Chrisprattalpharaptr
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
So... is there a reason you asked how we could interact in ways other than criticism?
Because I find it so unpleasant that I haven't replied to any of your posts in something like three years now despite telling you to stop and go away, and detailed why, but you keep coming back. I told you I'd rather be able to read your writing than just block you and move on.
No, it is not. A coherent claim has to have some clear logical support. There needs to be an X thus Y component; otherwise it's just an ipse dixit.
I see. I wasn't familiar with the formal definition of coherent.
And this sort of game is what drives me bonkers about HR815 getting used as a cudgel. You're not "specifically referring to that bill", and you aren't even saying it's an example or part of your example now, but you're also not going explain any level of specific support that could be falsified, to confront any of the reasons people might disagree, and you're not going to recognize that the people defending it here had to constantly lie completely miss details about every single section.
I'm 'not specifically referring to that bill' because I'm trying to avoid this exact conversation with you where I get linked a 30 comment thread that takes a law degree to parse! No, I don't have an example of case law where 'The legislature can explicitly give litigants the standing to enforce “shall” rules,' and it doesn't sound like mr populist did either. You won that argument, and you'd win this one.
But then, I can probably name less than a dozen case laws starting with Roe v. Wade, and I don't trust you to not be Eulering me. Why, in your view, were Lankford and other senate Republicans so incompetent as to draft an immigration bill that was harmful to their interests? And why discount the funding for enforcement, border wall (previously a major sticking point, with the border wall being hugely unpopular to the dem base), CBP, etc?
No, my position is not "we will never trust any legislation on immigration again". My position is that any compromise on immigration needs to have immediate, serious, and costly compromises paid by the group that has spent half of the last forty years exploiting and ignoring the law for their own purposes, instead of people insisting that it's a compromise because it's an immigration bill and Ezra Klien lied about it.
That's foolish. You say that Border Patrol won't report real numbers, that the courts won't enforce the rulings or grant standing. Besides, anyone on the left who actually suffers consequences will just get a pardon or a friendly DOJ/DA will refuse to prosecute them, and they'll inevitably win cushy appointments in NGOs or university faculties. Not to mention, democrat politicians see 'words as a mean for deceiving humans.'
If you think fedposting is bad, you probably will do a better job arguing against it by arguing against it, instead of just going nuts shoving words in other people's mouths.
Why don't you try arguing with them yourself before lecturing me about it?
Trivially, as I demonstrated in the link that coincidentally wasn't worth responding to, it's actually pretty unclear how incompatible it is with winning in the court of popular opinion or passing laws in congress.
How did you trivially demonstrate that rhetoric is incompatible with winning popular opinion or passing laws?
EDIT :/ Just as trivially, the DACA 'deals' had a different result than you might remember. /EDIT
I conflated the 2017 and 2019 DACA debates. In 2017, he chose to try and end DACA rather than take a deal. In 2019, how does it go? Ah - the time for rapprochement is before someone else is (about to) have power over you.
More critically, if a policy someone in the media gives a bad name, mean words, and sketchy misuses of DoD funds are all that it takes to make someone not-moderate on that position, you're going to have to give up ever Dem politician on the national level in the last thirty years, especially on gun control.
If the left ever elects someone who acts the way Trump acts, you're going to lose your mind.
And, of course, this had zero impact on Bill Clinton's then-active campaign for a federal assault weapon ban, which passed in 1994 and only ended when an unrelated Republican wave coincided with a sunset provision. Wasn't even controversial at a federal level until a couple complete nutjobs spent five-plus years digging into it and revealed that the official story in both cases had more holes than Ben_Garison's Lankford story, and even then you didn't get national television heads suggesting that maybe you can't shoot people or burn them on a pyre for being annoying and 'resisting arrest'.
What's your point, that the left can send in the feds to shoot up conservatives and still win elections? Or that violence is Popular, Actually?
(Not that one in a hundred normies could tell you what, say, LaVoy Finicum was protesting, either, but he didn't have a vagina, so he doesn't count.)
Indeed, the operative difference between LaVoy Finicum and Renee Good was their genitals. And you also might be surprised what normies could have told you about Lavoy Finicum six years ago.
No one cared. Progressives don't give a damn about women getting shot. They care about what's politically useful, and what's on the television. And, hell, I'm not saying conservatives are different! (although I personally try to care; in addition to my IRL work, I've pointedly tried to stick to 'don't speak ill of the dead' for this specific example.)
Your link is broken. But progressives care about what's politically useful, and what do you think those politics are a means to? Personal riches? Power? Please, teach me what truly motivates progressives.
Make your reply so that you don't complain about the 'reply and block,' then I'm done. My family and job deserve better than me wasting an hour of my day on this and coming home in a bad mood.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
I'm sorry that I'm not just pointing "this (up arrow emoji)" on the MMUD or tauren druid posts, but I generally try to avoid posting unless I either have further information or a correction, especially since this time of year is a clusterfuck.
If you think I do this for the adoration of the community and the fuzzy feels, look at the vote counts on most of my posts. Or I can send you some of the death threat DMs, although those died down a bit since I mostly started avoiding grabbing live wire culture war issues.
That's more close to a coherent claim
Saying that conservatives should have taken HR815 as a compromise is a coherent claim, just one you dislike and disagree with.
But you do understand why it's not that persuasive as a crux of your argument? There's zero trust that 'moderate' enforcement regimes would be tolerated or accepted -- not just because of the Lankford bill showing that 'moderate' meant no actual mandate, or that literal decades before that 'moderate' enforcement meant wildly net-positive illegal immigration, but simply that Trump tried that in the first administration, it was overwhelmingly not tolerated or accepted, and indeed its use was made to justify the massive uptick in tolerated illegal immigration under Biden.
I understand why it's not persuasive to you, and frankly to the others with dug in positions on immigrants and American identity. Do you understand why 'we will never trust any legislation on immigration again' is also not persuasive as an argument, in addition to being rather stupid? If you're done with the legislative process, go join the fedposters and leave me alone.
simply that Trump tried that in the first administration
He did what? You think the rhetoric around muslim travel bans and shithole countries and building the wall with DOD funds rather than taking a DACA deal is the 'moderate' position? Stoking partisanship is going to win you elections and make your base love you, but it's not a recipe for passing laws in congress or winning in the court of popular opinion.
indeed its use was made to justify the massive uptick in tolerated illegal immigration under Biden.
Yes, extreme positions and rhetoric provoke backlash, the same way that Biden suffered a backlash on immigration near the end of his term and Trump is probably suffering some level of backlash on ICE now. Time will tell, but however much people like to play rules lawyer about cars being lethal weapons, I don't think normies like seeing normie moms getting shot in the head.
Why do you think anything could be done about immigration on January 19th, 2025?
Because Ezra Klein, Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul and a host of influential figures on the left admitting that illegal immigration is a problem and the Biden admin fucked up combined with shifts in the general population is the ideal time to pass immigration legislation. When else do you think it's going to happen? Now that Trump is calling blue cities warzones and making shitposts about Chiraq and we're seeing ICE raids in our neighborhoods? The opportunity for rapprochement and compromise was wasted.
If you want to interact with me in some mutually beneficial way, then interact with me.
I don't know how, and frankly I'd rather not - honestly, we'd both be happier if you went and found someone else to argue with.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
Perhaps the way I wrote my comment misled you, but I wasn't specifically referring to that bill. The majority of Trump's agenda has been through executive orders that will be reversed the day after he leaves office, particularly since the center and center-left have soured on immigration enforcement after the last year.
I'd rather not block you because I sometimes enjoy reading your writing, but I'd also appreciate it if you stopped dropping by now and then with a 'you're wrong about everything, actually.' I respect and admire you, but I'm also at a loss as to how to interact with you in any kind of mutually beneficial way.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3d ago
During medical school I once got covered in my supervisor’s blood, and on another occasion, I had to carry away a chunk of somebody’s scalp. A guy I know from medical school once responded to a code in the middle of the night and found two patients and a nurse wrestling in the nursing station while another nurse slowly bled out from a neck wound.
I’ve been swept by a gun during a trauma (fucking search the bangers before, thanks), and handed a knife by a guy who was already searched while alone in a room. Yesterday, a nurse at another hospital in my region almost had their finger bitten off while restraining a patient, which is why I decided to write this.
Do you think these situations would have been improved by you being armed with a gun? And given that many doctors suffer a...size disparity from your average trauma patient, and fists can easily be a deadly weapon, should the doctor have shot the patients in any of the stories you list above?
Where do the NRA and courts land on arming doctors/self-defense in hospitals, anyways?
The groypers/tankies/islamists would kill/expel/rape/torture/imprison me anyway, so I’m unclear as to why I owe them any empathy.
Pretty small subsets of society, but sure, you can have a pass on people whose platform is explicitly kill/torture Jews. The woman who got shot in the head was presumably none of those things, although I doubt she had warm feelings for [edit] Israel.
But the episode taught me one thing. If you give the left an inch, they take a mile. If you agree that a single cop did something dumb, you get the police defunded, a wave of ridiculous and damaging woke in the private and public sector, and the greatest crime wave in decades. So while I don’t defend this, I know the only thing for it is to say “OK, what about it?”, to give not one inch.
And if you give the right an inch, they take Venezuela. Compromise is for suckers, smart people hit defect, right?
But regardless, you learned the wrong lesson. Defund the police didn't happen because you gave an inch to extreme leftists, it happened because broad segments of the population across the political spectrum were disgusted by what happened to Floyd. COVID lockdowns didn't happen because you ceded ground to some tiny fraction of hypochondriacs; they were supported by the majority of Americans, particularly early on in the pandemic.
You can be as callous as you like when you're in power, but a majority of Americans disapprove of ICE. And when they're back in power and you trumpet the latest MS13 murder, what's to stop them from smiling and saying 'why should I care?'
There was a moment at the end of the Biden administration where I thought there was relatively broad bipartisan agreement that something needed to be done about immigration. The left knew it was a losing issue, all the talking heads on the center left agreed something needed to be done, etc. The right (well, Trump really) chose to score political points instead and unilaterally take a bunch of actions that will be reversed three years from now.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
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8d ago
Jeez, how many people can report a comment in 45 minutes? Are they just sitting there refreshing the new comment feed?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8d ago
How full is the water bottle? And it's a normal person throwing it with a predictable windup or it's just magically headed directly towards my center of mass and it's a question of reflexes to get out of the way? I feel like a childhood of playing suicide (apparently called butts up in the US of A) gives me pretty good odds.
But also, without caring that much about the underlying specifics, the cop did 'just dodge the car.' He wasn't meaningfully hit. And even if he had been hit head on and still shot and killed the driver, it didn't stop the car from accelerating and crashing into the other parked car. If anything, shooting her probably made him less safe than jumping on the hood of the car or something.
Not to mention, if you shoot me in the chest or something I'm 100% going to do my best to run you over even if that wasn't my intention before.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8d ago
What a childish argument.
When you stand against immigration enforcement you stand against the future of the entire civilization we share. You are saying that you want your descendants and mine to live in a dirtier, poorer, more squalid, more corrupt, more unequal, more violent country, forever.
If you obstruct ICE in any capacity, why should I care what happens to you, when by your very action you are saying you don’t care about what happens to me?
Why should I care that Charlie Kirk was shot? Trump? Should I care when the Sandistas drag your rich family from their Manhattan penthouse, given that I suspect I'd take a dim view of how you acquired your wealth if I knew the details? Should I cheer for cops to shoot people violating COVID lockdowns because they obviously don't care about what happens to me?
Have you met your quota of 8 white/Jewish babies? Do you support my policy of sterilizing the genetic undesirables? Have you donated to my paramilitary group going door to door administering rapid-SNP tests and euthanizing people with below-average IQ PGS? No? By failing to out-reproduce the blacks and latinos and borderlander dysgenic trash you're dooming my descendants to squalor! Why should I care what happens to you?
Have some empathy and respect for your country(wo)men because the alternative is worse. Even if you're acutely self-interested and lack any altruistic impulses whatsoever, the alternative is worse for you as well.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9d ago
From DHS twitter:
Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.
Was, uh, a riot going on down the street or something? Or do the videos you linked capture the totality of the violent riot?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
It's a different world man. I checked the FBI crime statistics, and in my home town, when I was allowed to bike 30 minutes as google map says, probably 60 minutes as a kid bikes, down the bike path on the parkway to the nearest shopping center for a slushy, the murder rate in my county was 0-1 per year. Entirely domestics. In the year 2025 it's closer to 50, and lots of gang deaths.
I'm really baffled as to where you grew up, Petersburg? As far as my experiences in Virginia, it's overwhelmingly been one of gentrification - admittedly limited to NoVA and Richmond. I can't speak to Norfolk or Charlottesville. In DC, the majority of the city is unaffordable to anyone but wealthy professionals and the politicos, with the poors being pushed across the Anacostia. H street is a filthy den of hipsters (or may have progressed to a fully upscale neighborhood since I left, I don't know) and you have to go pretty far to the northeast to get anywhere grungy. NoVA is a gleaming mass of towers full of consultants milking the feds (where you possibly work making useless software?) and I'm not even sure how far you have to drive outside the city before you stop seeing Mcmansions and nice suburbs.
I don't know Richmond as well but The Fan and Jackson Ward both gentrified pretty heavily. Nice downtown core, UVA seems to be metastasizing, lots of mcmansions and farmers markets.
Are you confident that your quiet suburbia was invaded by illegals rather than most of the successful, law-abiding people being siphoned off by the gentrifying cities? Brain drain to the city cores will hollow out the suburbs and revitalize the downtowns which seems to be what's happening (although I haven't noticed the apocalyptic degradation of the suburbs you write about extensively). It's surprising that I lived in fairly similar areas to you without ever hearing about Teen Dismemberment Tuesdays. Why do you think we had such different experiences?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
16d ago
Being top DPS on your MMO raiding guild is competitive and zero-sum, but unlikely to attract many girls (though not zero)
Every guild has a female tauren druid who ends up getting involved with the GM...
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
23d ago
He was, for some reason, a big fan of Perplexity -- an AI tool that I’ve heard very little positive feedback about from anyone else.
For a long time (and possibly this is still the case) perplexity was the only tool that would give me actual papers as references. If i said i wanted protocols for x in cell type y chatgpt would hallucinate a bunch of papers with chinese surnames that didn’t exist.
Chatgpt is a lot more interesting these days (for my work) but even as recently as a few weeks ago it made up papers instead of giving me real references.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
29d ago
And black/hispanic men over white/asian men.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
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29d ago
In the first case, we can make the economy much more dynamic and worthwhile by reducing DEI.
In the first case, the jobs aren't fake and gay, people are just bad at them. You're arguing that people could be creating value for the company, but the slots taken up by women and black men are wasted.
Perhaps my experience is colored by being in STEM (as I suspect OP's is colored by being in finance), but my department of 100 something people has literally zero black employees. Maybe HR is majority female? Most other departments are fairly evenly split along gender lines and overwhelmingly white/east asian/Indian. Are these jobs all fake and gay? And if so, they are overwhelmingly held by white men and women - couldn't they easily be balanced to reflect the general population?
In the second case, the economy is unsustainable and any "solution" would fundamentally change the nature of the economy. Even fake and gay jobs can inculcate leadership and administrative skills that will be invaluable during such an upheaval. Society would benefit from putting the best and brightest into these positions to better prepare itself for the transition.
OP's entire point is that the economy is unsustainable, and fake and gay jobs are the path to sustainability. Our society produces a huge excess of wealth, but increasingly less-talented individuals can't productively contribute to the economy. Again, I see no problem with DEI.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
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29d ago
And black and hispanic men are incarcerated more frequently, right? So you favor a worldview where corporations hire black men > hispanic men > white men > asian men > black women and so on and so forth? At least for their fake and gay jobs, anyways (which is most of them outside of software development and engineering).
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
30d ago
Exactly, we just have to make sure we discriminate against the white and asian ones.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
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30d ago
It makes sense, in this scenario, to pursue a more aggressive version of the program that has been ongoing now for many decades. To manufacture employment. To have people do, perhaps ever more overtly, ever more ridiculously, what everyone knows is unnecessary.
I must confess that I'm confused by the apparently broad overlap between people who believe:
- DEI is net negative for society because more competent white and asian men are discriminated against in favor of less competent blacks/women
- The vast majority of modern jobs are fake and gay
Everything you just laid out is a nearly fully generalizable argument in favor of turbo-DEI. If you're paying people to stay out of jail, pay the people who disproportionately go to jail.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
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1mo ago
Do people actively play/did people use to play MUDs back in the day?
20-30 years ago, I was deep into a very niche MUD - small enough that naming it might even be an opsec liability. Maybe 50-100 max players online. I'm shocked to see that they now have a discord, and about 1-2 dozen people who still play. No idea how they manage to RP/PVP. I'm also surprised to find a fairly active subreddit for MUDs, possibly enough to make me consider trying it again.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I find this topic very irksome, for reasons that can be gleaned from some jingoistic comments below.
There is a lot of a cope. But there's also a lot of reflexive anti-jingoism where America default bad. I confess, I don't know whether to trust the economists or not.
"Breakneck" is also an annoying gimmick. They're not engineers.
I'll read it and get back to you.
Maybe the thickest layer of obscurity is official translation. For example: «中华人民共和国». «People's Republic of China». Character by character: something like "The Middle Splendid Land's People's Common-Harmony State". That's what they intend to be.
Out of curiosity, do you speak/read Mandarin?
I'm not really interested in arguing with you on the subject and I'm not even sure I disagree, but on this point that you might find amusing - the dim sum place near my house is also called 'peaceful mountain dumpling shop' (obscured for opsec reasons) and I can tell you it's anything but. I'm reminded of the Chinese copypastas from World of Warcraft:
patchwerk fat american 胖胖美国人angered hits on armored men对装甲兵的怒吼intentional pain river keeps others safe故意痛苦的河流使他人安全medics focus those who eat fists医务人员将重点放在那些吃拳头的人身上
邪恶的骑士 Evil horseriders 一起站 Stand together for falling sky 带走武器 Steal weapon 避免黑洞 Avoid pancake of darkness 圣光波 Change position often
They're funnier if you've actually played the game...
To get a feel for it, I recommend reading this interview (1, 2) on a book about his father Xi Zhongxun
Thanks - I'll try a book about Xi and/or his father.
Does anyone seriously think they will have trouble building sheds with lots of cooling and grid connection. They have the world's best HVDC system, they ate several major markets in the last 5 years, their heavy machinery is penetrating German/Japanese markets already. They'll be fine.
The point of that argument is not that China is incapable of building datacenters, but that America hasn't lost it's ability to build - it's just very focused on profit.
Cope? Maybe. Like I said, I don't know if I should trust the economists the way I trust psychologists and social science majors, the way I trust engineers or somewhere in between.
What merits explanation is not China but the dysfunction of Western societies, the decline of civilization really.
Again, I think Tyler's point is that a lot of what looks like dysfunction is actually function downstream of people's revealed preferences.
I'm honestly 100% uncertain on whether China wins, America wins, or both muddle along on roughly equal terms for the rest of my lifetime. I'm still skeptical of your apparent certainty, but I guess we'll see.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Which mods have acknowledged this?
Hmm, this one I misremembered...
Yes, the community here has suffered evaporative cooling and a hardening of consensus viewpoints.
...although this is somewhat tacit acknowledgement.
This is just wrong and tells me you're either being disingenuous or you just don't pay attention.
Who have you banned for saying naughty things about blacks, immigrants, women or progressives on par with hanikrummihundursvin? I don't think faceh or sloot have been banned for ranting about women being the mental equivalent of children (afaict this ban was for being a generic asshole). You'll say whiningcoil is on the edge, but as far as I'm aware he hasn't eaten a 90 day ban and has plenty to say about immigrants wrecking his town.
No we don't. This is, again, flatly wrong. If we were free speech absolutists, we wouldn't ban people for calling brown people locusts and Jews parasites
Yes, this is my point...
How many places on reddit or elsewhere can I very calmly and civilly argue for why I don't think trans women are women, or HBD may be real?
...and how many places can hanikrummihundursvin calmly and civilly argue that he hates the subhuman subcontinental filth and Jewish parasites that are holding down the proud Aryan race? You're proud that the speech you like is allowed here while being verboten on reddit, even as you ban the speech you dislike and put boundaries on what the deplorables are allowed to say.
But someone coming in saying Black Lives Matter and Trans Rights Are Human Rights would be allowed to argue for those positions.
I have not, and would not deny it.
BUT - it must be said, one reason they break so readily is that they are just not used to people being allowed to dogpile them, instead of the other way around.
There is some truth to this. But there's more to the story than libruls are thin-skinned snowflakes who can't handle disagreement. Not everyone wants to share a space with people calmly and civilly advocating for political violence or genocide any more than you want to share a space with 4channers.
But your criticisms are off base and mostly just wrong when not outright disingenuous.
We've done this a couple times, and usually your argument is just repeating that you're wrong, Chrispratt. Do you think you're going to change my mind just by repeating that you think I'm wrong, or do you feel the need to defend your record to the audience? Are you worried I'm going to evaporate as well? If it's the latter, I'll probably hang around until this place dies from a lack of activity and things get boring - no need to try and convince me one way or another.
But anyways. You're wrong, Amadan. I think you're ingenuously wrong. I think you're all doing a good job as moderators, but I'm less and less impressed with the free speech argument the longer I stick around.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
He said "progressive/liberal." "Progressive" is kind of a dirty word hereabouts, basically interchangeable with "woke," but do you not consider yourself a liberal?
In that case, why say progressive at all? And even then, the word 'liberal' contains multitudes. A Texas democrat, a Freddie De Boer flavor liberal who rarely culture wars, some kind of lawyer from Pittsburgh and some kind of software-adjacent lawyer are the vanguard now that everyone to their left is gone. Who's who, and whether that's an accurate cross-section of the label 'liberal' is left to you. 3-4 people is still not that many.
Once, I would have gotten pushback and been told I'm too sensitive and used to my progressive safe spaces and there's an even balance of left/right viewpoints. Now, there's tacit acknowledgement even from the mods that this is true and the party line has shifted to liberals are just too thin-skinned to deal with how wrong they are.
Sure, I'm probably a liberal, although I rarely participate in discussions and Mr. delVasto probably wasn't around when I did.
Really? So you think he could have said something similar about another group and not been modded? Why do you think that? Or are you agreeing with Hanik that the mods are ZOG collaborators? That would be a twist.
No, you aren't on the AIPAC payroll (or if you are, make me a mod daddy - I'll ban all the jew-haters tomorrow). But he was relatively polite, speaking clearly and it certainly wasn't low effort. His participation adhered to the rules better than Jiro saying 'Yeah, no' because he was butthurt about Jews being called parasites.
But yes, I'm pretty sure he could get away with hating on American blacks or illegal immigrants or Islamists or progressives or plenty of other groups for a lot longer than he could get away with hating on Jews. Coincidentally, there are a hell of a lot more Jews here than blacks or any of those other groups. Why do I think it would be modded differently? Because people hate on blacks and illegals all the time without consequence, maybe a bit less monomaniacally than SS, but just as virulently and often less articulately.
I mean, do I need to point out that in your link, @naraburns was not speaking as a mod?
What does it matter? His views on his objectivity are the same whether he's posting with mod flair or not.
"You're doing a good job and you also suck" is such a special snipe.
I don't have time to fully flesh this out because life, so concisely:
- You (the mod team and userbase more broadly, not you specifically) pride yourselves on being free speech absolutists and sneer at [insert lesser forum here.]
- Actual free speech absolutism leads to autistic 20 page screeds about holocaust denial and eventually devolves into 4chan.
- You know this. You tell those people to shut the fuck up and ban them when they get too obnoxious, or, as people here like to say: 'start scaring the hoes.' Iterate for definition of hoes moving rightward over time.
- 'Free speech' now works great because most substantial disagreement is gone from the platform and people pulling you too hard towards chanhood get banned.
I think you're right to do #3, and that you do a good job of it. I just think it's hypocritical to claim to be advocates of free speech when the only difference between you and reddit is where you've drawn the line in the sand, and that line is largely a product of the views of your userbase.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Can you name a single progressive here? I guess magicalkitty and whatever the other person's name is (aka darwin and impassionata), although I'm not sure they count given that they've been permabanned in the past and mostly troll now. There aren't any left to mod.
On the flip side, there's nothing in the post being modded that would deserve a ban on any other topic. There's no objective rule here (however much the mods may protest to the contrary), just an arbitrary line in the sand that the local userbase happens to draw further to the right than reddit does.
To be clear, I think they're doing a good job. But the hypocrisy and chest-thumping around free speech is profoundly irritating.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
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1mo ago
The only thing that the above reveals is that US suburbs are largely preferred to US cities (and, more specifically, by the kind of upper middle class striver who uproots from Europe/China to the US), but this does not generalize to suburbs and cities as a whole. Maintain a Singapore quality city in the US and I don't doubt many suburbanites would trade the yard and those extra beds/baths for a condo.
It's a fair argument, but I'm not sure I buy it. Millennials revitalized city cores and gentrified the shit out of many historically run down neighborhoods. They couldn't conjure up a world class mass transit system, but most of the ones I knew lived without cars anyways. Then they all hit 30, tried to buy a house in the burbs at the same time and the housing market chaos of the early 2020s ensued.
Also, ironically, I ended up taking a ton of cabs when I was in Singapore. It was nice, but I'm not sure I'd say it was in a different class from the American cities I like.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I think this is too fuzzy an analogy to be much help.
Fair. It's not a particularly sophisticated model, but then, I'm neither a historian nor an economist. It seems to be the playbook the CCP believes in, though.
It seems insensitive to link the south park clip, but like...someone has to do it, right?
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