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Amadan

Letting the hate flow through me

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joined 2022 September 05 00:23:21 UTC
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Amadan


								

								

								
								
									
								
								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Letting the hate flow through me

				
				
				

				

					10 followers  

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					joined 2022 September 05 00:23:21 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 297


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
							
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Please stop lying and implying I think something that I did not say I think. ICE never killed anybody "to send the message". The particular officer killed someone to stop that someone from driving over him with her SUV. Lying is bad. Please stop doing it.




People often have radically different takes, so radically different that they think "I cannot believe you actually think that, you are obviously lying." Or someone will say "So it's better to ?" and the indignant response is "I DID NOT SAY THAT YOU LIAR!"


None of this improves the discussion. In fact, it basically ends it. When you're calling each other liars, you're pretty much at the endpoint of the discussion. This is why I almost always mod people for calling someone else a liar. You are not a mindreader. People do usually actually believe the things they are saying. They may be ill-informed. They may be guilty of spurious reasoning. They may be arguing sloppily. And yeah, sometimes they might just be making up shit to win an argument. Not that I am saying any of that is specifically true here, but what I am saying is you'd better be on point when you call someone a liar.


I am not sure why this is the biggest scissor of the year (well, so far) but people need to chill the fuck out.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Elaborate, or refrain from comments that are nothing more than "Nuh uh!"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You're obviously arguing in bad faith






Fuck right off




People need to chill the fuck out, is what they need to do.


You've been warned repeatedly, though the last time was over a year ago. So I'm only giving you a two-day ban. But control your temper.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Since I got tagged in here:


I have no real opinion on your post that set this off, and believe you that you didn't use AI to write it.


I do think your style has gotten worse since you became such an AI enthusiast, mostly in that it is more wordy and "tryhard." I do strongly suspect it's the LLM influence, which you think is a good thing because they "write well," but the thing is, mostly they don't. They write very fluently. They can fill space with words, words that sometimes sound lyrical or profound, but... it's empty.


It's hard to describe without going into a much longer post about writing style, but it's very similar to the debate over AI art. I am not an AI art hater, I think occasionally it can produce really cool stuff, but mostly it's good for outputting placeholder art that gets the job done... you know, D&D characters or "I have a picture in my head that would be cool to see rendered but I don't want to pay someone to draw it" or bland corporate stuff. Notwithstanding Scott's AI Art Turing test, most AI art is very, very recognizeable as AI. You know the look: a little too polished, a little too saturated, a little too uniform in tone and shade and crosshatching (even when prompter tries to make it draw in different styles), an emptiness in the eyes... the illustration might be perfect in form, we don't see six-fingered hands or necklaces that meld with shoulders as much anymore, but it's still full of tiny details and stylistic choices that a human artist wouldn't make. And it's all very samey, like imagine every single artist in the world graduating from CalArts and trying as hard as possible to replicate the CalArts style.


AI writing is the same!


It's not just the tells (em-dashes, "It's not X, it's Y"), which like six-fingered hands and necklaces melding into shoulders, LLMs are starting to be trained not to do so predictably. It's the sameness, the pseudo-profound verbosity, the fluency that mistakes many pretty-sounding-words chained together in grammatically correct sentences as saying something prettily.


You are starting to write like a guy who reads LLM output and thinks "Yeah, that's good writing!" As if all those CalArts students were starting to take their art classes from ChatGPT and imitating LLM style instead.


Maybe in the future, maybe even in the near future, AI will improve enough to make this moot. We don't have LLMs that can write entire novels in one shot yet, and even with lots of prompting, the novels they can write are absolute crap. But I have no doubt people will read them, just like people read progressive fantasies and litrpgs that are absolute crap in terms of writing style (* cough * Reverend Insanity * cough * ) There is no accounting for taste, and some people don't actually care about style and craft and skill beyond basic get-the-job-doneness. "Give me words that tell a story, and make the story interesting. Give me pixels that form big round boobies and a waifu fuck-me face."


That's... fine, I guess? But don't mistake it for good.


I think that fact that you are defensive about this is kind of weird. Like you are insecure either about your own writing, or about the potential of LLMs, or about the intersection of those two things.


There's a writer on Medium I kind of casually follow for his trainwreck-of-a-life stories, and he gets dragged regularly for writing posts that scream "ChatGPT." He has admitted he uses AI for research, outlining, sometimes phrasing, but "he writes it all himself" and after another post that got a bunch of people calling him an LLM, he wrote a long, huffy, defensive post about how this is his writing style, this is how he's always written, ChatGPT is copying him, not the other way around, and fuck the haters. And, well, I guess I believe him if he says he's not actually letting ChatGPT write his posts for him (I don't, really, I think he's letting ChatGPT "outline" his posts and then he does some editing and tweaking and calls it "his writing"). But the degree of his defensiveness really convinced me he knows he's using too much AI in his writing.


Note that I am not saying you're doing the same thing, just... I think you know you're outsourcing too much to AI, and now you're getting pissy when people point it out.


On that note:


    

  1. 

    AI detectors are themselves not that reliable, since the ability to detect AI writing is a moving target, so posting "An AI detector said my writing is 100% human" is probably not that convincing to most people. (Just as many people have had the displeasure of seeing something they know they wrote themselves tagged as "almost certainly AI" by an AI detector.)
    

    2. 

  2. 

    I do not think we should be using mod logs to tell people "You are a crap poster so I dismiss your argument."
    

    3. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There are other options besides automatically prosecuting any officer who shoots someone on the assumption that a trial will sort it out. Granted, I doubt ICE's ability to conduct professional internal investigations, but in theory, that is how a professional police force would handle it.




But only one of those sides is making a habit of claiming immunity




Good's side is definitely claiming protesters should be immune from consequences (to include being arrested or forcibly removed from the area, I don't mean they deserve to be shot), and had Good in fact injured or killed the officer and not been shot herself, I am confident you'd see a lot of anti-ICE people saying she should face zero consequences.


No one is really (openly) claiming that the person who killed Charlie Kirk should face zero consequences, because "You should literally be able to murder someone in public and not be charged" is actually insane. (In Good's case, whether it was "murder" is in dispute, in Kirk's case, no one disputes it was murder.) But people were certainly celebrating it, piling on anyone who expressed such tepid sentiments as "Hey, celebrating a husband and father's murder is bad mmkay?", and would almost certainly fist-pump an acquittal for his killer.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You know what you haven't done? Present any evidence that the poster you responded to here made a claim incompatible with the available evidence.




I do not think the poster I responded to here made a claim incompatible with the available evidence.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Regardless of whether it's in the rules or not, what do you think you're even arguing here?




What do you think I'm arguing here?


That's an honest question, because you seem to be accusing me of "pounding the table" for a particular argument, when I have not taken a side on Reed at all, other than gesturing at what I consider to be a number of possibilities, which I explicitly stated were not equally probable.


I infer from your post that you have slotted me into the "anti-ICE, pro-Reed" side, and are seeing everything I post through that lens. Which is what most people do, because if you don't immediately and vigorously sneer and cheer for the right side you're clearly carrying water for the other. This is inane and mindkilling, but here is where even the Motte is now.


If you really wanted to know what I think specifically about any given proposition, you could ask. But people don't do that, they just assume.


My argument is that most of the people on both sides are guilty of motivated reasoning and would change positions if the tribes were reversed, if Reed had been MAGA and Ashli Babbit had been woke. You shouldn't be confused about this, because that's what I said in plain English. But instead you seem to be trying to dig for my unstated tribal priors. You think you know what they are, and you don't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, so, people may indeed be backing their tribe and justifying actions on that basis. But no one literally believes it's legal to run over a cop. Snarky "hth" "explainers" are a very bad way to engage with someone you think is making a bad argument. Is this what you really want threads to look like here?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So, just to be clear, your mental model of the OP is that he literally believes it's legal to run over police officers?


Even in the unlikely event one believes this, we still wish people to engage without unnecessary sarcasm and condescension.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you think he's actually confused about the legality of hitting police officers with your car?


Are you genuinely trying to be helpful? Because you think he genuinely needed that to be explained to him?


No, you are not. You're being sarcastic in a condescending manner, which feels good and snarky and takes much less effort than actually rebutting an argument.


I would in fact wager you didn't even read the entire post. At most you skimmed it while composing your cutting response in your head.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Do not agree" is not the same as "do not understand." I understand exactly what you are saying. You seem incapable of understanding what I am saying.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


First, you are being an ass.




Buddy, I wish I could grant myself as much latitude as I grant you.




I didn’t ask you to mod for an opinion I disliked.




Yes, you did. You do not insist on this scrupulous adherence to legal definitions for arguments you agree with. You want him modded because he annoys you and makes arguments that anger you.




I’m pointing out the other poster made an inflammatory factual claim that is obviously false but you won’t do shit about it.




That's correct. We won't do shit about someone saying something that may or may not be factual.


The factual nature of the claim is the point you should be arguing. We do not adjudicate truth values of claims made by posters.




Second, you stated it would be reasonable to mod if the other poster claimed ICE was killing a bunch of people. Well, if I made that claim and then said “when I use the word kill, I mean arrest” you would rightfully see that as fucking bullshit.




Yes, because that's a specious, inapplicable comparison. Someone who uses "kidnap" referring to arrests they consider to be immoral and illegitimate (but are legal under the law) may be legally inaccurate but everyone understands what the meaning and intent is, and if you think "That's stupid, that's not kidnapping!" you are allowed to rebut with that. But you don't want to rebut, you just want us to tell him he's not allowed to use words in a way that grinds your gears. No, we will not do that.


You are pretending (I use that word intentionally) that it's the same thing as saying "kill" to mean "arrest." But doing that would be legitimately confusing. No one would understand you actually meant "arrest." When @LiberalRetvrn says "Kidnapping" you know exactly what he means. You are not confused, and he is not trying to confuse you. You disagree with how he's using the term. Fine.


Now let it go, you have nothing else to say on this that will be anything other than (more) annoying.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Kidnapping suggests illegal. Where is the illegality?




That's a fair question. Address it to the person you are arguing with.


Oh, I see. You don't want to argue with him. You just want us to shut him up.


You are failing to articulate a broader principle than "This poster annoys me, make him stop." But sure, if it soothes you to believe it's about protecting lefties, you go right ahead and tell yourself that.


This is particularly amusing given the guff we're taking elsewhere.




You mod for much less absurd things.




I am sure your opinion of what other absurd things I have modded for is equally reasonable and principled.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you actually have a case in mind where a pro-life activist drove a car at the police and got shot? I can't recall any, but maybe I missed it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But the entire dispute is whether Good used violent action. I don't see any leftists who are saying "Yes, she tried to run down an ICE officer and she was justified." Rather, they are claiming she panicked/she didn't see him/he wasn't in danger and shooting her was unnecessary.


In the equivalent situation, no, I don't think the pro-life community would defend a pro-life activist who was actually trying to run over a cop, but they would defend someone in an ambiguous situation like this, where it is not at all clear what anyone's intentions or situational awareness was.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought about suggesting a megathread and then didn't get to it. My bad, but you're right, it would have been better to create a megathread than having a dozen people each creating a new top level post.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I apologize for going in on you so hard. Against my initial, wiser judgment, I have found myself invested in this ridiculous case, and the more I am assailed by what I perceive to be low-effort culture warring bombs thrown by rightists and leftists alike (I genuinely do consider both sides at this point-at least at the edges of the argument-to be bad faith, dishonest, and actively destructive to this country), the more disgusted I am. For some reason that manifested in my response to your post, which I really did perceive to be kind of dismissive of the brutality of the police and the state wielded against its "enemies." While I do think you are frequently oblivious (or at least, indifferent) to people outside your social class, it was unfair of me to accuse you of being pro-tyranny.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not in any way endorsing anarchy. On the oppression-anarchy spectrum I'd be closer to @2rafa's POV than the typical DSA or antifa or what-have-you activist (and they would consider me as fascist as her). I agree that at a certain level of anarchy, it's better to have a brutal warlord who at least keeps the bandits at bay than a hellscape of marauding gangs.


That said, tyranny is bad too, and the Warlord's friends telling me life is better under the Warlord's absolute rule is not going to be very convincing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Inflammatory" is subjective. We don't apply it every time someone says something that pisses you off. Arguably almost every argument made here is inflammatory to someone, and unsurprisingly, people who don't agree with the argument made typically consider it to have been presented with insufficient evidence.


I already pointed out the answer to your specific case: charitably, @LiberalRetvrn does consider the people ICE is arresting to be "us" and he does consider their actions to be lawless and tantamount to "kidnapping." I am not speaking for @LiberalRetvrn here, but this is definitely a perspective common on the left, and I'm sure you know this. That this make you angry does not make it "inflammatory" such that we're going to mod people who say it. (Nor should you make any assumptions about whether or not I personally agree with the argument.)


As a meta-comment, one of the failures of the Motte is that while in theory, we are here to debate and argue and test ideas, in principal most people just want validation, venting, and affirmation. When they see an argument they don't like- especially from an ideological opponent, especially someone whose tone or style or specific POV really pisses them off - rather than saying "Ah, someone with a challenging perspective to take on!" or "Hmm, a worthy opponent?" they rush for the report button, and then yell at the mods for not shutting the mf up.


Now here's a concrete example: "ICE is killing dozens of people every day!" would be an inflammatory and falsifiable claim that you could legitimately demand some evidence for. "ICE is kidnapping people" - well, you're going to have an argument over what constitutes "kidnapping." And that's okay.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Pointing out that "What's so bad about tyranny?" is coming from someone who will benefit from tyranny is not bulverism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Your point of view is consistently that of a wealthy, entitled person who sees the police as her personal gendarmarie whose job it is to keep the riff-raff from inconveniencing her life in any way. From that point of view, yes, anarchy is a much greater threat than tyranny, because tyranny will mostly leave you alone, while anarchy threatens you. Not to get all "woke" (har) but this is exactly why "privilege" dialog took root. There was originally a legitimate point to it. You consider the lower classes to be undesirables to be kept away from you, and the only thing you fear is revolting peasants. So nearly any level of state crackdown is acceptable to you because only at North Korean levels would it actually threaten your lifestyle. Whereas those beneath you understand what tyranny will do to them.


From a Conflict Theory perspective, there is no reason you should care about this, or people who are not you, as long as your side maintains the levers of power. But "Let them eat cakeboot" does have the potential to redound on you. Traditionally, rich people had some concern about oppression either out of genuine (liberal) conviction or self-preservation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We are often asked to mod people for "being dishonest."


We aren't mindreaders. We often suspect someone is being disingenuous, but the poster may really believe what he is saying. (You are surely aware that most progressives do consider illegal immigrants "us" so it's not implausible to me that they really believe ICE is "kidnapping people.")


Do I think @LiberalRetvrn is sincere, or a troll trying to push buttons? He's certainly on our radar, but making bad arguments is not something we ban people for. Demanding we mod people for "being dishonest" is asking us to use more personal discretion in judging posts than I think you really want. Lots of regulars are, IMO, at the very least fond of making unsubstantiated and unverified claims very confidently.


"Inflammatory claim with insufficient evidence" is the rule usually cited. Contrary to what many people think, though, this does not mean "A claim that inflamed (pissed off) me and that I don't believe."