Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
17hr ago
Well, you're not wrong that "You're an idiot" is not necessarily nicer than "You're a liar." But it makes a difference whether someone is being ignorant or being insincere. If you want to argue with someone, you should generally assume they mean what they say. Ignorance should be something you can demonstrate with counterarguments. I get annoyed when people accuse me of lying because, besides not being a liar, what am I supposed to say? You can't read my mind and I can't prove my internal mental state.
That doesn't mean all arguments are genuine. There are definitely people here who argue disingenuously. Not just the obvious trolls, either. But it tends to be an accusation people throw sloppily because they're angry or outraged at the argument itself.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
18hr ago
Never happened, and I don't address your screeds because they are irrational and incoherent.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Ironically, I think Kulak genuinely does believe in them, I just think he's an instigator who wants other people to take him seriously enough to act on his suggestions. But yes, I think his hatred and desire for violence is real.
And I think most people who claim to be afraid of fascism, or who think Trump is Hitler,.are being sincere. They are ignorant and sheltered and generally have no concept of what "fascism" would really look like, but like the black people who sincerely believe that cops hunt them in the streets or the trans and gay people who think they're going to be herded into camps any day now, being a fool duped by hysterical disinformation doesn't mean you don't actually believe what you're saying.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Also, your ProPublica link isn't against body cameras. It's accusing the police of acting improperly with the footage they have.
It should be noted that bodycam footage, like court hearings, are generally not uploaded to social media by the police themselves. They are public records which many jurisdictions make publicly available on a government website, and then YouTubers grab the video and make content out of it.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Your dedication to insisting that nothing you said in the past should matter, sure is a sight to behold.
Never happened. I have not denied anything I've said in the past and in some cases I have even amended my opinion. I'm just bemused, as always, at the spite.
And yes I think he should prove he actually believes what he's saying. There's nothing unreasonable in stating that he doesn't.
Actually, accusing someone of not believing what they are saying is uncharitable and we frown on demands that someone "prove" they mean what they say. Likewise claiming that if you don't put money on it's proof that you don't.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
From someone who doesn't have a lengthy record of this sort of low-effort sneering and baiting for which you've been warned or banned almost ten times now, I'd just say "knock it off."
But I told you last time:
You post nothing but worthless content like this, and you've been warned many times. You're obviously an alt created explicitly for this purpose. Tell you what: I'm giving you a week ban. Decide what you are going to do when you come back.
Clearly you have made your decision. Good bye.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
((and to bite on the obvious bait: that hasn't stopped you from offering that style of wager unsolicited.))
Dayum, you managed to find a reason to use that one again! That's some dedicated hatin'! Okay, I'll give you that one, though I will point out that I didn't actually demand money stakes to "prove he really believed what he was saying."
Are you even pretending to believe that there's a 10% chance of Trump suspending the Constitution?
No, that I'd put closer to 1%.
(I'd pay to see him get in the ring with Mamdani, though.)
It's just a word, and it just means 'something you don't like'.
No, as someone who has complained about overuse of fascism myself, no, I do not use fascism to mean "something I don't like" and you should know better. I do not think Trump is literally a fascist, nor the Republican Party, nor ICE. I think the US government, including the past several administrations (not limited to Republican ones!) have shown an increasing tendency to appeal to identify politics, cults of personality, and disregard for previous Constitutional limits, and that there is a ~10% chance this will lead us towards an actual fascist state (for some value of "fascist" - we can argue over exactly what the definition is if you really want to, but I am talking about something we would both broadly agree looks and smells like fascism, not "something I don't like"). In other words, the actual end of the Republic as we know it, at least in all but name.
I do happen to think Trump has fanned the flames worse than Biden or Mamdani or Nancy Pelosi or whomever you'd prefer to blame, but he's not the sole or first cause. (Note also that this is an admission that I have updated my priors somewhat since that argument I had with @FCfromSCC way back when - I still mostly believe the things I said then, but with weaker confidence. On the other hand, the fact that Trump was reelected should have made him update his.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
As a (former) poker player, I feel obliged to point out that these "If you really believed it, you'd bet money on it" gotchas miss the point of betting the odds.
A single bet at 10% odds with a 50x payoff is not a good bet, because there is a 90% chance you'll lose. Twenty bets at 10% odds with a 50x payoff is (probably) a winning strategy. A single bet is not. That's why professional poker players measure success over the long term, not whether a single bet paid off (and they also understand that variance is a bitch). If you're doing polymarkets or something, maybe it's rational to make a lot of bets like this. It's not a rational challenge to a single claim.
Of course there is also the fact that if someone wins betting on "Will the US become a fascist state?" then their payoff is going to be small comfort…
(And yes, while "literally Hitler" is absurd, I think 10% is a reasonable estimate of how likely we are to see something like a descent into fascism. But I'm not going to put money on it because I can't bet on 10 different alternate timelines.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
But here is what i dont get - why are some issues less "up for debate"?
Because admitting they are up for debate means letting opponents speak and granting them legitimacy. If you can preemptively shut down the debate by declaring any other position beyond the pale, you win.
I find it hard to believe you don't "get" this.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
If you wrote them, perhaps you would make half the text about domestic issues or marital strife or longing for one’s partner.
No, I would expect my readers (listeners actually) to understand complex themes, and not read one level deep , counting sentences to determine what is most important to me.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are not about "domestic issues" or family life. But they also are not saying those things were not important.
The Greeks didn't "make" them their "foundational works." Those stories were mostly oral histories of which Homer's written version is what survived. We made them the foundational works of Greek literature. There's considerable survivorship bias in saying "The two most famous poems we know of tell us what was most important to the people listening to them "
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Maybe 5-10% of the lines are about family life. The majority of the content is about brothers-in-arms doing things
It's an epic about a war. War and brotherhood was a central feature in that story. It does not support your argument that the ancients did not place a high importance on family.
It's not just the battles and the gods and the monsters that are important. It's *why" they did all those things. The climax of a story may be the only place a hero's motivation is mentioned. That doesn't mean it's not important.
Your reasoning and your theories are very shallow.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
The only thing more amusing than your ahistorical just-so stories is your confidence that you'd totally p0wn GK Chesterton.
women and the family an annoying requirement to keep things moving
What a truly miserable attitude.
However, as I have pointed out many times, while Rome and Greece and other ancient societies were certainly patriarchal, there is ample evidence (in poems, other writings, and contemporary histories) that feelings of love and affection for wives and children (including daughters!) were not some alien innovation introduced by modernity.
You cite the Iliad and the Odyssey as being all about the bros, nothing but bros, ignoring that the entire reason for the war was the abduction of Helen. You will probably say that was just men fighting over a bauble and the dishonor of having a bauble stolen from them, but Homer, and later poets such as Euripedes and Herodotos, speak of much more complex motivations. Menalaus loved his wife, and whether she betrayed him with Paris or was forcibly abducted depends somewhat on the narrative, but her own thoughts on the matter are expressed as well.
And in the Odyssey, Odysseus's primary motivation is trying to get home to his wife and son! And Penelope is a figure of nobility and faithfulness who is worthy of his devotion.
Try reading what you cite.
I think the only thing we agree on is that we are both frustrated. And I'm answering here because when I throw up my hands and let it go, I later get accused of refusing to answer. But as wrong as you think I am (that's about the only thing I can discern for certain here), I am not being glib or sarcastic or dismissive here when I tell you that there is something about your j'accuse posts that are, besides being annoying, really hard for me to follow.
I don't know if it's the way you write, and I can even entertain the possibility that I'm just not smart enough to get you (I doubt this, but I'm humble enough to own that I am no longer as smart as I once thought I was). But I go through your laundry lists of accusations and feel like sincerity requires me to try to answer them point by point, and I get bogged down in a mixture of "That's completely not what I meant," "That is not what I said and I think you're straw manning me," and "What does he even mean?"
So, really and truly, I'm not sure what you want from me. I mean, besides a wholesale admission that I'm on the bad side and everything I've said for the last five years is wrong. I'm afraid I am not willing to oblige you there. I dunno, some people attack me and at least I know what they are accusing me of, even if it's wrong. Some people attack me and they're just crazy, so I can roll my eyes and move on. You attack me in a very effortful way and I don't even know where to begin rebutting because it's all "You said this and here's a long paragraph about what other people did and isn't this funny and here's something you said four years ago."
I realize this leaves us back where we started.
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