naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I apologize, but to be clear it was a reference to dude's constant postings about "the Jooz." Edit: And, his reference to "dying for Isreal." So not much of a non sequitur.
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.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
You are so deluded it would be comical if your ideologies weren't so dangerous.
More light, less heat, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This seems unnecessarily heated and low effort. Please don't post like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
This is low effort, consensus-enforcing, and a bit antagonistic. Don't post like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
The hypo is meant to be a highly distilled, but if it disturbs you, you're obviously under no obligation to answer.
It doesn't disturb me, and I did answer. You're the one who was complaining about how I answered.
What about other beings whose reasoning may be equal or greater to that of humans, but not necessarily the same? Does one or the other groups owe anything to the other? How are we to discern that such a group might be in our midst?
The answers to these questions will depend, inescapably, on the nature of these beings and their compatibility with human existence, especially in terms of the ability to give and receive acceptable justifications for actions. The desire and ability to coexist lead quite naturally to reasons for action. Without that desire and ability, it's all pretty moot.
Another question that I haven't been able to understand from our repartee or the entries you linked, is who gets to decide what a reasonable objection is?
We do, through the process of reasoning together.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I'm not sure you could draw the implication you did about outside resources, but let me be explicit, there are no other resources in the universe.
Then how the fuck was this guy feeding his family before he "came along?" For that matter, where's the rest of the "mythical land" you specified?
My goal is not to fight your hypothetical; I'm happy to do my best to constrain myself to only the impossibly limited range of facts that you happen to find persuasive for whatever reason. But you keep losing the thread; whatever else these hypothetical characters are, they are not recognizably human, in the world you've described.
you seem to have a presupposition regarding the primacy of human life
What makes you say that? Because it's wrong. I'm not assigning metaphysical primacy to anything. And I sure as hell haven't suggested that we're engaged in "pure reason." Go back and re-read the thread; you will find no mention of "pure reason" anywhere in it.
All I've done is stake a claim on morality as we understand it being a human activity undertaken by humans through reasoning processes, that is, through the activity of justifying ourselves to one another. You keep trying to challenge or argue against that for some reason (despite haven taken no clear or coherent position yourself), but your objections are complete misses; you don't even seem to understand enough to meaningfully doubt. Which would be fine if I felt like you were trying to improve your own understanding, but you strike me as far too busy being blindly contrarian to ever glean any insight, either into any particular moral theory or into the more specific things I have claimed.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
This is borderline consensus building, and well over the line of needing to bring evidence in proportion to the inflammatoriness of your claim. Don't post like this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
The 'elites' in Europe are so braindead and so feckless
Please post about specific rather than general groups to the extent possible. Please provide effortful argument and evidence in proportion with how partisan or inflammatory your claims might be.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
"Ay! Darnell! DeAndre! Get yo' asses out here! It's time to go! Ay, who you is? Where my brothers at? Where dey at? Ay! Yo, I'm talkin' to you nigga!"
I have a hard time imagining a world in which you wrote that without expecting to eat a ban for it.
Optimize for light, not heat. User banned for three days.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
The mod team has discussed this comment in response to a couple of user reports. The result is mixed. I am explicitly not giving you a warning at this time--but I need to say a little more about that, because we are probably going to be dialing up the sensitivity on posts like this in the near future.
This is connected with @Amadan's moderation of @firmamenti and @cjet79's partial modhat comment about it. Since moving over from reddit, moderation has gotten both easier and more difficult in interesting ways. We have far fewer bad drive-by comments and much less brigading from trolls (although, importantly--not zero troll brigading!). We seem to have more users paying attention to AAQCs, both in terms of crafting them and in terms of nominating them, such that many excellent posts don't make the roundup simply because there are so many plausible nominations. These are positive developments!
On the downside, though, low effort comments from more regular users also seem to be turning up more frequently. There is a tendency to rely on shorthand arguments that are both low effort and obfuscatory for new users. This is understandable--as the community coheres it can often feel like certain individuals are just re-treading old ground. But that is something we want to try to mitigate. In this particular comment, your substantive position (that the primary impetus for targeting Trump is purely political, as evidenced by the ceaseless barrage of unusual, contorted, or even spurious charges raised against him) seems defensible, but the way you raise it as though it were obviously true (implicitly building consensus), without furnishing either evidence or argument, brooks no discussion on the matter. That is antithetical to the foundation of the Motte.
I will be writing a longer top post about low-effort posts in the near-ish future, but it seemed worth mentioning here to get people thinking a bit about the problem, hopefully.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Please feel free to post this in the CW thread, along with a submission statement of some kind.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
This is a Culture War post, and as such must be placed in our weekly Culture War threads, thanks.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Tension between the poor and wealthy neighbourhoods have been high recently with many instances of looting.
Particularly given this last sentence, your post is probably better for the Small Questions thread, or perhaps the Culture War thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Assuming the topic you mean is "Twitter can expose how the media tries to manipulate you," you could have simply chosen less inflammatory examples of how the media tries to manipulate you--or even used a wide variety of examples so as to not come off as harping on your bête noire. In general, writing with great evidence, clarity, and charity is very likely to get you to a much less accusatory (or race-baiting) place.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I am not sufficiently tech-savvy to answer your question, but I know @ZorbaTHut is always looking for volunteers to work on the codebase.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Lesbianism is more political than biological anyway.
Your comment is a bit... curt, I guess I want to say, given the strength of its claims. To much heat, not enough light. Which is not to say there's no light there, but if you're going to assert that lesbianism is "more political than biological," that seems like the sort of thing you should say with evidence, at least a bit. You didn't even hyperlink the idiom--some amount of shibboleth-slinging is bound to crop up in any community, but still it would be better to speak a bit more plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I had initially approved this, but on further examination it's pretty political. Please feel free to post it (and, preferably, with some commentary) in the CW thread.
Choosing the username "ShockJock" and posting "just asking questions" about white-hot culture war topics, outside the CW thread, suggests very strongly to me that you are trolling.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt for now and point you toward the CW thread, but this is definitely not getting approved as a top level post.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Yeah, and OP made it a bit clearer in another comment that the point of the post is strictly to solicit career-trajectory advice, rather than to examine plans pertaining to spouse and children, so this is all rendered somewhat tangential anyway. Ah, well.
Some states do have private school vouchers of various kinds, there are also tax rebates and of course many private schools offer scholarships. It's difficult to commensurate costs and benefits in the realm of child-raising for many reasons (not that this stops anyone, including me, from trying), but one that I think COVID-driven remote work expansions really highlighted was the possibility of spending more on a house in a good school district, to spend less on private schooling. If you've only got an average number of children, this likely represents only a small savings, but if you have 4+ children (OP seems to have some children and specifies wanting "more") the savings can stack up quickly--even at only $10k/year.
This also kind of overlooks the fact that the "private school advantage" is much more legible in the UK than in the US. There are some good private K-12 schools in the US for sure, but usually when I see stark opportunity or income gaps being discussed in the literature, it's UK schools under examination. In the US, private and public charter academies vary in quality as much as, and arguably even more than, neighborhood and public magnet schools. I admit that--while there are no doubt many good counterexamples!--I personally view suburban $10k private schools as kind of weird; they don't generally appear to outperform suburban neighborhood schools (the way urban private schools are almost always superior to nearby public alternatives), so it's hard for me to see suburban private schools in the US as anything but opportunities for the middle and upper-middle classes to participate in a cargo cult of pretend-wealth.
Most of your comment falls on the wrong side of the rules, I think, but this line in particular seems like standard-issue hyperbolic propaganda. Like, show me one instance where this looks literally true, a single instance of Israel selecting "the most torturous way possible" to kill "1000 innocents" for any reason at all, much less to "save a single one of theirs."
This is (apparently!) a hotly contested issue, so I was feeling mildly reluctant to moderate you in spite of the overall badness of the comment, but that sentence in particular just struck me as entirely too much heat, directed toward your outgroup, for what looks like no light at all.
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