JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Formerly "SandwichWarrior" and "The Upright Man", may or may not be feral, is most certainly quixotic.
User ID: 4009
As I was saying to @hanikrummihundursvin up thread, to me this issue illustrates just how "siloed" the liberal media bubble has become from more conservative and internationalist ones.
Liberals feel like this came out of nowhere and as a result their first impulse blame the perfidious Jew. Meanwhile everyone else has been speculating about if/when the US would do something about Iran's repeated threats to global shipping, and the answer to those questions turned out to be "Yes" and "March 2026".
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7mo ago
The kind of war that I imagine guys like Kagan want is an extended low to medium intensity conflict like Afghanistan or Iraq circa 2010 that gives them a chance to posture and justify their salaries while funneling money to their friends and sponsors in the contracting world.
This war, at least so far, is not that.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7mo ago
Not "Indians" the "Ingroup".
Which, as @FiveHourMarathon observed in that same thread, is perfectly understandable, "We're always going to have a bias towards our friends."
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7mo ago
The bit about the ratio of lurkers to posters is something that I hadn't considered. I don't think it's enough to change my mind but it is a good point.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7mo ago
As someone who has made a conscious effort to maintain some a presence on both sides of a wide cultural gulf I don't think I've seen any event since Covid that made the different algorithmic/media bubbles that people exist in more apparent than current conflict with Iran.
If you exist in a liberal oriented media bubble that includes publications like The Atlantic everyone in your feed is talking about how this came out of nowhere, how there is no plan, how Trump has betrayed MAGA principles for Zionist interests and as a result the GOP is surely going to get creamed in the mid-terms.
If you exist in a more conservative or internationalist oriented media bubble everyone in your feed is talking about how striking Venezuela and Iran props up the petro-dollar and deprives rivals like China of cheap fuel.
I've always felt that making upvotes and downvotes visible to anyone but the moderators (or perhaps at all) was a bad idea and that it would be better not to have them at all. If people want to agree or disagree at least make them put their name on it.
Did I miss some flameout that prompted this?
Maybe I'm being narcissistic but I feel like I may be at least half responsible. I blame the other half on @KMC and @FiveHourMarathon. No disrespect intended but I share the latter's perception that if @KMC's comment had been aimed at "Negroes", "Venezuelans", or "Trump-Voters" it likely would have gone un-reported and thus un-moderated.
What that means for the forum as a whole is it's own conversation.
I am neither lefty nor progressive, but I too have flounced off in my time (and then got dragged back in again).
Hence the "HereAndGone" username I presume?
You and me both.
"Islam is in diametric opposition to feminism. Therefore, it is hated by the woke"
This is news to me. If anything it would seem to me that "the Woke" and "Radical Islam" are nominally allied. Otherwise where would all the "Queers for Palestine" and mainstream media support for the Ayatollahs be coming from?
"Progressive" is not the term I would have chosen, I would have characterized them more as an "anarchist" or "revolutionary socialist"
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7mo ago
"Trump is a charismatic demagogue" is a very different complaint from "Trump is neither smart nor capable".
In fact, they are in no way equivalent.
Trump parleyed his position as the middle child of a minor patrician family into being a top-level player in 3 distinct and notoriously exclusive and cut-throat fields. Urban Real-estate, Television, and Politics. Furthermore he did so without seeming to accrue the roster of enemies, the public baggage, nor the "Kompromat" that one might otherwise expect from a man in his position. (most of the nonsense about him being "a fascist", "an authoritarian", and "the most dangerous man in politics" only appeared after it was clear that he was about to become the 2016 GOP Nominee).
Similarly Musk has founded 3 companies in 3 distinct industries that are notoriously difficult to break into, Banking, Automobile Manufacturing, and Aerospace, and not only have those 3 companies survived in industries where the overwhelming majority of start-ups fail, they've grown to become major players in their own right.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7mo ago
no smart & capable person would willingly, publicly go against the main tenets
To the extent that this is true I think it because the words "smart & capable" are more often a short-hand for displaying behaviors and beliefs associated with the elite, rather than anything to do with intelligence or the capacity to solve problems.
As men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk aptly demonstrate, you can be hugely successful across multiple domains for decades and still get dismissed by affluent liberals as an idiot/incompetent for having the wrong aesthetics.
"no quarter" means that if someone is trying to run away you should shoot them in the back. What it means is that anyone on the field who isn't a friendly or who hasn't already been killed or taken prisoner is not only a legitimate target but a mission objective.
What he's saying is that we aren't trying to hold territory, we're trying to send a message, that message being that if you try to fuck with us you die and your nation gets set back a generation per @MaiqTheTrue's post above.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7mo ago
I find it much more likely that he gambled on an in-and-out, five-day adventure. Blow up their assets, decapitate the leadership, get an easy peace deal. Foot in the door.
I agree that this was likely the hope, but knowing at least some of the players I find it difficult to believe that the current situation where in the regime has not collapsed wasn't "gamed out".
The Somalis are only a threat to shipping because much of Europe is too oikophobic to let merchant crews give incoming borders the whiff of grape-shot they deserve.
The Houthis in turn represent a significantly greater threat to shipping in large part because Iran has been supplying them with intel, aircraft, and anti-ship missiles which is one of the reasons we are trying to degrade Iran's capacity to so.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7mo ago
To the extent that there is a distaff counterpart to "toxic masculinity" I feel like the sort of off-shoring of agency you describe here is a big part of it. I feel like as society has become more "feminized" I've see more of these situations where a failure clearly occurred but we can't just tell someone that they "failed" because really the failure was the fault of "systemic issues" and everyone following their individual incentives.
I don't know. I kind of think that you should ant the guy that's in charge of the actual fighting to buy in to the whole Conan The Barbarian meme about "what is best in life?" unironically.
I also think that if I were President Truman in the spring of '45 I would want to keep Morgenthau and his plan on hand, in part because the whole "Good Cop, Bad Cop" cliche is a cliche for a reason. That reason is that it works.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7mo ago
No. Rawls does not propose a statute of limitations on morality, but it is kind of silly of you to expect people to be familiar with his work more than two decades before it was published.
I don't have any specific action items at this time, but again I am trying to avoid publicly naming names. What I am trying to do is get you to understand that users like @FiveHourMarathon are not just pulling their conclusions out of their ass the way you seem to have implied and as such you should be engaging with them, rather than snidely dismissing them.
I am sure you do feel like your objections are legitimate and completely unlike the objections of everyone else
...And I am sure you feel completely justified in dismissing my objections out of hand. Please try to understand that I am trying to help here. If you genuinely want this place to be a "place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" you ought to be conscious of what I am trying to tell you. Again...
Whether you as a moderator believe that an exemption exists is only superficially relevant to whether such an exemption is perceived as existing.
Your objection seems to be that people are allowed to say things you don't like.
Is this not the fundamental nature of all objections? If I liked something (or otherwise thought it was a good thing) I wouldn't be objecting to it would I? I feel like the reasoning behind my objections warrant more consideration than you are currently giving it.
See my reply to @MayorofOysterville. Also, Rawls' Theory of Justice wasn't published until 1971, 26 years after Nazi Germany surrendered.
I have two objections.
First: Whether you as a moderator believe that an exemption exists is only superficially relevant to whether such an exemption is perceived as existing. Similar to the arguments that I used to get into with @ymeskhout about crime statistics and electioneering, whether or not a specific instance of tom-foolery would sway the result is a separate question issue from whether tom-foolery occurred. The fact is that there are a number of of somewhat prolific users here who have built a significant portion of their "brand identity" around a sneering contempt for the outgroup. Whether that outgroup it is Jews, Blacks, or MAGA is also only superficially relevant to the conversation.
For the record I would like to commend you for the pulling the trigger on @DaseindustriesLtd but the fact that his antics were tolerated for as long as they were is a big part of the problem. People notice that certain users (and I am trying to avoid publicly naming names but if you want me to I will DM you) seem to get treated with kid-gloves, they compare these users' treatment to that of prior luminaries, and they start to pattern match. One of the patterns that is easy to arrive at given the make up of both the forum and the moderation team is H1Bs looking out for other H1Bs, and that is where I feel like users like @KMC and @FiveHourMarathon are coming from.
Second: The issue as I see it is not whether or not people here were sympathetic to Charlie Kirk, or whether one or two people here said something dismissive. The issue is that dismissive comments were tolerated, or that if they did get moderated, it went un noticed. As I have said in prior posts on the subject I don't think it was Charles Sumner (the man in my profile pic) getting beaten half to death on the Senate Floor that undermined the norms against political violence and made the US Civil War inevitable. It was the fact that that "Moderates" from Sumner's own party (the Whigs) and his opponents in the Democratic party were seen as defending it. In an alternate history where Preston Brooks and Lawrence Keitt were immediately arrested and faced broad bi-partisan condemnation does a "backwoods radical" like Abraham Lincoln get elected? Does the question of "free states" vs "slave states" get resolved with more or less bloodshed than in our timeline? I don't know but I think it's worth considering.
I don't know if this qualifies as "a defense" but I have a lot of sympathy for W. My impression of him is that he was a fundamentally decent human being that was ultimately chewed up and spit out by world events and elements within his own party.
That said, I also have a fair bit of sympathy and respect for Cheney despite thinking he was wrong about everything.
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