I do. You think "I couldn't help banging a pretty young girl/pressuring her into having sex with me" is equivalent to "I couldn't prevent something from falling on my head."
Your behavior, unlike gravity, is something over which you have control. Traditionally, we punish people who are unable to control themselves, we do not blame whatever triggered their lack of control.
To extend this analogy, if all men were gentlemen and kept their marriage vows, we wouldn't need laws and customs to prevent rape.
And if no one was violent or greedy, we wouldn't need laws against assault, murder, theft, etc.
I am of an ideology that reasonable concessions for safety can be made at the price of liberty.
Sure. Most people believe that, but where we set that on the sliding scale between "absolute freedom" and "absolute safety" is pretty important.
If, indeed, a woman can go into the public space with the reasonable expectation that she not compromise herself
And here is the sticking point. What, to you, is a "reasonable expectation that she not compromise herself"? What is "compromising herself"? Showing too much skin? Smiling? Appearing in public without a male chaperone? Voluntarily entering a room alone with a man (which, according to others in this thread, means he should thereupon have the legal right to rape her)?
Even back in Ye Good Old Days of whichever century you think was the height of sexual propriety, the rules for a woman in, say *Victorian England were quite different from the rules for a woman in, say, modern Afghanistan, and what with the "Islam is right about women" memes I am not encouraged that you want to place essentially all responsibility on women to not tempt men.
* Fun fact, the Victorians were actually stricter than previous generations. Even the Regency era, about which Jane Austen wrote, allowed women much more freedom to socialize and appear in public, hence several of her novels showing her heroines going to parties and thus being placed in compromising situations. Yet even writing in the 19th century, Jane Austen, hardly a modern feminist, was able to view both men and women as having both agency and responsibility with more nuance than our "Make women property" advocates seem to.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Scoring it on the back of a napkin, it seems like we've had a really effective executive only maybe half the time since 1960? The administrative state is truly out of control when we don't even notice having a president who can't remember what day it is.
Adding to this with one of my favorite subjects (early US Presidents), the record was no better in the 18th and 19th centuries. Washington was a good president given that he was setting all precedents. John Adams was a very good man but probably pretty mid as a president. Jefferson was not a very good man but a good president if you ignore that he basically ignored the Constitution and was a two-faced hypocrite. Madison, pretty good (except he got us into the War of 1812, not 100% his fault). Monroe, good, not great. John Quincy Adams, very mediocre as president. And so on all the way through the 19th century - for every lion like Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln, or effective bureaucrat like Polk, you had an apparatchnik like Van Buren or Fillmore or a failure with feet of clay like Tyler or Buchanan or Johnson, or just midwits whose greatest virtue was that they didn't do too much damage, like Pierce or Harrison.
History repeats itself and echoes frequently. People would be less stuck in presentism and "This is the greatest crisis in history!" if they read more history.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Hah. I didn't know that. TIL.
Personally I doubt I'd ever bother banning someone for less than 1 day.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
People aren't roads, as much as some might wish otherwise. Even the past was rarely as Dread Jim and his fanboys represent it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Freddie's not wrong, but I find him endlessly tiresome and miserable. He constantly gropes for the truth and almost seems to grasp it, and then hastily backs away as if it burned his fingers. Every time I read one of his essays, I think "You've almost got it" and then he swerves and ostentatiously clears his throat to make sure no one thinks he's suggesting non-leftists might ever be right about something.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
I agree with you in general, but when people say that widespread voter fraud ended in the Gilded Age, I am reminded of Robert Caro's magnificent biography of Lyndon Johnson. His 1948 election to the Senate was characterized by massive fraud - which was in fact the norm in Texas at that time , complete with jeffes telling their underlings how to vote (and supervising the votes to make sure they did it correctly), ballots collected by party apparatchiks, and illegals shipped across the border to vote en masse.
Voter fraud really isn't some hypothetical bogey man that's a relic of ancient times. Our elections are probably a lot cleaner today than in the 1940s and 1950s, but the potential and the motivation is most definitely still out there.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Pretty sure it was basically that right wingers were sharing it around as a good anti-woke rant, and Freddie was dismayed that his enemies were using his words as ammunition against leftists (even leftists he himself was attacking).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Less antagonism. You've been warned about this repeatedly. Next time is going to catch you a ban.
It's fascinating to me that you interpret anything a man might do as merely obeying ancient biological imperatives over which he has no control, while anything a woman might do is basically women being evil whores with full awareness and control over what they're doing.
Yeah, (straight) men find young women hot and fuckable, and for as long as there has been civilization (and contrary to what some Bronze Age Gor fetishists), even in the most restrictive societies where women were basically chattel (which was not, in fact, most of them), there was still some expectation that men can control wanting to fuck any young woman they can get their hands on, even if she doesn't happen to be property of the king.
Really now.
Male motivation does not exist "outside the plane of morality." Morality is what you use to govern yourself and how you act on your motivations.
I am very confident that I could spend any amount of time alone with an attractive young woman and still not try to fuck her. And yes, I am a straight male with a normal, healthy sex drive.
I mean, if you're talking about "literally the last people on Earth stranded on a desert island" or "trapped in a rocket ship hurtling off into the void forever".... well, maybe I'd at least make a play, but I remain confident that if she said no, I could avoid, you know, becoming a rapist.
Or you could treat men as moral agents.
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