magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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9hr ago
· Edited 9hr 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
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14hr 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
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15hr 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
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15hr 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
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1d 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
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2d 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
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2d 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
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4d 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
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5d ago
· Edited 5d 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
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5d ago
· Edited 5d 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
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5d ago
(does that ever happen?)
TequilaMockingbird admitted being Hlynka, apparently.
magic9mushroom
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6d 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
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6d ago
· Edited 5d 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
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6d 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
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7d 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.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
Having rewatched the whole scene:
you'd have to have a pretty warped view of the plot to think that the Munchkins were signaling their support of random vigilante killings
Glinda says that Dorothy is the Munchkins' "national heroine" before Dorothy gets around to explaining that she didn't mean to drop a house on the WWotE, and then there are the lines "we thank you very sweetly for doing it so neatly; you've killed her so completely that we thank you very sweetly". So yes, they were, in fact, signalling their support of assassinating* the WWotE. The WWotE is one of the few circumstances in which that is (presumably) Fine Actually because she was a witch tyrant. I think this is just a complete non-example of the point you were trying to make, which doesn't in and of itself mean the point is wrong but does make it not especially useful to bring up.
I do think I'd be mostly behind the "don't celebrate deaths unless you'd have supported bringing them about" principle of etiquette. The case you mention is really a non-central case born out of highly non-consequential edicts, and even then it's considered pretty gauche to publically celebrate.
*I'm not using the term "vigilante" because we don't generally consider killing monarchs to be "vigilantism"; the monarch is the state, not a criminal, so killing her is war or rebellion (and, of course, assassination).
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Episode I was almost entirely a waste: it introduces Padme and Anakin, and shows Palpatine gaining power. Nothing else in that movie was important for later films.
There are a couple of other little bits - starting Anakin's apprenticeship under an inauspicious star, with him too old and Obi-Wan barely even a Jedi, and showing that this is The Old Republic and things are expected to End Well. The second of those is very important, and is the big obstacle to any attempt to integrate TPM more closely into the prequels. You could extend the romance, and possibly even some of Anakin's time as a Padawan, into TPM, but the main plot mostly has to be standalone because it has to End Well.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Imagine that someone you really hated was randomly struck down by a freak bolt of lightning. Wouldn't you be pretty giddy? And if someone tried to argue that this made you just as bad as if you were advocating for that guy's murder, wouldn't that seem pretty unfair? Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard of Oz is the canonical anthem for celebrating this sort of "such-and-such celebrity you hate has randomly died" breaking news, and you'd have to have a pretty warped view of the plot to think that the Munchkins were signaling their support of random vigilante killings. Whether out of cowardice or morality, none of them would have been willing to drop a house on the Wicked Witch - that's why it took a freak tornado before they were freed from her tyranny. It just happened. But once it does happen, celebrating this happy turn of events is perfectly wholesome.
I have spent some time thinking about this, and I think I see some very obvious distinctions aside from the "murdered vs. accident" issue.
-
The Wicked Witch of the East had actual power over the Munchkins. She was a tyrant who ruled them and (if remotely comparable to the Wicked Witch of the West) killed and tortured them on a whim. Charlie Kirk had no actual power. He wasn't a government official, let alone a ruler.
-
The Wicked Witch of the East's power could only be removed by killing her. There's no political procedure for "getting rid of the witch who fireballs people who disagree with her". Hell, even her ruby slippers specifically only come off once she's dead.
So if Donald Trump pulled a Palpatine and declared himself Emperor, and somehow this didn't result in him simply getting arrested but the US straight-up becoming an empire... then, yes, it would be wholesome to celebrate if he got shot dead. Sic semper tyrannis, and all that. But that's separated by bright lines from the Kirk assassination.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
I haven't read the novelisations (I hear the RotS one is actually considerably better than the movie), but the movie exchange goes:
Obi-Wan: I have failed you, Anakin. I have failed you.
Anakin: I should have known the Jedi were plotting to take over!
Obi-Wan: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!
Anakin: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!
Obi-Wan: Well then, you are lost!
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
"Nazi" might be diluted as an insult, but it's not diluted as an ideology.
This isn't quite true. Jew-exclusionary white supremacists are universally called, and often own, the label "Nazi" whether or not they're fascists.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
However, in its current form it does not actually have (although it might claim that it does) fascism's profoundly revolutionary ethos.
TBH, they've kinda already pulled off the revolution and successfully brainwashed the populace. There's no requirement in fascism to continually revamp society after you've turned it into a beehive, the way that SJ lionises activism as a lifestyle and has thus had massive scope creep and a degree of cargo-cult activism untethered from any plausible theory of change.
There's the goal of fighting outsiders, but, uh, they're pursuing that.
Agreed on the rest.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
Yeah, I probably should have included "and six-foundationers were winding up raised Marxist and/or hippie liberal and tried to extend these to fill in the missing foundations".
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
The bailey may be true - you'd have to defend it
I mean, there's this obvious pattern where if you look at the SJ and traditional positions on most cultural issues, the (actual) Marxist position is right in the middle. How did I put it?
Tradition: "Men should be in charge of women", Marxism: "Sex divisions are a distraction and should be ignored", SJ: "Women should be in charge of men".
Tradition: "The white man is the best man", Marxism: "Racial divisions are a distraction from class struggle; be colourblind", SJ: "Whites suck".
Tradition: "White culture is scientifically superior to natives' primitive culture and we should raze the latter", Marxism: "All cultures suck and we should make a new, constructed culture designed by science", SJ: "Indigenous ways of knowing are just as valid as science; traditional Western culture should be razed".
And as others have noted, there is a direct line of descent. The obvious culprit would be the Marxist academic community attempting to out-Marx itself on cultural issues (having adopted a virtue axis of "Marxism good, tradition bad").
You are of course correct that this interesting historical tangent is not dispositive of the question "is SJ good or bad?". Merits are merits; descent is descent.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
Stanislav Petrov and Stanislav Petrov alone prevented nuclear war.
No, that's not understanding it correctly. Petrov reporting what he saw faithfully wouldn't necessarily have resulted in nuclear war; it was the Soviet leadership's job to decide whether to launch on that information and it's entirely plausible that they wouldn't have.
Vasily Arhkipov is an obvious but-for case, but not Stanislav Petrov.
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).
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