magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
No bio...
User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10hr ago
· Edited 9hr ago
You guys surely have mothers. Are you really going to say to them "Mom, you shouldn't have gone past high school and you should be glad Dad isn't fucking a 20 year old on the side because you need to appreciate that a man is willing to lead and rule you, you useless eater"?
I mean, I suspect my life might have gone a bit better had Mum not been able to divorce Dad, get full custody, and then beat me with a metal spoon, pour hot potatoes on me, and starve me without oversight*. Admittedly, Dad didn't use all the leverage he did have (on like twenty occasions she called him up saying "come and pick up [m9m], I don't want him anymore", and if he'd called her bluff my understanding is that she'd have had no recourse), and that's on him, but I don't think he understood exactly how bad things were (I, after all, didn't exactly have context for exactly how far out of line she was, and she'd mostly-convinced me I deserved it with her various misandrist rants**); had he been in the house, I think some more alarm bells would have gone off.
Now, I certainly wouldn't call Mum a "useless eater" - she met Dad through their jobs, and her job wasn't negative-sum activism - and Not All Women Are Like That, but I'm not sure she's the example you want to be using here. (More generally, you will find that bringing up the personal lives of X-ists is often going to blow up in your face; X-ists are X-ist for a reason and that reason frequently is "their personal lives legitimately behave as X-ism predicts".)
*The one time the police showed up, I was the one who got an hour-long lecture about how I was going to grow up into a wife-beater, although it's hard for me to blame them given that she wouldn't have shown a single sign of guilt - she was and is utterly convinced she was in the right - and due to how far she'd managed to twist me around I did.
**I specifically remember her teaching me that the Y chromosome was a genetic defect.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
America is imbalanced, there are no major power bases outside the central government.
There's a rather-large "unless" attached to that, which is "unless there is serious doubt about who the government is". A constitutional crisis in which multiple people claim with significant validity to be the President (e.g. if Kamala Harris had refused to count electoral votes for Donald Trump on the grounds that he was barred by the Fourteenth Amendment, and declared herself the new President), or in which there's a "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!" could cause both sides to think they had the bulk of the military behind them.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
The word "argument-free" is critical here. Scott:
For a mistake theorist, passion is inadequate or even suspect. Wrong people can be just as loud as right people, sometimes louder. If two doctors are debating the right diagnosis in a difficult case, and the patient’s crazy aunt hires someone to shout “IT’S LUPUS!” really loud in front of their office all day, that’s not exactly helping matters. If a group of pro-lupus protesters block the entry to the hospital and refuse to let any of the staff in until the doctors agree to diagnose lupus, that’s a disaster. All that passion does is use pressure or even threats to introduce bias into the important work of debate and analysis.
In a democracy, at least in theory and usually at least partially in practice, those with the franchise are rulers; they decide what policy is best for the country. However, policy of a modern nation is fairly complex, and needs to be carefully tailored in order to function well; we can outsource some of this to politicians and the civil service, but not all. Ruling based on bellyfeel - System 1 - would quickly doom us all, because System 1 is very old (it's mostly hardwired, and evolution is slow) and thus its conclusions are in many places out of step with correct actions of a modern state.
Attacking claims about policy based on bellyfeel rather than reasoned argument is moderately-strong evidence that one adopts views based on bellyfeel rather than reason, which thus implies that one's a poor ruler. This is the "rap" that Skeletor mentions as being put forward by the most extreme of anti-feminists: if women are all emotional rather than rational, they are systematically poor rulers, and they shouldn't be rulers i.e. women's suffrage was a mistake.
I am not convinced of the premise there. At the very least, as even Dave Sim notes in his infamous essay*, the bell curves overlap; there are certainly some women who are more rational than some men. But this is why the accusation's being treated with such gravity; the "women are irrational bellyfeelers" => "women's suffrage was a mistake" implication is well-known and commonly accepted in the Ratsphere (especially the right-leaning half of it), which makes the truth or falsity of the premise direly important.
*I don't really recommend said essay; it's an example of what I call the Capitalised Important Concept Rant, which is how psychotic people tend to write essays (and indeed, it's known he was mentally ill at the time). If you enjoy CICRs, or want to see a good example of what they look like, there's a copy archived here (skip down to "Writings from "Reads""). Note that I still don't agree with all of it even after disregarding the obvious layer of crazy paint.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Given that it's not really possible for every generation to be worse than the preceding one and to have a functional civilization, this complaint should be taken with a few pounds of salt.
-
It is true that this trend is obviously inconsistent with a civilisation that remains functional indefinitely. However, Western civilisation has not remained functional indefinitely. It has remained functional during current trends for ~75 years (NB: the 1950 date I'm using here seems to be relatively bipartisan and static; SJers and their foes both seem to talk about the 50s as the paradigm current trends have moved away from, despite their diametrically-opposed views on the value of that paradigm and the trends since, and haven't started talking about the 70s instead as time has gone on). It is possible that the trend is slow enough that the chickens merely haven't come home to roost yet; "there's a lot of ruin in a nation". Indeed, most of the people pushing this claim at any given time are specifically worried that we might stop having a functional civilisation at some point, and this is something that has happened before albeit rarely (e.g. the Fall of Rome, the collapse of Qing China into warlordism).
-
I can't help but notice that the USA and significant chunks of Western Europe are not in a good way at the moment. Germany's been talking for a while about banning the party that is now #1 in their polls. The USA has significant groups of people on both sides of the political aisle who literally support murdering their political opposition (citations: this board, and the Blue Tribe Internet following Charlie Kirk). Suicide is a non-negligible cause of death. We have cost disease, one of the causes of which is regulatory sclerosis of productive activity. The USA can't pass laws much anymore, to the point that it's become standard for the President to govern by executive order. It would seem that our civilisation is indeed somewhat less functional (at a nuts-and-bolts level) than it was 75 years ago, which is not in contradiction with the hypothesis you're attacking.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
Yeah, should have included it (I am a member, and all that), but it is a bit less active than here IIRC.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
11d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Arguing with leftist is impossible because they pretend not to know things.
I suspect that a lot of what you interpret as "pretending not to know things" is "not knowing things" - and that latter in the profound sense, the sense of not really grokking that a physical reality exists independent of the narrative and social games - living on simulacrum level 3 or even 4. Some of it is also "not knowing things" in the less-profound sense of "not knowing these specific things due to insufficient brainpower/attention to derive them from first principles (NB: Zoomer attention is scarce due to smartphones/social media) and due to a total lack of paths for others to feed the person the correct answers due to censorship".
And, of course, some of it's just a mistake on your part, as you admitted to here (good job there), and some of it (though relatively-little) hits the mark.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
11d ago
Scott Alexander was wrong. The natural end state of liberal discourse is not "seven zillion Witches and three Principled Libertarians" it is "seven zillion Witches and zero Principled Libertarians" because all the libertarians have been shouted down, driven off, or banned, for refusing to compromise on one point or another.
Scott said that the natural end-state of free-speech alternatives to captured discourse venues was "approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches". He didn't say that this was the natural end-state of those captured discourse venues themselves, and almost certainly doesn't believe it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
11d ago
A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side.
You know that most of the reason the Near East hates the West is because of us propping up Israel, right? Western protection of Israel was explicitly cited as a motive for both September 11 and the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea.
And it's not even like all Jews support Israel!
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17d ago
MAGA did win the popular vote, but not an absolute majority of Americans (I don't think that that's ever happened; turnout and the existence of children make it really, really hard) or even an absolute majority of Americans who voted (he got 49.8%, significantly more than Harris but not quite an absolute majority).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17d ago
· Edited 14d ago
QQ used to have politics discussion before, well, they banned politics back in 2017. It was not an echo chamber. It wasn't the most civil place, but there was actual discussion going on. But, as noted, it's over now. QQ still has people of most political persuasions (some SJWs, a lot of real liberals, a few alt-right; essentially-no true conservatives for the obvious reason); they just don't talk about politics. (Well, sort of. I keep getting away with it because I'm polite enough and moderate enough to frequently be a calming force, because I'm erudite enough to be able to avoid saying the magic "political" words while still getting my point across, and because I know when to take things to PMs; however, even I've gotten close to the fire on occasion and I don't recommend trying to pull that off.)
I did only say "used to be this". DWW's dead (as in, offline), QQ doesn't allow politics, and SB/SV/[whatever Jackie/Ritterin Sophia's board is currently called] don't allow moderates or rightists (NB: don't touch that last one with your real IP; Jackie's a doxxer). I suppose I forgot about Frozen in Carbonite, but I don't know much about it (there is similarly the slight issue that the admin, Horton, is known for black-hat hacking and acted like a man with a candy van when trying to get people to join up).
EDIT: Oh, and THASF/Train Dodger (the owner of DWW) wasn't a jerk. He was a little schizophrenic, and then a lot schizophrenic when COVID hit, but he was never an arsehole that I remember. Yeah, technically he's banned on the big three, but two of those were self-requested and the third was because of the aforementioned psychotic break (he refused to stop posting his Big Folder About COVID everywhere - this being the folder that popularised hydroxychloroquine, no I am not kidding - and so the QQ mods permabanned him).
EDIT2:
The most progressive posters, mainly those who were fans of a censorious power mod (who in my view did deserve to be fired, but the firing process was arbitrary and incompetent), schismed off to their own website.
Most of them came back to SB and maintained dual accounts after The Observer resigned. Of course, that very capitulation did eventually lead to the PM scandal and third exodus, which is part of why I blamed SJ's tactics for that.
Incidentally: the first to flounce off SB during the Athene Affair was, um, me. SV would have happened without me, of course (Squishy and Ford had been cooking it up for months without my knowledge; they just went public early to capitalise), and I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't had massive existing issues with The Observer and some of the mods, but that was still not a great decision on my part; I'll cop to that.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17d ago
I mean, those effects were involved in the SB/Sietch breakup, although significant chunks of it were just SJ pulling the standard entryism+inevitability playbook that it was playing for the entire decade. QQ and DWW, though, died as politics venues for unrelated reasons, and SV/SB mostly retained a common userbase rather than siloing happening (of course, now SV's dying; never mind QQ eclipsing it, its post rate is outright going backwards at a significant rate).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17d ago
So tell me, bud, where are the other places I could go to share opinions and maybe express skepticism about whether or not trans women are really truly heckin' 100% biological women, even though I by no means hate them or want them killed or put in camps or forcibly detransitioned?
Some parts of the SpaceBattles diaspora used to be this (most notably Digital Wild West and Questionable Questing), but DWW's dead (its owner had a psychotic break) and QQ banned politics. I think The Sietch is roughly similar to here in outlook, although I haven't actually joined due to being satisfied with ACX/here.
Speaking of which, the ACX comments still do exist, although Substack's UI is hilariously inferior.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17d ago
It’s clear to me now that the time for talking is over, and that there can be no further productive use for sticking around and trying to bridge the ever-widening divide in realities between “woke” America and “antiwoke” America.
There are actually a lot of people in the middle here. I'd largely consider myself one; I'm often grudgingly willing to ally with the conservatives against the progressives (particularly since said conservatives are weaker here in Oz), but as an erotic fanfic writer I know I'm not exactly their favourite person either.
It would be nice to keep more diversity here - real diversity, that is, diversity of opinion. It has been noted to me that theMotte is not feeding me an especially-accurate view of "the left", and you could help with that.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
18d ago
mathematicians might need people to demonstrate 1 + 1 = 2
No, we usually don't. Outside of weird cases like ordinals, 2 is defined as "1 + 1".
We do need people to demonstrate that 2 + 2 = 4, though (as 4 is defined as "3 + 1"), and that 1 > 0 (I literally had to prove that for a homework assignment).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
19d ago
I remember back in 2015-16 when I hung out on a rapidly-radicalising SJ board, "Agent Orange" was used a fair bit. Of course, some of the members kept switching codes, IIRC because they were worried search spiders would include them in searches for "Trump" and thus display him as being talked about a lot.
(I mean, I can barely talk on the latter front; there are certainly things I try not to call attention to, although I don't play the You-Know-Who game.)
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
19d ago
I mean, certainly there exists some amount of funding at which you've got to say "you are not giving us enough funding to have enough public defenders actually live in the Bay Area to deal with this caseload; if you don't give us more, you're not fulfilling your constitutional duties because N lawyers cannot actually defend 300N cases at a time".
Whether SF's caseload is actually at that point, I have no idea.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
21d ago
This is, yet again, plain defiance of higher court rulings.
I'm curious: does SCOTUS have the power to find lower courts who ignore its rulings (e.g. lower court does X, SCOTUS on appeal says they can't do X and remands for consistent proceedings, lower court does X again) in contempt?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
22d ago
· Edited 22d ago
(It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects, but perhaps those women are more masculine?)
To give an example of some of the stuff @TitaniumButterfly is talking about, here's the way the tertiary entrance rank worked in Victoria (where I live) when I was in year 12 (back in the oughties!).
You do four or more subjects, and get a score of 0-50 for each. Languages other than English (LotEs) get a +5 to their score; uni-level subjects get a +5 to their score. Then you add up your top four subjects' scores, and add on 10% of your fifth- and sixth-highest scores. So far, so good.
Except that English is required to be counted as one of your best four, and LotEs can count as one of the top four (and you can do more than one, for a theoretical maximum of +16) while uni-level subjects can't (and you can only do one of them, for a theoretical maximum of +0.5).
Guess what sex does better at English and other languages (my score for English was 15 points lower than the worst of my other six subjects*). Guess what sex is more likely to be doing uni-level science in year 12 (I'd have done two - physics and maths - if I could). Girls' best subjects are prioritised over boys' when calculating the TER, which means yes, you will wind up with more girls than boys qualifying for competitive uni positions, including science courses which have nothing to do with year 12 English (i.e. writing essays about Hamlet or the linguistic differences of Aboriginal English) or LotEs. This is not meritocracy - not, at least, when talking about sex disparities.
*Actually, I'm like 70-80% sure that I failed English outright (which doesn't count as a score at all, and means you can't graduate), but my English teacher fudged the paperwork. Not that it wasn't justified after the complete trainwreck my life was at that point, but this demonstrates even further how wide the gulf was between that and my other subjects.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
22d ago
· Edited 22d ago
Yeah, what ToaKraka said. It's highly unlikely Amadan would lie about that, after all.
I didn't peg TM as being Hlynka, although I did openly accuse him of bad faith. (The middle paragraph of this was also regarding Hlynka-as-TM; I didn't name him because that's implicit extreme antagonism, but he's banned and a confirmed semi-troll now, so eh.)
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
22d ago
(does that ever happen?)
TequilaMockingbird admitted being Hlynka, apparently.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23d ago
Yeah, but @justawoman isn't actually banned - and has indeed briefly left her self-imposed exile to praise MKC before. She has no need of an alt that's still obviously her.
The only reason to make an obviously-JaW alt would be if one didn't actually have JaW's password, which might be JaW if she forgot it, but could also be an impostor.
In any case, I've just tagged the original, so now we might get a clarification. Or not.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23d ago
· Edited 22d ago
You have a tendency to sling gotchas and ad hominems, which is bad for the place not being a giant yelling match.
Examples: 1 2 3 4 5 6 - NB: in some of those cases I'm not so much getting at the linked post as your followups.
You do seem to be doing it a bit less since your (apparently voluntary?) sabbatical, though, which I hadn't noticed, so good job there. I was probably also getting a somewhat-worse view of you than justified due to most (all?) of our interactions being in those threads; sorry.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23d ago
While obesity rates are similar, general overweightness is, you guessed it, skewed quite a bit more towards men.
Except "overweightness" was badly defined decades ago (and not fixed because of the growing inertia of Western society) such that the "overweight" range is the lowest all-cause mortality range (the elevated cardiovascular risk is more than compensated by reduced infection risk; in the "healthy" range your body is still skimping on the immune system to save calories). I'm in that range (BMI 27.2) as a result of a high-calorie diet, and before you accuse me of making excuses for base urges, I am literally anorexic and was dangerously underweight (I think my BMI was about 15) until I deliberately ate my way up into the "overweight" range on medical advice. I will brook no claims that this is the result of poor impulse control.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
24d ago
TBH, I'm more annoyed with @magicalkittycat than I remember being with Darwin.
And MKC's pattern is not an unusual one. There are lots of midwits who think posting sneering gotchas is the height of art. Look at XKCD. Hell, I used to kinda be one due to hanging around with them too much.
So no, I don't think MKC's Darwin, but he/she is certainly causing issues, and that's a problem by itself.
Honestly, for most of my childhood, she wasn't really awful; she always had a violent temper, but there were only about 3 years of my home life being truly hell (from when I hit puberty and her misandry started applying to me personally, to when I ran away from her).
More options
Context Copy link