Chrisprattalpharaptor's profile

Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Tucker and DeSantis are some of the early attempts to get controlled opposition out in front of this distrust, but they won't be the last.

Are you suggesting that Tucker and Desantis are intentional establishment plants meant to lead the new right astray, or am I misunderstanding the use of controlled opposition? If you believe this, who are the genuine leaders or influencers of the new right?

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Would it be reasonable to sue/prosecute Ruth Sent Us or MSNBC into oblivion?

Yes. If, in fact, the Supreme Court had not struck down Roe v. Wade, but MSNBC repeatedly claimed that it had for literally years. Maybe if MSNBC repeatedly showed details of the Justices personal lives (as Jones did for the children's gravesites, parents phone numbers, etc) while claiming that they were deep state crisis actors or something. If the Supreme Court Justices were nobody private citizens who suffered their children being murdered instead of public officials who to some degree have sought the spotlight. For good measure, throw in substantial amounts of evidence that MSNBC knew what they were saying was false but said it anyways to sell snake oil penis enlargement pills. And then MSNBC just refused to comply with court orders so they received a default judgment against them.

I have to say if you're using that scenario to calibrate, we took a wrong turn somewhere. There's a debate to be had around publicizing addresses and other personal information of private citizens (all publicly available information if they own property - less of a problem when it was buried in filing cabinets, more of a problem now that apps can look up addresses in seconds), but that's a separate discussion considering all the other crap Alex Jones did.

Also, Alex Jones repeatedly admitted to shooting the children in Sandy Hook himself. Checkmate, conservatives.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

You talk about a lot of reasons why Alex Jones is a terrible person

No, I listed some of the ways in which the hypothetical OP gave differed from the Jones trial.

whether or not angry rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking qualifies as inciting other people to criminal behavior.

If you're asking legally, I'm not particularly interested in LARPing a lawyer this afternoon and chasing tails with others doing the same.

If you're asking morally, I take a dim view of people doxxing private citizens (including Ruth Sent Us, fig leaves notwithstanding and posting their private contact info. There's enough radicalized people on both sides such that publicizing the private info of any polarizing figure virtually guarantees that some nutjobs on one side or the other will harass them.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Well, she successfully signaled her opposition to conservatives, slagged off the nation (in their view), and now she winds up in prison for a minor drug charge in Russia, our geopolitical rival.

If our standards for 'deserving time in Russian prison' were 1) signaling opposition to democrats and 2) complaining about the state of the nation, there wouldn't be any conservatives left to post in the Culture War thread. Not to mention what she said:

"I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our season," Griner said. "I think we should take that much of a stand.

"I don't mean that in any disrespect to our country. My dad was in Vietnam and a law officer for 30 years. I wanted to be a cop before basketball. I do have pride for my country."

As far as 'slagging off the nation' goes, it's pretty anodyne.

Why wouldn't they be gleeful?

Dunno...some shred of human decency? The same way I'm not gleeful about red triber suffering. The same way that if I were, you would be outraged and calling me out for it.

An analogy might be Ben Shapiro going to Texas and getting a harsh prison term for something that was legal in California. You could bet your bottom dollar that Twitter would be physically heavier from all the glee-tweets.

And you could bet yours that you would be rage-posting about it to thunderous applause. That doesn't mean you need to carry water for people hating on Brittany Griner or that you or twitter are behaving morally in that hypothetical.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

Well, whatever, the rules are made up and the points don't matter.

Remarkably absent from both your post and the replies are the fact that Republicans control the Virginian house of delegates and the governorship, so this has about as much chance of passing as the Illinois bounty law. Even if Democrats had slim majorities in both houses and the governorship, I'd be shocked if something like this could pass. The far end of trans rights is generally a losing issue for democrats and, by extension, taking children out of their parents control makes the majority of people in both parties uncomfortable.

The cause is the Tribes, Blue and Red, and their manifestly incompatible values. Blues/Reds do not Like Reds/Blues. Contrary to arguments presented here for years, we do not share values, moral intuitions, a workable understanding of The Good. The Culture War is not about mistakes, and people are not going to come to their senses any minute now and realize all this was just a whole heap of silly goosery. The Culture War is a conflict. We cannot all get along, because we have lost the fundamental capacity to agree on what "getting along" consists of.

The virtuous cycle of Conflict theory:

Step 1: Find blue person doing bad thing

Step 2: Equate blue person with entire Blue tribe

Step 3: Claim entire Blue tribe wants to hurt me and mine

Step 4a: Spend a lot of time on the internet talking about igloos <- You are here

Step 4b: Hurt blue tribe

It may be difficult to believe, but some people genuinely care about the wellbeing of Trans kids and think they're happier living as their chosen gender. I would be absolutely shocked to find that Guzman is so monstrous that she's primarily motivated by a desire to cause you suffering, and even if she were, the idea that the broader Trans movement was conjured up to harm you both beggars belief and smacks of hubris. Your attraction to Conflict Theory isn't for the truth value, rather you need it to justify your own behavior and hatred:

We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.

You'll reject any arguments I make to the contrary that Blue tribe is Out To Get You while ignoring or defending any Red tribe transgression. You've surrounded yourself by yes-men who will trip over themselves to fellate you regardless of what you write, and be outraged that my reply is anything other than happy seal noises.

According to your model, half of your fellow citizens represent a serious and immediate threat to your children. So, what comes next? No more AEO excuses for hinting darkly rather than speaking clearly.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

I think you have someone confused with me, but rock on.

It was meant to be more of a royal You than a personal critique.

Yeah, all those outgroupers. Not a shred of human decency among them.

The majority of republicans or conservatives, as you said elsewhere, don't really care. There are some ghouls on twitter of all political stripes that are a bit deficient in human decency though, yes.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

I never really see you posting here calling out anyone on your side for being gleeful about suffering

Wherein I complain about woke people taking over science fiction awards (so many upvotes!)

Wherein I incredulously share an anecdote about a woke woman denying physical differences between men and women (oh so many upvotes! The community loves me)

Wherein I say the BLM protests were probably on balance bad and many of the conservative critiques were correct (you may want to ctrl+F BLM).

I could go dig up older reddit posts in the same vein, but since you can't be arsed to put any effort into it, I don't see why I should either. For a while now I've wanted to say kudos for the great name and flair, but honestly, your one and two liners aren't worth engaging with so this'll be the last you hear from me.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Thanks for the reminder. I promise upfront not to argue with you, but if you're willing to indulge a question I'd appreciate it.

IOW, there are rules.

From my perspective, I hold my tongue on a lot of snarky one and two line posts that strike me as culture warring. 1 2 3 4 5.

Not to complain or cry that they should get warnings and/or bans, but my impression was that we were thunderdoming it. Are you willing to comment on whether from your perspective the mod philosophy is the same as in the Old Place or if there was a deliberate change early on to retain users?

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

I agree with the first paragraph! I don't have time to do this justice, but I hope you'll accept this placeholder and I'll get you a real response in the not-too-distant future.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Thanks.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Do you have any suggestions for comparable Red Tribe transgressions? From my perspective, Reds just look less invested in this part of the game, possibly from having a smaller "standing army", as it were, of professional partisans who spend all day thinking up culture war offensives to enact.

Either you already know the answer to this question, you'll say my response is categorically different (politics vs. social engineering) or that my response is just wrong, no? I doubt there's any huge culture war development I'm aware of that you remain ignorant of.

False election claims, often knowingly false claims made by Trump et al to undermine faith in the election system for personal benefit. Recently elected Republican election official harassed by his own party for saying he hasn't found any evidence of fraud. Cyber ninjas debacle. etc, etc, etc. Explicit, unabashed gerrymandering. Power plays like this one.
Roe v. Wade, Texas bounty hunter law, decades of unconstitutional abortion laws in southern states, assassination of doctors providing abortions, armed men screaming abuse at women walking into planned parenthood and a concerted effort to trick them into 'pregnancy crisis centers' instead.
Nobody cares anymore, but southern states still push creation science and religion. Children are indoctrinated by whatever religious sect their parents choose for them. Children are inundated with things like the pledge of allegiance, armed forces propaganda and media glorifying the US military to an extent that you won't even recognize as weird if you haven't lived abroad.
How about don't say gay laws? Or other anti-trans legislation? Laws banning discussion of [equity]9https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/heres-the-long-list-of-topics-republicans-want-banned-from-the-classroom/2022/02)? What about book bans? There's a lot of focus on lawn boy and it's ilk, but look at some of the shit people are using that as cover to ban. Oh no, a child might see a muslim person portrayed as anything other than a terrorist! The horror! The handmaid's tale is banned by a dozen states.

I'm sure if you cared more about the culture war you could make hay out of a dozen crazy bills proposed by some state legislators in the south.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.

And with that in mind I think the fact that trust in the media seems to break pretty cleanly along class and partisan lines (70% of Democrats having a fair amount of trust or greater in the media vs less than 14% of Republicans) explains a lot.

They asked the wrong question. Conservatives have just succeeded in redefining the term 'the media' to only refer to outgroup institutions, but that doesn't mean ingroup institutions don't exist. It's safe to bash 'journalists' and the 'media' because to them it categorically excludes their preferred sources of news.

Conversely, if your question was 'Do you expect Libs of Tik Tok/conservative talk radio to report facts fully, accurately and fairly' your Democrat and Republican numbers would flip.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Similarly, all those "anti-trans" bills are about biological males participating in women's sports teams - has anyone finagled some clever scheme to ban trans students from all extracurriculars purely as a Fuck You wedge to punish the outgroup?

This is false.

The latest directive comes in the form of a letter issued in late February to DFPS directing the agency to classify medical treatments for transgender adolescents—such as puberty blockers and hormone injections—as “child abuse” under existing state law. The letter calls for DFPS to investigate parents who help their children access such treatments, as well as licensed facilities that administer them. The letter also imposes penalties on any “mandatory reporters” like doctors, nurses, and teachers who don’t report instances of treatment to the agency, as well as on members of the general public.

The letter is the follow-up to a legal opinion Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a few days prior, defining such procedures as child abuse and labeling gender-reassignment surgeries as “forced sterilization,” among other claims.

The Florida 'Democrats are pedophiles' law attempts to conflate discussions about the existence of gay or transgender people with exposing them to sexually explicit material:

—No Federal

funds may be made available to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10, including hosting

or promoting any program, event, or literature involving

sexually-oriented material, or any program, event, or literature that exposes children under the age of 10 to nude

adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious

dancing.

Okay, I'm on board.

—The

term ‘‘sexually-oriented material’’ means any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity,

any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of

human genitals, or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.

Ohhh, I see the trojan horse now. So, for example, showing a story with a gay couple would be a discussion about sexual orientation, wouldn't it? Or a discussion about why boys have to wear pants while girls can wear dresses would be skirting (heh) dangerously close to verboten language. Essentially, you're claiming that talking about the existence of gay or trans people is 'sexually-oriented' material in a way that discussing heterosexual relationships is not. Republicans want to pass something like this nationally.

If we gave voice to the central majority rather than the extremists on either margin, there's probably a course to be charted. I think most people are uncomfortable with letting 6 year olds opt for irreversible surgery, and virtually all with CPS agents dragging away your child because you questioned their pronouns. Conversely, I also think most people are uncomfortable with a China-like security apparatus trying to memory-hole the existence of gay people.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

You're correct insofar as democrats aren't nonpartisan saints, also dislike outgroup media and have their own criticisms of red tribe media.

You're incorrect insofar as the politicians and base of one party are much more vociferous in their criticisms of what they call the mainstream media, of CNN and 'the failing NYT,' of fake news and the Washington Compost, sleepy-eyed Chuck Todd, the dying WSJ, 'Dumb as a rock Sour Lemon Don Lemon,' and so on and so forth. I suppose about 8 years ago I can remember people saying 'Faux News.' I can remember some measured comments from Obama bemoaning conservative media and echo chambers, but it really pales in comparison, doesn't it?

We can talk about why that is, and I don't think it's because my outgroup are moral monsters, but it doesn't change the fact that it is.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

1/2

Apologies upfront, but this will probably be my only reply in this thread. Not because I don't care, but because I don't have the time to exchange essays and frankly given the timestamps of your replies it's probably best for the both of us.

Assume that I suck to an unbelievable degree at this, and that probably says woeful things about my character, but it's just barely possible that there's some valuable signal buried in the above shit-heap of noise. Then read it again, and if you're up to it, give me a short summary of the argument you think I'm trying to make.

Alright, I read it again. I'm still incensed. I'll expand on why in a moment, but we can go piece by piece.

I did not make sweeping generalizations about a group I dislike.

You did.

This law isn't being proposed because it solves a problem. It's being proposed because Blues hate Reds and want to harm them. That tribal hatred, by no means unique in its character and very much reciprocated by Reds, wants to Do Something About The Bad People.

From the Blue perspective, legally redefining Red Tribe parenting as child abuse is certainly a pretty good way to hurt the outgroup, and options for retaliation are limited and costly. The algorithm is working! And for those who might have concerns, never fear: Guzman's got you covered. '

when people like me use the term "groomer", we are not saying "I really don't like this person." We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.

You don't get to open with an angry rant about a law being proposed by a Virginian democrat, pepper it with mentions about blues hating reds and wanting to harm them, wrap it up with 'actually, these people are groomers and I consider them an immediate and serious threat to my children', stuff the same argument you've been making for as long as I've been around in the middle, and claim that you aren't waging the culture war. Out of all the replies to your post, how many were interested in an academic discussion about the finer points of the law being downstream of cultural values versus people wanting to bitch about Thing Blue Person Did This Week? I'd count one for the former, almost everyone else in the latter. While I'm sure my reading comprehension skills are subpar for the local community, everyone is responding to the 'hatejacking,' not just me. You just don't care because the other contrarian, totally-independent critical thinkers agree with your take.

I think I did, in fact, go to considerable effort to contextualize and steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

Your steel-man:

A major politician attempting, within their sphere of influence, to criminalize the way half the country raises their kids is not someone saying something wacky on twitter.

Wow, really? So your half of the country uses pronouns given at birth, which this law would criminalize, and the other half of the country calls their children ze/zir? Literally the entirety of blue tribe has trans children, and the parenting style of >99% of red tribe families with cis children will be criminalized? That's your steel-man?

But whatever. Like I said, the rules don't matter, and even if they did, nobody would care what I think.

My best summary of your argument, parts of which I agree with and have made myself:

Laws are irrelevant, what matters are the upstream values of the people writing them, the people voting for the people writing them, the people enforcing them and the people willing to obey them. A group of people with no shared values who hate each other and defect constantly who adopt the United States constitution and system will not become the United States; conversely, if we memory-holed the constitution and judicial system overnight, people in respectable communities here would still put back their shopping carts, mow their lawns, send their kids to school and so on and so forth. There's plenty of happy little enclaves throughout history who lived your Good Life without our laws, and plenty of shithole countries that imitate our system with poor results.

Our values have diverged so far that we can no longer have productive debates, discussions or peaceful coexistence. Life is now a zero-sum game dictated by how best to harm the outgroup. In short, Conflict Theory.

You've made this argument repeatedly with a different event du jour tacked on, usually a bad thing that you cite as evidence to support your worldview. Usually, if you'll forgive the armchair psychology and repeated assumptions about your state of mind, something you're personally incensed by.

Why would you respond to a claim that it doesn't matter if the law is passed or not by pointing out that the law probably won't pass?

Because literally everyone responding to you is hyperventilating about the government criminalizing the parenting of the entire Red Tribe. Because someone needs to pump the brakes, because someone needs to at least culture war in the opposite direction if we have to be waging the culture war in the first place.

Just for the sake of wild speculation, imagine for a moment that I am not actually attempting to radicalize other Reds, incite violence, or generally hate-jacking it over the idea of large-scale death and misery with my fellow rage-monsters. Imagine that I'm actually trying, very imperfectly, to convince you specifically that you're wrong about something really, really important: that some of the core assumptions you and people like you rely on for your political and social reasoning actually have a really big and very hazardous blind spot in them.

I reject what you're saying both because 1) I disagree, and believe in the decency and character of the vast majority of my fellow citizens, including you and your fellow rage-monsters and 2) even if you were right, I'm not going to accept it, shrug and go back to scrolling on reddit while my country burns. I'm going to rage against the dying of the light even as you laugh and say 'told you so stupid motherfucker' the same way I'm raging at you now, I'm going to enlist in the armed forces, run for office, start a goddamn substack, argue on the internet, have a family of 6 or whatever it takes to make the world a better place because we are not just passive bystanders, we are what makes this country what it is. There's always going to be freeloaders, cynics and rage-monsters. Spreading cynicism and conflict theory begets more cynicism and conflict; regardless of the truth value of your statements I believe that you're making the problem worse.

Do you remember what you said years ago when I asked why you still bother to post around here? Perhaps I'm insufferable, naive, self-righteous and overzealous but I prefer my answer to what I remember yours was, which amounted to 'it helps pass the time.' If only I could find it.

If a law like this actually passes and starts getting enforced, will you reconsider the relevance of the above post?

Hardly, and the inverse law already exists in Texas. I can fairly easily mentally model a steel-man where both Texan politicians and Guzman are doing what they think is best for the children. Also, the law doesn't matter, remember?

It would take some truly titanic event to turn me as cynical as you. Like concentration camps, civil war, a real coup or living in Russia.

Guzman is motivated by some combination of political ambition and desire to be a Good Person. For her, "good person" is defined by her tribe, which is Blue. Blue Tribe holds that Red anti-LGBT bigotry causes vast harm and suffering, and that preventing and/or punishing this bigotry helps make a better world, that the world will be a better place when Red hostility to LGBT culture has been eliminated, and that actively working to achieve that elimination is a good thing.

You flip between Guzman and Blue tribe as a whole depending on which is more convenient, and project the former onto the latter to justify you writing off half the country. You're rehashing this conversation. Again, you ignore the majority of values that we do share and catastrophize over the marginal cases of trans children with deeply conservative children. In a country of over 300 million, I have no doubt there are a few hundred cases of miserable trans children and angry parents that you could make a probative mountain to bury me under. I suspect you're less interested in the mountain 300 million people tall where this isn't the case.

Not to say I don't take your concerns seriously, or minimize the suffering of those people, or argue that they should be charged with a felony and thrown in jail. But I'm not about to lose my faith in western civilization or this nation because we don't have a great solution for this problem.

Okay. So what happens when they do dominate? Do you think this is all just posturing, and they'd never really do it because that would be crazy? What happens if they decide that no, actually, they're gonna try it?

I think there's a world where trans people face more acceptance than they do now, that surgery and medicine improve their ability to transition more seamlessly, and where people come around not because blue politicians rammed it down their throat but because they don't feel threatened by it anymore. If there are indeed people attracted to being trans for persecution complex reasons, the total number of trans people goes down. And this is congruent with what I think you were saying above; if trans people aren't viewed as a threat anymore values will change organically and a law like this will have broader majority support.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

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You could not possibly be more wrong. I endeavor to behave in a fashion that requires no justification, and to the extent I fail there is no excuse. My hatred is unjustifiable, flatly evil, and something I am actively attempting to get a rein on.

I wish you the best, and while it's ludicrous and perhaps a failure of imagination on my part, I fundamentally believe this is the attraction of Conflict Theory.

One of us is very badly wrong.

Unlikely. The world is more complex than "Everything is 100% explainable by conflict theory" and "my country(wo)men are saintly altruists who take no selfish acts," and the truth is likely in the middle. The US isn't headed towards glorious fully automated luxury gay space communism, nor is it headed towards apocalyptic prepper wasteland where we fight over bottlecaps, it'll shamble along a good while longer.

Avoid the problem by declining to live in Blue areas or exposing my kids to blue organizations. Coordinate political power along explicitly tribal interests so that we can secure a livable future free of Blue oppression. Attempt to get enough resources to successfully bypass doom if that coordination fails. Hope for a miracle, get on with living life in the meantime.

Well, segregation is your right as a private citizen I suppose. This country only works insofar as we put in the work to have hard discussions across the chasm of differing worldviews, and I'd encourage you to not give up on trying to communicate or understand or empathize, but I suppose it's better than most of the alternatives.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Naraburns banned me for making an argument she disliked,

See, I knew I wasn't crazy. I wonder if I got that from you?

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

You... do know this is primarily a reactionary forum and is consequentially going to have a right-wing skew (thus be a bit more concerned about traditional purity, per Haidt's Moral Foundations) to it no matter the actual leaning of the participants, right?

I don't know who you are or how long you've been around, but it's pretty frustrating to hear you say that. Mere months ago we were being told (by - wonder of wonders! - Naraburns) that actually, the forum is politically balanced, and liberals were too thin-skinned and used to dominating online spaces:

I have audited moderation, AAQCs, and (using your data!) the demographics of the sub itself. I have never found any evidence of an anti-left bias. I have found copious evidence of the absence of a left-wing bias, which many left-wingers appear to interpret as an anti-left bias. Part of the problem, I assume, is that it is much easier to write polemics than it is to write constructively; even when writing constructively, we tend to respond to criticism, which is itself a sort of polemic. And part of the problem is that, as one of the few rational platforms that permit right-wing viewpoints at all, we do seem to have something like an "overrepresentation" of the right here, though it is perhaps inescapably difficult to say for certain...After all, I'd conducted multiple audits in response to users whining about anti-left biases, and simply never found any evidence.

But I happened to have a moment to check your work, and all I can say is--what? Unless the vote tallies have shifted quite a lot since you did this work, I find your tally for November 15 to be nigh incomprehensible, to the point where I am inclined to simply disregard the others without further audit.

But based on the criteria you provided, I once again find no particular anti-left bias in this space--though I do worry that claiming there is a bias, in a comment that (due to the high effort nature of gathering the data) few users are likely to challenge on the particulars, is one way to encourage anti-left bias, and discourage leftists from posting here. At minimum, you seem to think that many comments I coded as "other" are in fact comments that would discourage leftists from posting here. That seems like you indirectly claiming that leftists are simply too thin-skinned to abide even the slightest disagreement. I do not think that is true, but if or when it is true, then I think it is the foundation of the sub, rather than the users or their posts, to which such people actually object.

You're the second person I've seen this week saying something to this effect. But we've gone from a mod calling us 'users whining about anti-left biases' to 'of course this place leans right you fucking idiots' so fast I'm getting whiplash.

For the record, I think Naraburns is a good mod.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

Accordingly I sympathize with @naraburns for not wanting to cross that bridge either, and there does come a point where calling a spade a spade is the most charitable course.

Ah, we're doing the call a spade a spade thing? Will you defend me saying this forum is populated by 'yes-men tripping over themselves to fellate [FC]?' And will you defend my right to call out people for being racist, fascist misogynists in the future, if these are the rules you want to live by?

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

I do not agree, for the exact reason it's fair to call Ghislaine Maxwell a groomer.

Groomer -> Pedophile

Groomer -> Ghislaine Maxwell

Groomer -> Guzman (whoever that Virginian legislator was)

Groomer -> Educators showing their charges books like lawn boy

Groomer -> Educators showing their charges media that has trans/nonbinary/gay characters not doing sexually explicit things

Groomer -> PM me classic memes

Groomer -> pro-trans people (always unclear how wide a net this is casting, sometimes allowing for plausible deniability)

All of these claims have been made in this thread, by numerous different people. At one end, groomers are pedophiles who want to fuck your children (serious and immediate threat!). At the other end, for someone doing something categorically different, you're casting a wide enough net that tens of millions of Americans are now Maxwell-Groomer-Pedophiles (yeschad.jpeg the trolls will say).

I stopped using the words racist, sexist and misogynist for the same reasons that the definitions have gotten so amorphous that some people would call tens of millions of Americans racist (yeschad.jpeg, their response is). Y'all are just playing the same game as the normie Blue tribers you love to hate, to a remarkable degree.

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Chrisprattalpharaptor Ave Imperaptor 1yr ago

It feels like what would happen if ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor showed up any time you mentioned COVID to disprove you or interrogate you as if you were a collegial equal.

I apologize if you feel like I held the topic hostage or stifled conversation. I can sympathize with the idea that someone might be more knowledgeable about a field but not necessarily share your values or background, and I'm sure if you had access to all the same facts you may reach different conclusions than me. With that in mind, what would you suggest I do? Just lay off the hobby horse for a while? Be less aggressive?

No need to reply if you're uncomfortable, I know this is tangential to your point.