naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo 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
Let's take a 30 day break from your trolling this time. Come back better, please, or just don't come back.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
The original plan of the UK government, which is to encourage individual measures such as handwashing and voluntary distancing, is thrown out for the lockdownist policy that originated in China and was copied by countless other nations. Cummings is of the impression that, if we had done this earlier, we could have reduced the number of deaths.
Huh. For some reason I thought Cummings was the architect of the original approach, and that the draconian lockdowns marked the beginning of the end for Cummings. But maybe that was based on my impression of his comments to media when he broke lockdown to be near relatives when his wife got sick.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Here:
On September 7, 2020, this post was made on /r/themotte and got +20 upvotes:
As the poem goes, sooner or later the Saxon begins to hate. And I have more than just begun.
[...]
The truth is that I fucking hate them. [...] I don't want a compromise anymore. I don't want to go our separate ways in peace. I want to hurt them and I want to win.
[...]
I would rather die and fail and men say 'at least he tried' than to throw my own flesh and blood to the wolves that swim in Cthulhu's wake.
[...]
I doubt we are in for a short victorious war but I think the right will come out well in any civil conflict.
I reported this to the mods, who did nothing. After waiting some time, I reported it to the reddit admins, and the AEO promptly deleted it. To my knowledge, this was the first AEO action against /r/themotte. The mods discussed it via modmail but issued no warnings or ban to the user in question.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Christians too dream of utopia, but of course since we know that the Kingdom of God is fiction, the Christian position is tantamount to the claim that utopia is impossible and not worth striving for in actuality.
This technically violates the rule against consensus-building--"we know" is too strong. More subtly, I know "Christians" (in the sense that they identify with Christianity while doubting the metaphysics of it) who see the Kingdom of God as unattainable but worth striving for as an ideal, so you need to be careful about making assertions regarding what "we" know, as well as what the "Christian position" is.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr 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.
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.
For the benefit of the community, @naraburns should recuse themselves from trans issues/this debate in future.
Yeah, that's definitely not happening.
Your assertion that I am "unacceptably partisan on this topic," as a moderator, is baseless. In the first place, I was not participating in that conversation as a moderator, and you should not be misled by PM's apparent inability to disagree with me without making that about my janitorial role. (Every. Time.) There are definitely some users whose approach to argumentation... clashes with my own, let's say, and I do often avoid moderating or even talking to them. But frankly we don't have enough active moderators for me to do this in every single instance, so I can't really pre-commit to never moderating such users, even if I rarely do.
(In fact, one of the most frequent moderation discussions we have begins with, "I am really tired of taking shit for modding genuinely horrible posts from this repeat-offender, can someone else do it this time?" Usually, these end up being Zorba's job, but I think we've all taken a turn spelling others at some point.)
The mod team has discussed topic bans for specific users in the past. A similar idea we've discussed is enforcing a minimum word counts on posts--I don't think it's ultimately a viable approach, and I don't think anyone else does, either, but it would shut down a lot of low-effort posting! So far, we've not implemented any such thing, and no serious plans to implement such things is in the works. But given his explosion here, you'd see PM get topic-banned from trans issues far, far sooner than a topic ban on anyone writing the way I've written on the subject. And then we'd inevitably be subject to accusations that this was somehow partisan, rather than a problem of PM telling people they should be eating bugs in a gulag. So that's one reason why topic bans have, thus far, been a non-starter.
If it's ultimately a concern about me setting some kind of example for the community, well. When I was first asked to moderate, the only moderator who raised a concern was @HlynkaCG, and he said something to the effect of "naraburns might like the fight a bit too much" but ultimately was okay with bringing me on. Some on our current mod team had multiple warnings on their accounts when they were chosen by the Doge process. The link between "model citizen" and "motterator" has always been... tenuous, I guess I want to say, in much the same way that some of our best quality posters have also been our worst rules violators. I definitely think more carefully about the rules now than I did when I wasn't a moderator! But if being a moderator was going to prevent me from strongly engaging on interesting topics when I feel like it and have the time, then I wouldn't be a moderator.
Clearly, some people would prefer it that way. Maybe someday, they will get their wish! But today is not that day. And tomorrow is not looking great for them, either.
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
1yr ago
can you demonstrate how one would communicate the same idea in a less heated manner?
Sure thing.
If he is doing this, do you think it sounds like "Excuse me sir, I am expecting to be at address X and...?" Or do you think it is more likely that he was making demands in a loud, plausibly aggressive tone of voice that could easily be misinterpreted before he's even properly reached the door? I've seen people do this.
In my experience, there are cultures of people who communicate anything they want in a direct, loud, demanding, and repetitive fashion, even when they have no ill intentions, and can make others uneasy even during actually fairly neutral interactions with them, much less an 84 year old man.
I've had plenty of interactions with people who have wrongfully assumed that they needed/wanted something from me or vice versa based on various mistakes of fact, and while many of these have ended in a non-threatening "Oh, my bad" (though sometimes they also just like to immediately disengage and walk away without comment, almost like weird primitive AI agents, once they realize you're not the droid they're looking for), getting there is usually still an uneasy process as they just do not seem to practice the habits of clearly confirming and socially negotiating their presence and intent nearly as much as I am used to.
This of course is not malicious behavior in their book. They have no problems yelling at each other repetitively until one side's shouting wins. But if you aren't used to it I can see why it might seem hostile.
I did not write a loquacious ban message because it seemed unnecessary to do so, but the rule requiring posts to be about specific rather than general groups, to the extent possible, absolutely applies here. @WhiningCoil's response, which I am tempted to moderate as well, illustrates the problem. I have met many black people. I have met some who behaved in the ways described above; I have met many who did not. I have also had entirely too many encounters, in my life, with white people who behaved in the ways described above.
This is--obviously--a high-heat discussion topic. That is not an excuse; it is a reason to work even harder to live up to the rules.
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
1yr ago
And a Merry Christmas to you!
the culture war by psychos
Don't do this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
The "Webb is a bigot" people don't care about anything except having all PR everywhere pay tribute to their gods.
This may very well be true, but if you're going to say it, you need to buttress it with some evidence or argumentation. Remember that this is the thread for discussing the culture wars, not waging them. That doesn't mean you can't criticize your outgroup, but if you do criticize your outgroup, you're going to have to do it with more effort than this.
And I'd normally leave it at that, but you've accrued a lot of warnings in the last two months. So I'm going to ban you for a week and see whether maybe that makes something stick.
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
11mo 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
1yr ago
@anti_dan's low effort comment was, indeed, low effort--to the point where it might have drawn moderation if it were more directly antagonistic or uncharitable or somesuch. I don't think it quite rises to the level of calling for a wrist slap, but on a different day, maybe it would.
But you uncharitably characterizing a position on which someone else was insufficiently specific does not improve matters at all. Especially when you acknowledge that there is a broad range of interpretations, here. Picking the most outrageous, least plausible version of that and then asking for evidence has some very "have you stopped beating your wife" kind of energy. Please don't do this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I would like to call for naraburns to commit to not calling people names for disagreeing
Sure, I commit to not calling people names for disagreeing.
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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