fuckduck9000
2yr ago
What’s the problem with it though. In effect some uninformed voters voluntarily hand their preferred parties the power of their residual votes to use as they see fit, along with the main one. If the voter himself says : ‘I’ve seen all I wanted to see, go to the backroom’, it’s not really backroom politics.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Chacun à son goût.
Apparently this is a common quebecois saying? I think this phrase should die immediately, it’s a phonetical chimera.
Either go with :
“chacun a son goût” – each has his own taste
or:
“à chacun son goût” – to each his own taste
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I was having a conversation about admitting you were wrong, and I remembered this comment. Just wanted to say it was an absolute top-notch comment that considerably mollified my view, I didn’t know urban china was so rich. I didn’t answer at the time because I was waffling between just thanking you and counterarguing by going through sources etc, and obviously I didn’t get round to either. Anyway, thank you.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I'm pretty familiar with your style, it's pretty entertaining, so I tend to stop scrolling when your name pops up in the feed .
Thank you. I like your style too. I do think a bit of spice is more entertaining and “drives engagement”, aside from all the other benefits, like the pedagogic eviscerations described above.
But the truth is you're pretty antagonistic
Perhaps, compared to the median here, now. But we’re talking about a flock that started off exceptionnally tame, and was then shaved and sterilized (see darwin and all the others).
It's good to have the same standard for others as you do for yourself, but other people might not have that much of an issue admitting they're wrong.
But did you admit you were wrong on musk and the hassidim?
He would jump in with a bombastic claim, it would turn out he cannot back in literally any way, he would indeed back off, and then just do the same thing again in the future. People would have a lot more sympathy for him, if he wasn't acting like GPT prompted to defend progressivism no matter what.
I agree he did that, but those constant GPT/ Devil’s advocate comments, while not optimal, were still valuable. He defended his ideology as best he could. It was actually a good signal – you knew that if darwin retreated into total bullshit and random one-liners, progressives really had zero case on that issue. Like when a lawyer starts arguing against the death penalty instead of arguing the innocence of his client.
He has not been replaced by anyone. Sometimes our more-progressive posters will make arguments, and they’re usually of high quality and very polite and everything, but they cannot equal the sheer volume of progressive perspective/apologia darwin helpfully provided. For a sub so focused on condemning the woke, we really should grant them legal representation in every discussion.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
How is turkey going to succeed against greece and bulgaria where russia failed against ukraine, when they will get much more support, and presumably want to become turks even less than ukrainians want to become russians? Turkey’s military budget is 11 B (source) and greece 8 B, bulgaria 1B (This is a clue that bulgaria, contrary to greece, doesn’t think turkey is a threat to it). Given the budget ratio was 10-to-1 against ukraine, I will put turkey’s chances of conquering bulgaria and greece at approximately 0.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
The sport of Rock Climbing. As distinct from alpinism, where there's the idea that you go that far to get the view, There is nearly always an easier way to get to the top of whatever you're climbing.
Agree. But not with the distinction. Alpinists insisted on doing the North Face of every peak, and died in droves for it.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Is it vile to refuse help to your sworn enemy? Assuming they did help, would the world recognize, and palestinians be grateful for their generosity?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
We are far from the content-free insult comment you tried to pin on him at first. Your examples are not even 10% as bad as guesswho’s comment.
That isn't a counter-argument, but rather a flat dismissal (two flat dismissals, technically) of the argument presented. What does he think the difference is between government coercion and private business, and why is that difference significant?
It’s not good or original, but it is an argument. I can’t believe this discussion has logically arrived at a point where I’m supposed to make “Darwin’s 10 shittiest arguments ever” for him, which I am positive I am 100% opposed to.
“Well, I think it makes a rather big difference whether the state enforces censorship, or private persons. For one, no one gets put in jail. For two, the option is still there in theory. Obviously government censorship is far more absolute. And it would violate people’s right of self-association to force them to provide services to just anyone. If Jeff Bezos only wants to sell diverse literature, that is his inalienable right. ” Or something? I’m going to take a pass on the connection to communism, but I’m sure an argument can be made somehow.
A maximally-uncharitable summary, delivered with the standard indirection. A maximally-uncharitable description of the purported idea behind the essay. An actual, explicit argument this time, albeit one simply asserted with no specific evidence provided and no consideration of possible counter-arguments, delivered in an attitude of absolute certainty.
I gotta say, I find it extremely unfair of you not to quote the edit, which is far more conciliatory:
EDIT: Someone downpost suggested that I append a later post I made to my original post here, as they say it was much clearer in helping them understanding my position. It may be that the post above is jumping too many inferential gaps and not making my stance clear. Here's the later comment: I'm not claiming that this is Caplan's intent or exactly what he said, but I'm saying that it is the natural result of his ideas. These ideas are not new. They're fundamental to many of the types of respectability politics and assimilationist civil rights efforts that have always existed in the larger dialogue around these issues. They're not evil or stupid ideas, and maybe they're even not bad advice for the individual. But on a societal level, where these ideas always lead is a huge burden on the minorities and outsiders to do all the work of fitting in and trying not to bother anyone, with no burden or expectations on the majority because they're already dominant and seen as the resepctable, civilized default, so why would they change? And every time this is tried, no amount of integration or assimilation is ever good enough to be fully accepted, no amount of humility is ever enough to forever avoid offense, no amount of brotherhood ever erases prejudice and systematic discrimination. Respectable black people who minimize their identity and try to appease their white neighbors still find burning crosses on their lawns, employers still point at crime statistics and demographic IQ statistics and everything else to turn down minority applications, Trump still says 'I can't stand having black guys count my money.' No amount of appeasement is ever enough to stop these things from happening. And when they do happen, this type of thinking places the blame for that failure on the minorities who are being discriminated against, because they didn't do enough to fit in and appease, because they had the responsibility to shrink their identity in the first place, and I guess these attacks on them are evidence that they failed. It's a final and awful betrayal that excuses the real perpetrators and continues the cycle forever, generation after generation. I'm certainly not saying Caplan is in favor of the outcomes I just described, or that he's even aware of them. But we've been down the road with this type of thinking before, we know where it leads. The idea of 'pride' and identitraian politics is far from perfect, but it's trying to present an alternative to this endless cycle. We're all open to new suggestions about better ways we could be trying to make progress, but not to a suggestion that we try going back to the same old thing that was failing us before.
And even the non-edit part is just vigorous disagreement, there’s nothing wrong with it. Overuse on your part of ‘uncharitable’ . Darwin’s a progressive. Progressive views are uncharitable towards white males, reactionaries etc. So are anti-woke views towards them. He’s not obligated to pretend any random essay from his enemies must surely come from the best of intentions and make sense, and not pattern-match it to what his ideology tells him about those people.
Again, I don't expect you to agree that these examples are typical of his behavior.
That’s where you’re wrong , I agree this is fairly typical , he acted frequently in this manner. But it has nothing to do with what you originally defined his behaviour as. Guesswho’s behaviour is bad. Darwin’s behaviour is acceptable. Nothing but personalized insults towards another commenter, bad, argument that implies white males are terrible and reactionaries don’t know what they’re talking about, okay.
one commenter puts some effort into penetrating the fog, puts together an argument and provides specific claims: there is no empirical evidence to back the position Darwin is describing. Darwin's reply is "did you watch my video?". The poster says they haven't, but asks for a summary, or just the points Darwin thought were particularly relevant. Darwin declines to provide one
Well if 07mk doesn’t want to watch darwin’s video and darwin doesn’t want to watch the other video, I guess they just go home and call it a lame draw. This is not the decisive discovery of the dastardly deeds of darwin.
He is shaming. He is attempting to build consensus.
A consensus of one. A shaming contingent of one. This is not how those rules are meant to be used. They’re not there to protect the overwhelming, massively upvoted majority from one guy arguing against the current.
Nybbler calls him out explicitly, and is promptly warned by a mod. Darwin ignores him. That comment is worth its own discussion; I can see the mod's point, but I think if that comment is over the line, it shouldn't be over by much. Making solid, pointed predictions about verifiable reality is one of the more useful things here.
Well obviously, it’s a great comment. I’m not usually in favour of punitive mod decisions, if you hadn’t noticed. Except for that false flag nazi alt multitude.
He says maybe there's something there but not really, and then stops responding.
I don’t like your paraphrases, I would describe them as ‘maximally uncharitable’. “stops responding” cannot count as any sort of offense, I told you. He says this:
I'm sure there's something going on, but I think it's probably highschool kids being stupid on both sides of the debate, and maybe the judge punishing his ideological opponents, and I'm saying even if that's all true, the accusations that people are spinning out from it are no more valid than the accusations I could spin out if those guys on the street were shouting 'Maga country!'.
He has backpedaled considerably from the beginning, he no longer believes they were saying maga, or that his original interpretations had any validity. We are witnessing a man slowly changing his mind, and it’s beautiful.
The basic problem with any non-forced-anon forum is that conversations generate history between the participants, and sooner or later that history turns into bad blood and drama.
What a surprise, you’re pessimistic about this community, too? Yet, the one thing that we cannot say is that our values have drifted apart, right?
I don’t know, there isn’t any bad blood with anyone I argued with. From my end, anyway.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Have you argued for a position with very little support – honest inquiry, not a gotcha. I have, sometimes in here, and it’s an interesting dynamic. At first everything’s cool, but if you persist, the rudest part of the mob will accuse you of ignorance and stupidity, while the nicest will say you are obstinate and have ‘no interest in discussion’ . They progressively embolden each other and get annoyed by your refusal to admit “the obvious” until the knives really come out and you are declared a “troll”, a liar who can’t possibly believe anything so widely disbelieved. It seemed to me in those cases I was not wrong, they were.
But if I was wrong, then I guess it’s very difficult to recognize being wrong, and I have to absolve darwin. And if I was right, well then the mob knows nothing and I have to absolve darwin.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
then invariably ghosting whenever someone actually engaged with effort and good faith.
This isn't a thing. He would have to 'ghost' most people because each of his comments had like 6 replies. 10 comments deep, he would need ((6^10 )/24)/ 365 = 7000 years to respond to all.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I don’t think you understand the sheer elegance of the position. From the pov of some uninvolved party, it doesn’t matter who wins, it’s just about solving the problem. Coase theorem really. Just assign it to whoever holds it and defends it, no one has to do anything, and all aboard for the pareto optimum.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
My point is, anyone can get a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans if they just comment and stick around. Like yours truly. List just gets longer and longer. But whatever. I’ve made my peace with it, it’s like senescence, the inevitability of death.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Darwin was banned on the subreddit only after a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans.
yeah yeah I know how that goes :)
First they came for Darwin....
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Obviously I have a different perspective on what was usually happening. Anyone arguing in a hostile environment will appear more antagonistic than his best-behaved critics. Given his ideological distance to the sub, he was relatively polite. His worse critics should have been more charitable.
As to his refusal to admit he was wrong, though I accused him of bad faith for that myself once or twice, I now think it’s his business. I don’t judge him for lacking the grace to do what most of us almost never do, even when we are not facing the threats, mockery and vociferous demands of hostile ideological opponents.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Is it about whether that type of posting was bad
It's pretty bad.
or whether Darwin posted that way frequently
He did not post that way frequently.
assuming it was bad and he did do it frequently, he was still a good poster?
He did post that way occasionally ( against old enemies probably, after taking about 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles) but he was still a good poster.
So lets pull up some examples, kind of randomized.
Let’s go to darwin’s page , sort by controversial, motte/SSC comments.
1 : Arguing against a ban, I disagree with his line as always, but it’s reasonable. Productive conversation with amadan. Lower down people were already discussing darwin and whether he called people who doubted smollet’s story racist :
Links to 2
So while it's off the mark to directly call this sort of classic liberalism 'racist', the steelman accusation is that it has a tendency to favor the continuation of racist structures if such things just happen to already exist. And the corollary is that any public intellectual who talks about these issues should be aware of this tendency because this is a pretty basic and old critique. And the corollary to that is that the people who stridently ignore this problem and pretend it doesn't exist, are probably doing so for motivated reasons... which is where we come to the accusations of racism and the relevance of pointing out the demographics of the speaker.
Ok so this is the infamous smollett thread with the classic nybbler call-out. Aside from the fact that darwin’s wrong and proven wrong later, do you object to his behaviour in those threads? He presents standard progressive arguments at length, he’s civil. Well fine, the ‘It's called 'empathy.' -comment isn’t up to snuff, but he is being dogpiled, I think the occasional redditism can be excused.
3 : a modded comment
Scott still seems entirely correct to me?
Like, yeah, some minor public figures have their careers and lives disrupted by social power, but that's always been what social power is. Scott doesn't go home to Trump Tower because he was never that rich, but he does go back to whatever his job and level of income already was, as per the spirit of the hypothetical. And Elon Musk has far far more haters than Scott, but his wealth and power aren't affected at all. Social power can annoy a few individuals and cause damage to people who already had little structural power, but it can't do much to people with lots of structural power. As for which team's protestors gt treated better... are you just not watching the same videos I am of protestors getting tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, savagely beaten for no reason, abducted off the street by unmarked government agents acting outside their purview, etc. etc. etc.? Like, yeah, I get that a few murals have been allowed and not every protestor has been brutalized or imprisoned yet, but I have to say your characterization of the overall structural response seems just ludicrous to me.
Disagree with the modding. Darwin is clearly in a completely different info- and argument bubble than we are, ideally he should have provided the videos yes, but still it’s important to have his perspective, and some videos no doubt exist, he's not lying or inventing a narrative as nara says.
And so on.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Don’t ask me to side with a mob against a contrarian who won’t admit he’s wrong. Although he may have been wrong – he was most likely wrong – a mob forces the issue through social pressure and the weight of numbers (and ultimately in this case, mod force) , and that is not legitimate.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
As far as I know, Darwin isn't currently banned, and having spent years arguing with him, I'm pretty sure the above is his alt.
I did too, and playing @guesswho ? Is a waste of our time. This proxy accusation is ludicrous, if you want to criticize him, link him.
The real darwin was not charitable, but neither was he treated with appropriate charity by the sub. In the end he was confronted with every perceived wrong thing he ever said wherever he went, swarmed by a mob demanding he yield. He never gave an inch, but he was more than capable of making good arguments (although obviously he made some bad ones too) .
They were often arguments we could not make and had not seen before, at least a few notches above standard reddit dross. Sometimes he would chew up a careless right-winger who got ahead of himself, that’s why they hated him imo. Granted, he would not be particularly nice about it, like a ymeskout, SSCreader, Soriek or gdanning might be. But perhaps the greater abrasiveness was better for our epistemic hygiene. People should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Given his extensive participation in our sub, why do you have to pick an unknown alt as an example of his worst behaviour?
That alt reads more like impassionata to me. But no, that’s not very valuable. Although as you know, I’m pretty free speechy, so not being as valuable as darwin, and antagonizing people, is still not enough for a ban in my book.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
It’s a stain on our free speech record to have banned him. Even as a skilled devil’s advocate, if we assumed he never believed anything consistently, he was valuable.
I guess if he is literally at the conceiving phase he should push back. But realistically he isn’t and should cross that bridge when he gets to it. People believe a lot of dumb shit. You can’t draw a million red lines based on problems that might appear 15 years down the line (assuming you have not convinced her or pushed back at any point before that) and expect a normal romantic and social life.
That woman is going to determine how your kids grow up and see themselves.
So obviously you need a perfect specimen with entirely correct opinions on everything or your hypothetical kid’s lives will be ruined. Think of the children.
I don’t know why the internet social advice is always so manichean and unrealistic. It’s like the limited information forces a binary answer, and since the information is usually bad or else they wouldn’t have asked, there’s only one possible answer.
edit: maybe it's all status signaling, like those tinder profiles that go 'you need to be able handle me at my worst, make 16 million dollars a year, be 8 feet tall, etc'. I get it, you got options.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I think it’s important to just vocalize your opposition, perhaps more important than actively opposing. Protests are not effective because they harm a policy or regime, but because it lets other people know they oppose it. They already did, but now they know. Wrong policies thrive when the line is blurred between followers and supporters. They only remain in place if most people are assumed to be supporters, not followers. I think it’s completely counterproductive to act as a quiet supporter in public and turn into la resistance with the people you care about.
But again, maybe it's different people saying those things. Plus I’m really burnt out on the /r/relationships /r/AITA standard “dump him!” takes. Maybe we need less dumping, just people staying together, staying friends, not sacrificing another relationship on the altar of politics for some internet shrews.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Didn’t I tell you to take a covid test instead of blowing a friendship? I don’t understand the integrity instincts of the people on this board. I don’t know if it’s the same people, but on the one hand it seems that if they get an email at work telling them to give their pronouns, wear a rainbow shirt and post a blm flag, they won’t even say anything, and act like they’re living under stalin, while they appear ready to destroy all non-pecuniary relationships over some incredibly puny stuff.
They wouldn’t be caught dead protesting or sending a letter to a congressman, or getting into local politics to oppose some policy they abhor (the elites will do what they want anyway, democracy is a sham the state will destroy me like the truckers and blablabla) , but when their gf wants them to use a pronoun twice in their life, they really draw the line and will fight till the bitter end.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Both. She deserves most of the blame for pressing, but I don't think your intransigence benefits society . A break-up over this would only increase the political homogenity of couplings and friendships. Even if we completely ignore any personal benefits from your continuing relationship, I think it's more important to maintain an open society than to crush the they-them aspirations of the trans in private conversations with your gf.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I wonder if @coffee_enjoyer made the same mistake or if he had the cynicism to imply the intentional starving of slavs by germans was a hardship borne by the german people.
Not defending it in any way, more a data point in the stupid = evil argument, but I think nazi leaders really believed germans would starve if they did not secure arable land. I found TiK’s argument on shrinking markets really illuminating on this. I can’t believe anyone could do such a thing without an ‘either them or us’ frame.
Anyway, one more reason why I dislike pessimistic arguments - zero-sum, de-growth, peak resources, third world exploitation, starving proletariat, inevitable civil war, demographic collapse, climate & AI apocalypse type stuff – it gets easier to support horrible measures if you already think the future will be horrible. The cure is usually far worse than the disease.
My eyes quickly glaze over any trans discussion, but I think there’s less than a 1% chance of guesswho being darwin, and you can quote me on that. He’s an antagonistic progressive, he's got progressive stylistic ticks, that’s basically the extent of the similarity. Other arguments include: as you say, darwin was prolific, why would he even use an alt, and keep it secret, after he did leave that time he was banned, just to make a few random comments. It's not parsimonious.
He did get a lot of AAQC. So you'll have to concede these aren't his best arguments, at least.
There’s low-effort, and there’s content-free. Strictly low-effort posts are only really bad if they express a very common idea (for the sub), imo. As to ‘inflammatory’, it is just a function of a commenter’s ideological distance. We need to tolerate inflammation, as it is a key aspect of the body's immune defenses.
Disagree, he does endorse the interpretation partly with:
This is getting into way too many details of one argument. Our fundamental disagreement is whether his behaviour here is bad. What is the rule, applicable to all commenters, that he broke ? “The defendant made a short comment that implied a certain argument, but then later only partially endorsed it, and in further clarifications it became clear that he endorsed another argument more”
The fact that he is incorrect from our pov, that ‘the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it.’ is weak, is not for us to punish (through force).
You are using his own, extensive clarifications to catch him in a contradiction, when they put the lie to your other accusations, that he was just sniping, that he wasn’t engaging. Wouldn’t it be worse if he had not explained what he meant?
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