Jiro
1yr ago
I specifically called out Scott in pointing out that the phrase "no evidence" is often a flat out lie.
Scott's response was that that can't be an example of the media lying because the example is too good and would actually prove that the media lies:
Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned.
I mean yeah. I chose a good example. Condemning the media is the whole point of using a good example.
Jiro
1yr ago
the heroine thinks she has a flaw because of this event
That's one of the prime characteristics of a Mary Sue. The author's not willing to create an actual flaw for the character, so it's "I blame myself for this thing I'm not responsible for", "I don't realize how awesome I am", "other people don't realize how awesome I am", etc.
Jiro
6mo ago
where it says that 3,208 Palestinian civilians have died from 2008 to 2020 (compared to 177 Israeli civilians over the same period),
That's the same thing I pointed out a couple of days ago. The fact that more Palestinians were killed doesn't mean that Israel has been more aggressive. It just means that that Israel's defenses work better. Counting deaths this way is a bizarre standard which implies that the more you successfully prevent people on your own side from getting killed, the more immoral you are.
Israel shouldn't lose points for preventing more Israelis from being killed and this making this comparison look bad.
The progressives are running scared.
This is (aside from the Title VII/IX parts) just a variation of "I'm feeling unsafe". Claiming to be scared is more effective at getting obedience and working up a mob than not claiming to be scared, so people do it. People also are able to work themselves into a frenzy and be sincerely scared, yet if being scared wasn't useful strategically, they would not have been that way.
I'm sure there were people in Nazi Germany who were genuinely scared of Jewish control of the world, as well as a contingent who claimed to be scared of Jews in order to have an excuse to hurt them.
Actually "running scared" would mean being scared enough to obey the right, not being scared enough to have an excuse to attack them in the same way they would anyway. You don't see people on the left saying "the right is so terrifiying that I advise not tearing down any statues because they'd beat us up (or even vote us out of office)" or "you'd better stop making movies with diverse casts, or the right will make your profits tank".
Jiro
20d ago
'Rich person flaunts the law, confident they will never face consequences' is not a very unique or interesting story. It's certainly not 'brave' or anything...
"Rich person flaunts the law" implies that the rich person gets away with crimes because they can retaliate using their wealth and connections. Rowling doesn't have judges or lobbyists on speed dial, and she's not going to contact her friends in the banking industry or the Mafia.
"Rich person flaunts the law because they have enough money to pay for a good defense, and because if something absurd happens to them, the public will see how absurd it is" is a noncentral example of a rich person flaunting the law and is more like the rich person not being railroaded than it is like a typical rich person flaunting the law.
Jiro
10mo ago
"Pride is just a celebration, like Polish festivals" is the motte. Few places have month long banners about the Polish festival, and failing to support a Polish festival rarely results in a penalty.
Go away. This is either another adequacy.org style troll, or a strawman.
And people, please stop responding seriously to it. The chance that he actually believes this is just about zero. The rhetoric is written to be maximally inflammatory, rather than to express a position. Anyone who actually thought evil needed to be destroyed wouldn't use negatively emotionally charged words like "genocide", "cancer", and destroying "heresy" to describe what he wants done.
It's like having someone argue in favor of abortion by saying "we should commence baby killing". Real abortion supporters wouldn't call it that.
Jiro
1yr ago
Going to that link reveals posts like "What you can do to help stop violence against women and girls", which looks as though EA is being ideologically captured. The post contains nonsensical talking points like "In several countries, violence against women is in the top 3-5 leading causes of death for young women aged between 15 and 29" (which 1) explicitly refuses to compare the numbers to men, 2) is more a reflection of how safe people in that age group are from other causes of death rather than how endangered they are by this one, and 3) even then doesn't say much--top 3-5? Really?)
Jiro
1yr ago
When the media said his grandfather was a Republican, I knew they were deceptive. If he was a Republican, they would have said it, because they don't like Republicans, so "his grandfather is a Republican" means that was the closest association they could find and he's not one. It was also suspicious that media reported that someone stopped him. How exactly? That information was absent from most news reports, so it was probably unflattering to the side the media likes.
Jiro
2mo ago
That is a mistake theory recommendation, and the Times isn't running on mistake theory.
Jiro
1yr ago
Consumers discriminate by price heavily in air travel because it's extremely hard to compare anything except price on more than a crude level. And a lot of that is because the airlines themselves have tried to deliberately obfuscate anything that you could compare airlines on.
Also, the government has regulated away some things that airlines could otherwise compete on. You can't get an airline without a TSA check.
Jiro
1yr ago
So far he’s dribbled them out piecemeal through journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter feed, which makes it easier for the media to claim they can’t report on documents because they can’t independently confirm them.
Dribbling out documents piecemeal is standard procedure. Your opponent doesn't know that you may produce a document tomorrow that contradicts some excuse he gives today, so it's harder for him to lie about it. (Although that doesn't work so well if he doesn't have to lie because the media buries the story and he doesn't need to say anything at all.)
Jiro
10mo ago
"Within a year" everyone got rid of Covid restrictions. That has nothing to do with the truckers.
Jiro
1yr ago
An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes.
"It's not the thing you are using as a scapegoat" inherently means blaming something else, but it's wrong to describe that as "suddenly concerned about".
If plagues were blamed on Jews poisoning the wells, and Jews said "wait a minute, bad sanitation by Christians is a better explanation", you wouldn't ask "why are Jews suddenly very concerned about Christian sanitation?"
Jiro
3mo ago
To anyone who says that my only beef with Freddie is that he won’t let me talk about this stuff in the comments of his articles about something unrelated, I would like here to reiterate: I have never complained about him forbidding people from bringing up trans issues in the comments of his articles, and completely respect his decision to ban people from doing so.
I think that's actually too charitable.
Replace "trans stuff" with some obviously negative thing like "misquoting sources". If Freddie decided "I won't let you post any comments about how I've misquoted sources", does he have a perfect right to do so? Of course. Can he be criticized for it? Sure he can. Yes, it's his blog and he decides what goes there. But it can simultaneously be something he has a right to decide, and bad judgment.
Congratulations! You’ve successfully invoked the Worst Argument in the World,
No, you haven't. If someone claims that everyone should be let out of jail, and you say "that means we'd let even murderers and rapists out of jail", they can't respond "that's the Worst Argument in the World, most prisoners in jail are in there for nonviolent crimes". You judge how bad the standard is by looking at the worst case, not at the average case.
While most transgendered people are not in cults, the left has no principled standards about how to distinguish between transgendered people in a cult, and everyone else. You're just not supposed to gatekeep at all, and the policy of not gatekeeping deserves to be judged by the worst cases that it enables, not the cases they would like you to think about.
Jiro
10mo ago
That might apply to some places. It doesn't apply to the hobby groups that are being discussed. You absolutely could participate in Battletech or video games without saying anything whatsoever about your private life.
Jiro
1yr ago
Firstly, for the average Democrat this is simply not an important issue. I
What's the average Democrat's response to Republicans' attempt to stop it? "Oh, that's not an important issue, go ahead, no I won't cancel you"? Maybe, but I suspect not.
Thanks. I try to be careful about specifying when I'm saying what I believe, steelmanning what some group or person on the left might say about the topic, or playing devil's advocate to stress-test a position.
Because a common dishonest tactic is to take a position that's an exaggerated version of your normal one as a test to see what you can get away with. Anything you can't get away with, you then label as a "joke" or "just getting you to think" or "playing devil's advocate". If you want to play devil's advocate, do it for a position that you don't directionally believe in. You've talked about steelmanning the opposition above, but a leftist playacting as a more extreme leftist isn't steelmanning the opposition.
Also, your "devil's advocate" position seems to contain flaws that are best explained by you sincerely believing in the position. For instance, someone taking a devil's advocate position wouldn't misrepresent Rowling's book--there's no incentive to be careless about something you don't really believe in. But a true believer has an incentive to be careless.
Jiro
1yr ago
if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".
There are as nasty or nastier things that leftists say about the right, which start at Russian spies and go at least up to "literally Hitler". It results in violence too. Do you react to the left for this, similarly to how you react to the right?
Jiro
9mo ago
Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you,
Yes, but it still can be criticized, because sometimes "my ideological enemies are building a weapon" amounts to "my ideological enemies get to fight fairly". Or to put it another way, the left is so used to privilege that equality looks like repression.
Movies and TV that are deliberately promoting some progressive bugaboo in an unfair way are too common for me to care that somehow, some conservative managed to do the same thing once.
It's unlikely the same person would just happen to sincerely post this and a bogus post about black body radiation and global warming, and about an ideal world, three totally unrelated subjects, except that posting something wrong is a sure way to stir the pot and get responses.
He's a troll. Please stop responding to him.
Jiro
1yr ago
A lot of the problem with NIMBYism is the hypocrisy. If you believe that it's a moral imperative to help the homeless, that people who don't like the homeless are evil, and that the homeless are pleasant people to live next to who don't cause problems anyway, then not wanting a homeless shelter in your backyard shows that you are being hypocritical and that your actions don't match the moral condemnation you are ready to hold over people's heads. That's very different from admitting that the homeless are smelly, rude, commit a lot of crime, and unworthy of respect and then not wanting a homeless shelter near you--of course you don't! You just explained why!
I won't say that this is a troll, since themotte has seen real people with such an opinion and it doesn't matter that someone is a new user when the entire site is new. On the other hand, this is certainly an inflammatory post without evidence, and doesn't belong here for that reason alone. Even though it does show some "evidence", the evidence is for something extremely narrow; the general claim
The answer is that excavations would be extremely hazardous to the false narrative that's been created and weaponized,
makes a very broad inflammatory claim that is not supported by the evidence provided, even if you were to assume it's true.
(And Nazis tend not to report evidence accurately anyway.)
Wizards of the Coast, who own Dungeons and Dragons, have been in the news lately because their OGL 1.1 was leaked. The OGL was an open source-like license, originally from 2000, which allowed people to create D&D-related works and which was supposed to not be revocable, as confirmed by its drafters. WOTC is trying to revoke it by using a clause referring to "authorized" versions of the license and claiming to have de-authorized the earlier license. The new replacement license requires giving 25% of your revenue to WOTC, makes you send a copy of your content to WOTC which they can then publish for free, and they can revoke it at any time making all your products instantly unsalable.
After backlash from fans, WOTC officially released a 1.2 license instead, which has similar problems, but worded a bit more subtly.
The culture war element comes from this clause:
I hope the problems with this are obvious to everyone here. I absolutely don't want a world where people with the wrong political beliefs can be barred from producing game materials. But every objection I've seen to this clause by fans has been a twenty Stalins objection: WOTC has produced discriminatory material in the past and can't be trusted to do this properly. There have been calls to have WOTC outsource this to an independent tribunal. Just, take it out because even people with unpopular opinions should be able to put them in games? No, nobody believes that.
(Links are trivial to google, but it's hard to find a site that has everything correct all at the same time, and is up to date as well, and also engages in trustworthy journalism in general. This EFF post at least covers part of the initial controversy, though you'll have to follow links to see what's in the license.)
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