naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
You are so deluded it would be comical if your ideologies weren't so dangerous.
More light, less heat, please.
This NYTimes article proves once again that we should not trust Israel’s assessments or American intelligence assessments on Israel.
This language falls on the wrong side of the "consensus building" line. Speculative analysis by an American news organization (or Twitter randos, or known terrorist sympathizers, or...) may or may not be more reliable than official reports from American or Israeli governments; you and others are free to make the argument either way. But this NYT article does not appear to prove anything, must less prove anything that has already been proven (i.e. "once again"). While you do not actually write the words "everyone knows," you do not present the matter as open to discussion, instead treating certain matters as clearly settled. Your engagement on the topic (which is rapidly approaching "single issue poster" status) does not communicate any willingness to entertain the possibility that you might be wrong. Rather, your rhetoric here looks like an attempt to build a consensus about what "we" should think on a question that is open (and may, given the circumstances, forever remain open). That is a way of waging the culture wars instead of discussing them, and is against the rules here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
This seems like a "debunking" with real "We Did It Reddit!" energy. The video I've seen of the actual crater does not appear in any plausible way the result of an "airstrike."
Both the misfire hypothesis & the airstrike hypothesis hold equal weight.
This strikes me as complete FUD. Every claim I've seen suggesting this was anything other than Hamas weaponry (whether as a false flag or just incompetence, who knows) appears primarily based on "but I want it to have been Israel, so let's imagine the possibilities, shall we?"
The American Press are stenographers for terrorists is a much more parsimonious response to this particular series of events.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
There seem to always be a reaction like this that presumes the only relevant question is the cause of the overrepresentation rather than the meaning or impact of the overrepresentation.
No, this is definitely not what I'm getting at.
There is goig to be a certain impact of this Clark Kent dual-identity when so much policy is controlled by people who identify this way.
I certainly don't deny that!
But "Clark Kent dual-identity" is the fruit of identity politics across the West, and everyone is playing the game. As far as I can tell, Pete Buttigieg has a federal sinecure because he likes to have sex with men; he certainly didn't have any of the experience I would expect a Secretary of Transportation to have, and if he wasn't gay I doubt he would ever have been more than a mayor, and maybe not even that. Sometimes when I say this, people tell me I'm not being fair, but like... here's an interview with the Secretary of Transportation from this past summer, where the bulk of the content is about gay stuff, and Buttigieg's actually job only comes up in connection with criticism of DeSantis. Or in connection with race, consider Kamala Harris, or Ketanji Brown Jackson, or Sonia Sotomayor. These are women who revel in not rising above their identities, but in sinking into them, doing their jobs not for the good of America generally but for the good of their racial in-group.
I think this is bad, but I also think it is dishonest to pretend, or imply, that Jewish people somehow have a corner on the phenomenon.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
A number of users have reported this as "antagonistic" and I rather see their point. We've talked about your trolling before, and while I can appreciate its artfulness, even gentle sneering constitutes objectionable disdain.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. Or, if you prefer--you're not venturing into the lion's den, you're just another lion. I don't know if you and I have had this particular discussion before, but I've had it with many others: I will always enforce the rules more strictly when the target of criticism is this space and the people in it. That doesn't mean we can't be self-effacing and self-critical, but it does mean that such posts require maximum charity and effort. This post doesn't really cut it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Quit your lying.
I have not said anything known to me to be untrue, and I find this level of antagonism as surprising as it is unwarranted.
There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Oman? I invite you to substantiate this assertion further. And it's not like Israel's doing great at this either.
Oman? This Oman? I see no indication that their country qualifies as a counterexample.
As for Israel, I have nothing to say in defense of Israel's own errors. That they are the sole liberal democracy in the Middle East is not an assertion that they are perfect, or even that they are good. I find none of this relevant to any of the statements I made in my previous post. I think @Pasha makes an interesting counterclaim that the 20% Arab population of Israel is being deliberately limited to that in order to preserve the Jewish state, that seems plausible to me. But it is still substantially more tolerant of Arabs and Muslims, than any sharia-oriented country is of Jews. You mentioned Oman, the first sentence of this Wikipedia page is worth chewing on:
There was a Jewish presence in Oman for many centuries, however, the Jewish community of the country is no longer in existence.
Anyway, I think maybe you've confused me for someone else, or something, because most of what you've written here is entirely beside the point. I am not pro-Israel in any meaningful sense of the words. But I am very, very anti-Hamas, to say nothing of their bloodthirsty paymasters.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
OP is low effort and many of these responses illustrate why we moderate against that sort of thing. "Pride now is just authoritarian mind control" may even be true, but how would anyone become more informed about that possibility by reading your comment? You're signalling a view without elaborating on the details; you're participating in a conversation without actually contributing anything of substance to it. Please post with more effort than this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
A week? That's ridiculous, it wasn't even a swear word.
What fucking difference would that make? It's not the words you use, here--it's how you use them.
I think you banned him because you know he is one of the few motters who could and would eloquently and persuasively defend that position.
I think I temp-banned him because next time I want him to lead with the eloquence and persuasiveness you seem to think he has at his disposal. I have quite had my fill of people getting moderated and then responding to me with eloquence and persuasiveness--or at least, with the evidence and effort they declined to furnish in the first place.
I want people to do that before they get moderated, and if they fail to do that often enough, then they're going to eat a ban. That's how this works--as you well know.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
conservatives still mindlessly repeat
But
There are literally millions of people on either side of every major conflict, and finding that one of them is doing something wrong or thoughtless proves nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
So please don't drop low-effort group smears.
That is pretty rich coming from someone who refuses to own up to the fact that he erroneously said that 303 Creative is a religious freedom in commerce case.
I did explain, already, that my phrasing there was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek inversion on the many people erroneously insisting (often, in news headlines) that this is an "LGBT rights" case, since of course the jurisprudence on suspect classifications is, let's say, 95% separate from the jurisprudence on Free Speech. Sorry you didn't feel that was sufficient "owning up."
I don't really understand why you're being such a sourpuss about this. I really tried to keep it light when I noticed your initial response, in which you classically ignored any point of interesting substance in favor of seeking boring nits to pick out of some misguided sense of tribal enmity. You always, always make me regret talking to you, in ways that have nothing to do with the substance of our disagreements, and I don't know what to do about that. Often you're pretty good at correcting the ways that people sometimes apply distorted interpretation to various facts, but you seem totally unwilling or unable to apply that ability to your own arguments, or indeed the arguments of anyone you perceive to be your ingroup.
But, if makes you happy, instead of saying that they are "completely different issues with completely different jurisprudences", perhaps I should have said that they are 99% different. Or even 95% different.
Cool cool. Glad we could reach some accord on your error.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
I'm not going to dig up the post where you made this "joke," but one way to follow the rule requiring charitable interpretation is to take people seriously even when you're unsure about them.
I'm not going to dig up whatever post it was where you did this, but if I see you doing it, I'm going to moderate you for not speaking plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
If other people are racist against me how does it help me to unilaterally stop being racist against them?
Being racist mostly imposes costs on you. Not being racist is better for you. If other people are racist against you, they are assuming costs they need not pay. (This is a standard argument re: the fictitious "women's pay gap." If women actually accepted less money to do the same work, then non-sexist companies would out-compete by hiring less-expensive female employees instead of more-expensive male employees. The same is true of racism; if you're a racist company, you're leaving money on the table.)
We already tried the race blind thing and every group except white people kept relentlessly advocating for their racial interests.
We still mostly do the race blind thing. It mostly works fine. The people relentless advocating for their racial interests (whether they are white, black, or otherwise) need to be told, as clearly and repeatedly as possible, that they are wrong.
South Africa tried the same thing with identical results.
No, South Africa is a disaster today because black identitarianism was allowed to overwhelm a liberal status quo that was actually working to everyone's benefit, for a little while.
No truce is possible because the other side will shoot you in the face the instant you lay down your gun.
I'm not saying we should surrender to the identitarians on the left. Of course not! I am very critical of leftist identitarians. But in this thread I am saying that surrendering to the identitarians on the right is in the end the same basic mistake.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure I see your point. The plaintiffs in Lawrence had a harm to bring a case over: they really were charged with sodomy.
To the extent that I have a point at all, it's that the jurisprudence of homosexuality--and perhaps, we might infer, many other things--is substantially fictive. I think many people are suspicious of forum shopping, fewer are aware of plaintiff shopping but people do seem to be a bit suspicious of that, too. Most people are aware of civil disobedience, though, and don't necessarily think of it as problematic, even though it does involve ginning up a case rather than addressing the law from a position of organic (so to speak) social interaction. I do think CNN's "just asking questions" article is too coy by half, but as I noted in another reply, I don't have any serious objections to how these cases turned out. Just--if you're (the general you, not you personally) going to raise doubts about one SCOTUS case based on its loose connection to real events, you might not like where that leads (or, more likely, you're just engaged in isolated demands for rigor).
That seems different from the claim that no gay marriage website was ever ordered, so the whole case was actually about a hypothetical harm
While I don't think SCOTUS mentioned the "chilling effects" doctrine in 303 Creative, the Court has long recognized that the law does actual, rather than hypothetical, harm in cases where the law is clearly intended to "eliminate disfavored ideas" (p. 25).
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Everything past that is sophomoric mental masturbation.
Maybe, but you haven't added enough light to the conversation to justify the heat you're bringing. Assume for the sake of argument that the objectively correct response to transsexual choices, behavior, or advocacy is mockery: here at the Motte, you can argue that this is so but you are not permitted to actually deploy the mockery. You can say "we should call freaks freaks" but you cannot nakedly assert "these people are freaks." I assume that people find it challenging to walk that line since almost everyone I know, here and elsewhere, is really quite bad at it. But it is the line that has been drawn around this space so you need to adhere to it here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I guess you just want to play childish games.
No: I want you to stop pouring your disdain on this community, and I'm quite serious about that. It's one thing to raise legitimate criticism in a charitable and effortful way. It is something else entirely to go about darkly hinting that mere racism rather than legitimate reason is at the heart of any group's political concerns, but especially the group you're directly talking to, of which you are a part.
And if somehow it was not your aim to air your disdain--though if you said so I could plausibly accuse you of playing "childish games"--then you need to speak plainly. You're a very sharp and educated person, so even if you do this sort of thing by accident it just isn't credible to make that excuse. This is the curse of competence.
So just knock it off. Your comment was out of line, contributed no light, only heat, was not worded plainly, was low effort, take your pick and take the L. I'm not going to get into a philosophical debate with you over what it means to be "bad" or whether there is a difference between saying someone is bad and just hinting at unflattering characterizations with two winks and a nod. I'm telling you, don't post like that, or I will mod you a second time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.
This is about as clean a violation of the "consensus building" rule as it gets. Please don't do that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I had not previously encountered that meme. It seems like a pretty on-point criticism of "edgy" academics (who are often ensconced in some of the cushiest institutional sinecures available to anyone who is not literal royalty or a token minority).
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
This is unnecessarily antagonistic, and also oddly specific, which I suppose tracks.
If you would like to talk about the specifics of your personal difficulties, we do have a weekly Wellness thread. Though even there, you'd need to be seeking advice (and be open to gracefully receiving it!) rather than just venting. I don't think I could draw a bright line between "expressing frustration over CW-adjacent issues" and "aimless heated venting," but your posts seem to lean more toward the latter than the former, and if you can't rein that in, you're going to eat a ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
That's due to a derangement in your value system
You are free to explore value disagreement, but dropping to accusations of derangement is too much heat. I might let it slide if it were some passionate rhetoric in the midst of an effort post, but this comment seems to just be pure heat. Three day ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
When racists in the US government diverted vaccines away from white people to black people did that hurt black people? I think it helped them.
Sure. So we should complain about racism, not divert vaccines away from black people instead.
When Harvard gives black people an advantage in admissions does that hurt or help them?
To hear Clarence Thomas tell, it hurts them. But perhaps more importantly, trying to judge "hurt" and "help" in terms of who gets to be a Supreme Court justice or Yale law professor, and who is instead relegated to graduating from a top-10 law school and making millions of dollars as a partner at a top law firm (but who doesn't get to tell her friends she went to Harvard) seems like piss-poor reckoning. It's not as though the Asians "harmed" by Harvard's racism (whites actually appear to benefit very slightly, or at least not be harmed, by Harvard's preferences) are facing a choice between Harvard and never going to college. The real harm is so slight as to be essentially invisible, except for the part where we decide to reject racism on principle instead of on the basis of who gets to have the most desirable status signals. Rejecting racism on principle is good.
If I own a store and exclude people of race X because I think they shoplift a lot and are a net drain on the business then that is racist
It's not racist to see facts. If there is an ethnic propensity for antisocial behavior, there's nothing wrong with taking reasonable action as a result.
...and illegal
Right, you can't just say "because black people are more likely to shoplift, all black people are excluded." Instead you should say "we need to construct a law enforcement system which makes it easier to detain and punish shoplifters." There's nothing racist about that. Oh, sure, an identitarian will say there's something racist about that when it turns out that a bunch of mostly non-white kids are the ones who end up actually doing time, but I am not an identitarian, I'm the one arguing against identitarianism.
To use your example, if I own a business and I think women are worse workers and hire them with a lower starting salary then I'm being sexist.
No, that's wrong! This is exactly my point. To call that sexist is the problem with identitarianism! Pay people whatever you want! As a job creator you don't owe it to anyone to pay a penny more than they are worth! And if they are worth more than that, someone else will pay them more. But if you're sexist, you're at a disadvantage versus others who are gauging merit instead. There are of course inefficiencies in the market, this won't work perfectly, but your responses to me are completely mis-targeted because I'm the one arguing against identitarianism! You're criticizing certain bad social practices and telling me "to combat racism and sexism I have to be racist and sexist" but all you've done is accepted the wrong definitions of racism and sexism. Once you do that, it's just "ingroup versus outgroup" all the way down, you lose the ability to complain persuasively about racial and sexual preferences because you've shown that you want racial and sexual preferences for yourself. A black-hating racist and a white-hating racist are just engaged in a game of power, there's no principle to appeal to, just pure in-group preference. But very often it is cooperation, not competition, that we need to coordinate if we're going to get stag.
Or another example, if I know race X commits crime at a high rate and I find myself walking around an unfamiliar city at night in an area with a lot of X, what should I do? Leaving the area is racist
I cannot emphasize this enough: you are just buying the wrong definition of racist here. If you disagree with left-identitarians, why would you let them define your key terms? This is what makes me crazy about the alt-right: they allow their enemies to set the poles of the debate--and that means they are destined to lose. They have lost the game before they have even begun to fight.
Identitarianism is always going to win in a democracy because embracing identitarianism gives you a bloc of perfectly loyal voters.
I agree that democracy is mostly bad and even the small protections of minority rights built into the U.S. system (Supreme Court, Bill of Rights, the original selection method for senators, the Great Compromise, the electoral college) have been much eroded by identitarianism. Proposing to fight fire with fire, however, too often just ends up getting you burned.
...you can't have race blindness because sooner or later one political party is going to learn that they can win by abandoning it.
This is a different problem, though. You're no longer arguing for "the good kind of racism," now you're arguing against the practice of democracy. Because if political parties can't divide people along racial lines, they will just divide people along some other lines. The blues and the greens of the Roman chariot races are the canonical example, I think.
The United States began as an uneasy alliance between a bunch of "white" abolitionists and a bunch of "white" slavers. Later came Germans (now "white"), Irishmen (now "white"), Chinese immigrants (now "white adjacent" for purposes of college admissions), Hispanics (usually "white" within two or three generations)... Native Americans who don't maintain sufficient blood or cultural purity become "white," many blacks "pass" as "white," the way these lines get drawn is political.
And sure, you can say "I would like these lines to be drawn to my benefit," but then you're just doing the same stupid thing the people you're complaining about (indirectly, in your selection of examples) are doing, in reverse. And intelligence is not reversed stupidity.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
And likewise, I agree to an extent. But I feel like the examples you give, and the more complicated ones you didn't give, fall into "just so" stories, narrow selections of what-might-have-been.
For example: by young and try buying a house. "Depending on where you live" is doing a lot of work in your example of price and other pressures. Houses today are bigger and in other ways far more luxurious than they were 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago. Anti-growth environmentalism and government overregulation (including various government subsidies for, especially, first-time home buyers) have far more to do with anyone's housing woes, than immigration. And even so, "Generation Z" is actually tracking as more likely to own a home than their parents were at their age.
Are the streets meaner, crime higher? Well, "depending on where you live," no, for example violent crime has gotten a little worse since the Great Awokening (thanks, Obama!) but is still way down from its peak some 30 years ago. Immigration has probably suppressed some wages, but in the United States the people who seem to be most economically harmed by Hispanic immigration are black Americans who are the next most likely demographic to pick up the manual labor. Oh, sure, maybe some white kid has a harder time getting a good wage at a coding job because the government is handing out H1B visas like Halloween candy, but people have been predicting the total implosion of computer science as a viable career choice for at least two decades that I know of; still doesn't appear to be happening and young white kids with CS degrees are still making a lot more money fresh out of school than, say, me as an educator. There are no solutions--only tradeoffs!
In other words, it's not about what you could have in multiracial America, it's about what you could have in monoracial America.
But what do you lose in a monoracial America? What do other people lose? The identitarian position for white nationalists and black separatists and those who make "stolen land acknowledgments" is always the same: "my people would be better off if everyone else would just submit to our demands!" Well, maybe that's true, but history tells a very different story: trade and liberty (in particular, of movement and commerce) leads to widespread increases in quality of life, in ways that nothing else ever has in all of history. If it is true that white people can be better off, overall, by denying some liberty to non-white people, and non-white people can be better off, overall, by denying some liberty to white people, and both groups set about denying liberty to the other--then the practical result is that neither group is going to be better off in the end, they're just going to constantly be fighting about which group gets to be on top. Better to find intelligent ways to cooperate, than to compete in a zero-sum game (that might not even pan out empirically in the end). Especially since white people are a small and shrinking global minority.
Of course, there is a global ethnic minority that did attempt to build itself an ethnonationalist homeland, and I don't know what history has in store for Israel but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not "peace in our time." Likewise, casino operation has changed this in some places to some degree, but ethnically pure Indian Reservations are in general riddled with poverty and cultural malaise. Even Japan, arguably a shining beacon of ethnonationalism and certainly an economic powerhouse, is struggling with demographics and economics in ways that are changing their historically xenophobic culture rapidly. There just aren't any positive examples of "purge the undesirables" I can find anywhere in history; the most successful one that comes to mind is the ethnic divorce of Greece and Turkey in the 20th century, and neither of those countries are today places ripe with golden opportunity.
Because you can have good things in both Americas. But one of them has some very obvious downsides the other one does not have.
The other one has some very obvious downsides, too.
Those foreigners imagine a better life in the White Mans Backpack. I've never encountered any righteous indignation directed at them, telling them to stop being so envious. "I want more. I deserve more!" Why can't they just accept their lot? Why aspire for an environment where you are more likely to flourish?
Everyone below a certain reasonable threshold should aspire for an environment where they are more likely to flourish. They just shouldn't aspire to get there by hurting other people. And this is where the identitarians always end up, tweeting ("ironically! to start a dialogue!") about ethnic cleansing of one kind or another. It has been tried, it doesn't work.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
We aren't here to be your therapist.
While @yofuckreddit would probably have been better off making their post a bit less rant-y, sneering at them does not help matters. Please avoid this level of antagonism in the future.
Oh, your meaning was clear. But I can't ban a user for single-issue posting if everyone else keeps trotting out that user's hobby-horse for them. Israel is a foreign power. Treating it as a synonym for "Judaism" is something its advocates and critics do interchangeably, depending on the point they want to make. That kind of disclarity is objectionable, here, but so is making uncharitable assumptions about which meaning is intended.
The user to whom you were responding is not the most artful user we have, in terms of disingenuously cloaking objectionable insinuations in plausibly neutral language. But that does not excuse uncharitable jabs from other, similarly artful posters.
We want, in short, for people to have room to change their minds, however minutely. Comments like yours discourage that.
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