Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3d ago
The war was always unpopular with the left, though at the time even anti-war activists would do a lot of throat clearing about how evil Saddam was. It was very popular with the right, who mostly, as you say, thought removing Saddam would turn Iraqis into democracy-lovers. (Remember all those photos of Iraqis proudly showing off their purple fingers?)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
You know, I am not a puritan and don't really care if porn is available. But are we really supposed to be concerned that homeless people can't access free porn? Like their presence isn't making public libraries and coffee shops unpleasant enough as it is?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4d ago
I don't think there are many commonly used modern definition of feminism that directly involves policing other women's choices regarding their own appearances
The term is "internalized misogyny" or "the Patriarchy." It's very common, though it's never framed (overtly) as being the women's fault. But the implication is often that they are defecting, selling out for male approval.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
I understand that 'more abortions for black women(and this is South Carolina)' is your #1 priority
Don't attribute motives to people they have not stated.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5d ago
Okay, that's enough 4chan-level shitty comments out of you, dipping into personal antagonism.
A lot of users are eagerly anticipating your banning. I try to factor in your unpopularity for just running against popular sentiment when you get reported constantly, but the fact is, your reports are increasingly for low-effort shitty comments and you seem to be trying to do a speed run on how many digs you can get in before you're banned. You actually occasionally have some interesting things to say, but it's mostly buried beneath snark and disdain.
You've gotten a lot of warnings and no bans yet. Here's your first one-day ban. I am disappointed that once again a left-leaning poster cannot control himself enough to avoid getting banned, but that seems to be the path you are on. Change my mind.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5d ago
I am currently reading Private Citizen, by Tony Tulathimutte, on @FtttG's recommendation. (We had some discussion about his collection, Rejection, not long ago, in which appeared his most talked-about story, The Feminist).
So far, Private Citizen is quite entertaining with the same clever and descriptive wordcrafting and vivid descriptions of a certain caste of Millenial. They are all striving fail-trackers in San Francisco, messed up in various ways, and while I enjoy the true-to-life and often hilarious slices of their lives - self-involved neurotic would-be PMCs-in-denial at the bottom end of the social spectrum in the proto-woke era - gods, they're annoying. So far not much of a plot has emerged, but that was true of many of his short stories as well- they were more like "Here is a Certain Type of person and how they end up." It will be a super-dated book in ten years (it's already showing its age) but some things will probably remain timeless, such as the brutal takes on sexual relations. (The "nojob" is cringey and physically painful to read.)
On a less highbrow note, my current audiobook is The Air War, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is the eighth book in his Shadows of the Apt series. I wish more people knew about Adrian Tchaikovsky. He's obviously a big seller, and he has two Hugo nominations this year, so he's not exactly a nobody, yet you rarely see him talked about with other big names in fantasy and science fiction. I suppose it's because in some ways, he's not a super-memorable writer; his prose doesn't leap out at you, and he writes so much that it's hard to say he's notable for any one thing or series (he isn't even a "fantasy" or a "science fiction" author - he is very much both, something many authors try to do but few pull off well), other than writing a lot of books. He also seems to be aiming for that inoffensive middle ground where his books are very people-pleasing and as an author, he's an enthusiastic science and gaming nerd but mostly seems to stay out of the culture wars and SFF politics.
But boy does he produce, his output is at Brandon Sanderson or Stephen King levels, and I have read about 20 of his books now and not one let me down. He switches between epic fantasy and space opera and writes long series. I think Sanderson is his closest comparison, and IMO he is a much better writer than Sanderson in every way.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5d ago
Sanderson writes very satisfying stories and he's known for sticking endings, but I think there is a sameness to his plot beats and his prose is definitely lukewarm, and I can never stop seeing the character sheets (and the Mormonism) floating around on the page. I agree that Tchaikovsky sometimes wanders off into self-indulgent tangents, but his ideas are exceptional and his writing is just better, especially in recent works.
I've only read Kevin J. Anderson once or twice and thought he was borderline awful.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Okay, since you're doubling down on being obnoxious and openly admitting to ban evasion (not that I was in any doubt), bye.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Okay, initially I wrote a rather harsher response, because the combination of projection ("You are being snide! You are responding with Nuh-uhs!") and the old "emotional investment" gambit (a low class tactic usually seen in forums where going to straight to ad hominems is the norm - "Huh huh you are arguing with me, you must be emotional about this! Like a woman!") annoyed me. However, from your lengthier reply I think you are arguing in good faith and deserve a kinder response. So, just to make a few points in order:
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If you are referring to Revolutionary France, that was more than 200 years ago. 200 years was your criteria, hence my confusion.
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A common tactic I see, usually from Christians, is to accuse atheism of being responsible for the mass atrocities of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al, when the defining feature of communist dictatorships was communism. State enforced prohibitions or control of religion are just one aspect of communism. It's not the atheism that is their ideological driving force, it's the Marxism. (Indeed, I would argue China never really became "atheist" in a real sense. They just replaced Confucianism with Maoism.)
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I still disagree about Rome and the Weimar Republic, and I think you haven't really brought much evidence to bear that "control of women" was the defining or even most significant failure leading to their collapse. Even you back down a bit from that proposition, merely citing it as a contributing factor.
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Yes, I am kind of personally invested in my society not collapsing, but I don't think I am just ignoring evidence that it is. I just think we are on a long slow decline for a lot of reasons, not a rapid collapse that is happening because of modern hypergamy and male avarice.
To address your broader meta point: no, I am not going to accuse you of being personally misogynistic. But anyone proposing something like "Women must be controlled or their sexuality will destroy society" has to grapple with the essential misogyny of that position. You can bite the bullet and say "Yes, for the good of the species, women must be treated as property." You can propose social guardrails (like Christianity) that hopefully will constrain them in a less brutal fashion. You can argue against the premise (I am far from sold on it). Or you can go full blackpill and say "Who cares what women feel, they aren't even people." (Not hyperbole, that is more or less the position we have actually seen a handful of people take here over the years.) But a lot of this talk about how women being able to choose and the feminization of society seems to just complete lack any empathy at all for the position of a (female) person being told to accept a society where she has little or no say in who gets to fuck her and when and whether she will be impregnated. That's stating it in its bluntest terms, but it's hard to dismiss the hysteria of of women wearing Handmaid's Tale cosplay at protests when they can actually see men who really are proposing what they fear. For those who are honest and say "Yes chad" to that, okay, points for being forthright about it, but you don't get to sneer at feminist arguments anymore, because they are actually right about your intentions.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5d ago
Big fan of GMT, and Churchill (the WW2 game that Versailles 1919 is based on). Churchill has the same basic setup: a three-player game representing the US, the UK and the USSR negotiating even as WWII is still going on. You need to make progress against the Axis (represented very abstractly on two different tracks, one for the war in the Pacific and one for the Eastern and Western fronts in Europe), but you don't want your opponents to make too much progress compared to you. You are also carving up the post-war world with colony chips, and there is a separate Atomic Bomb track. Victory conditions are kind of wonky, because if one faction wins by too large a margin, they destabilize the peace (being seen as a new existential threat) and then there are some complicated rules to figure out who is the "real" leader of the post-war world.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Okay, you're repeating the pattern that got you a warning and then a timeout just days ago, and once again you are filling the queue with reports from people annoyed by your behavior, and with good reason.
This kind of argumentation where you just drop low-effort snarky bird-flipping comments needs to stop. I'm warning you again; next we start applying longer bans.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
This seems like a ban based on vibes alone.
Another way of saying vibes" is "tone." Yes, we moderate based on vibes. It's not quite that fuzzy- we try to follow the rubrics we've developed over the years- but yes, when someone is being an obnoxious trolling shitstirrer, and has been posting obnoxious trolling shitstirring threads for a while that so far have been just barely this side of acceptable discourse, eventually we're going to say "Enough, knock it off." @AlexanderTurok has been there for a while, and he's been warned repeatedly. He just got a 1-day slap on the wrist, and so promptly writes a post absolutely dripping with sneering condescension.
Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!
You know what my least favorite category of bitching about modding is?
"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"
Playing this kind of game is never productive. Every one of us mods has explained, many times, that while we try to be more or less consistent, we do indeed mod based on "vibes" to some extent, and a lot of those vibes are "How obnoxious is this particular person being right now?" "How annoying has this particular person been recently?" and "Does this particular person have a long record of AAQCs, or a long record of being warned to knock it off?" There is also a lot of subjectivity in whether a particular word or phrase strikes this mod on this day as being over the line.
(Also worth noting that sometimes someone is filling the mod queue with reports, and he'll eventually get banned for one of them. Unless you're absolutely sure that the person you're complaining about didn't get a ban around the same time for some other post, don't assume that whatever post you're linking to is an example of "Mods thoughts this was okay.")
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
There was nothing wrong with my reply.
I'm telling you there is something wrong with your replies throughout this thread.
You can reject that or ignore me. I'm just informing you of the situation and what the consequences will be if this continues.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
This place isn't really for self-promoting. We'll let people post links to their blogs, but generally not as their first post with no previous participating in the community.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2d ago
Your report was obnoxiously unfunny and we have to deal with enough spurious and bad-faith reports on posts.
Normally I'd leave it at that, but you have a history of this kind of obnoxious trolling, so banned for a day. Knock it off.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
I didn't say that, I just said you can't say "the purpose of the law is support the child because the law says so, it's in the name, stupid". You do this multiple times so I'm only addressing it once.
Your rules are absurd and demonstration nothing because they could apply to a lot of laws. "You can't refer to the purpose of the law in describing what it does" would make many laws illegible.
The fact that the support ends when the child reaches age of majority This is also compatible with the mother support theory.
No, because it expires when the child no longer needs support.
How would you propose disentangling "mother support" from "child support." Any money given to a mother to support her child necessarily benefits her.
Do the needs of children scale with the father's income? They eat more food? Wear more clothes?
I am fine with a rich man having to pay more than a poor man to support his children. If you're rich you shouldn't get to leave your children in poverty because you don't think you owe them anything. If you want to propose a cap, I'd be amenable, but not if it's the bare minimum because fuck those kids (and their mother).
I'm less concerned about this part than other elements, but to the extent that it matters, it is a solved problem. You make it an EBT card with similar controls. Courts can pull the records on a moment's notice. There's way less deniability because the funds aren't co-mingled. This isn't rocket science. Wouldn't be surprised if some places already do this.
Wouldn't you still protest that she might be eating some of the food bought with the EBT card (which she almost certainly is)? Or, again, that being given money to buy food for her child means she can use some of her other money for not-child things? It does not solve the problem from your perspective (which is that we should somehow prevent the mother from benefiting in any way).
Do you actually know what typical child support is? Because you seem to think the median child support payer is being drained of half his income or more and it equals or exceeds the amount actually needed for basic living expenses for a child. This is not the median situation.
I have financial obligations to women all across the country and their children. No bailing on that one, unfortunately. I'd probably feel less bad about child support if it meant I never had to pay strange woman to raise another man's kid.
That's a slightly different issue, because enforcement is hard and society picks up the tab on deadbeats. But I'd be on board with much harsher measures for men who can't/won't pay- "lithium mines," sure. I don't think you actually would be, though.
Who cares? Nobody has any concern for the welfare of children when it collides with the needs/wants/whims of women. If a woman's right to drink smoke and snort as much as she wants while pregnant is inviolable, I don't see how a man's right to stay home and play video games shouldn't also be etched in sapphire.
I am pretty sure there are laws under which women who abuse drugs and cause their children to be born addicted, or with birth defects, can be charged, though that's another hard to enforce law. If you want to make it illegal for a woman to drink, smoke or do any drugs at all while pregnant, I think it's impractical, but let's say I agree in theory. The point of child support laws is not to make sure men and women are being "punished" equally, it's to provide for children. "Well, if we cared about children, we should do this also!" Okay, if I agree in theory but also acknowledge we can't/won't do that, what now? Fuck them kids because it's unfair to men? Some things are unfair for biological reasons (where a lot of these conversations wind up, usually about the time the proposal that a man should be able to disavow any responsibility or obligation for children he fathers emerges).
I answered you already downthread, but since you've spun into multiple sub-arguments with different people about your grievances with various posters, how we handled Darwin (unfairly, disproportionately, and with great bias, according to you), and alleged personal attacks against you that we have refused to mod, I have a few points to make in addition to those I made here.
First, regarding Darwin aka @guesswho.
Have you noticed, perchance, that @guesswho is not banned? During his last pass, he earned a bunch of warnings, one tempban, and an AAQC. Hardly indicative of unfair treatment, for all that many of our users (and, being honest, half the mods) hated him.
I didn't hate him. I found him annoying and disingenuous, but I agree with you that to some degree, the hatred of Darwin was excessive and ideologically motivated (he was one of the most persistent and antagonistic leftist posters willing to argue a leftist position down to the ground).
But you know what? I also totally understand why he drove so many people absolutely bugfuck crazy. Because that was more or less his entire reason d'être. He had mastered the art of poking people in the eye until they'd rage back at him. I don't think he was a literal troll - i.e., someone engaging in a performance just to piss people off, without really believing the things he argued. I think he really believed the things he argued but I think he argued for the joy of it, the joy of "conquering" his enemies (i.e., driving them bugfuck crazy with his tactics) and he wasn't particularly interested in, you know, accuracy or sincerity or ingenuousness. "Owning the righties" was his game and he played it with prejudice.
You know who drove him away?
Me.
The thread you were already linked to, about J.K. fucking Rowling. Here you go again. The one where I finally lost it with him. But I "lost it," not by going bugfuck crazy, but by deciding I was going to nail his feet to the ground, pound on each and every one of his arguments, and drill him until he either stood and delivered or ran.
Guess what he did?
Been a year, and we're still waiting for him to get to it "in his queue."
But he's still not banned! He can starting posting again whenever he wants. And while I'm sure if he did, a lot of people (including me) might say "So, about that JK Rowling thread?" - most likely he'd waffle and dismiss it, and go back to his old ways forthwith.
Your thesis that "Darwin was ganged up on and mistreated just because he was a leftist" is mostly bullshit. Sorry.
(@Tree's claim that we bent and made up rules just to go after Darwin is thus 100% bullshit.)
Now about all these other threads you point to as examples of us "Letting righties be mean and not modding them."
@gattsuru has a ton of AAQCs. That gives him a very long leash. This is by design and it's not secret - people who generate a ton of quality comments get away with more. That said, every comment you've linked to as an example of personal attacks? Being aggressive in interrogating you is not a "personal attack." I say this as somone who has been the target of @gattsuru's interrogations more than once and who can hardly be considered a fan of him or his tactics. He's a dedicated hater and I'm on his hatelist. No bias here. Worth noting that at one point we pretty much did issue a "Stop using this particular tactic" rule regarding throwing walls of links to every single past conversation every time someone he hated posted something, because it was obnoxious and degrading to the discourse (and we got some flack and resentment over it). And I mention this, not to continue to persecute @gattsuru (hey buddy, at least I guess we can have civilized conversations about which SF authors suck) but because you think we make up or bend rules just to prosecute our ideological biases, when in fact, if we bend or make up rules at all, it's because someone is being particularly and uniquely obnoxious (a point I already made about @AlexanderTurok) and it's not ideological bias at all, we do it to people who are being particularly obnoxious.
You (and @Tree, and a couple of other people) hammer this argument that we are absolutely seeing for the very first time (that was sarcasm), that the Motte picks on leftists and they get unfairly dogpiled until they get banned, and meanwhile we let MAGAs get away with anything. We've been hearing it since the Motte began. You've all read my "if I had a nickel..." speech about a dozen times now. Because yes, kids, the righties, especially certain categories of righties (the ones who really like talking about Jews, bitches, and fucking children - that's a gerund, not an adjective) insist that we're all ZOG-converged tools or something. Or, from the saner but still angry right wing, that we let leftists in general get away with more. That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned even as the mod queue is being flooded with people demanding we ban them. We especially hear it when we ban a rightie for, you know, being particularly and especially obnoxious, whatever his particular hobby horse (even if it's just "hating leftists").
The point of this long screed (besides letting me get some mod frustration off my chest - man, does it get annoying hearing the same tired accusations over and over and fucking over again)? Make a new argument. But not really- you don't have one. None of this is new. Instead- accept that this is how moderation works here, it's by design, and you can nudge us incrementally towards being harsher or laxer with the general feedback that is the overall pattern of complaints and reports, but playing "Why did you mod Johnny and not Suzy?" for the hundredth time is not going to move us. Insisting "You take sides (against my side)" for the hundredth time is not going to move us.
You're wrong. You are observably, factually, and empirically wrong. I say this because I see the mod queue. I say this because I have a pretty good memory of the Motte and its moderation going all the way back to before I became a mod (I wonder if even @naraburns remembers that I was once on the "You're cruising for a banning" list). I say this because I am part of the mod discussions we have. I say this because I have a pretty good mental model of my fellow mods, and of our most prominent posters. Not flawless, I am not perfect and I can sometimes misunderstand people (and I am saying nothing here about the quality of my own arguments - there's a reason my handful of AAQCs are mostly for writing about hobbydrama-type posts), but I have a reputation for having the best spidey sense when it comes to alts and trolls. I could tell you stories, many more stories. A lot of the misapprehension people have about modding is because you really don't see... the stuff you never see. Not your fault.
But a lot of it is because you're just wrong.
@AlexanderTurok got banned because he has been regularly and intentionally obnoxious for weeks now and he's already been warned. Not because we hate his opinions. Not because he's a leftist. (Or a rightist or a whatever-he-calls-himself playing the part of a leftist who claims not to be one.) The one-week ban, specifically, was @netstack's call. I might have only warned him. Or I might have given him three days. Another mod might have actually let it go. We didn't actually discuss this one internally (we do not discuss every ban). But it didn't happen because of ideological biases or unfairness or the Motte hating lefty posters. (A particularly ironic accusation to throw at @netstack, who is the only mod arguably more lefty than me.) It happened because Turok likes to rattle cages and frame arguments in a maximally uncharitable and inflammatory way calculated to be ragebait. He thinks this is entertaining, and if he keeps it up, his next ban will be longer.
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