naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Welcome back! Let's see, you were last temp-banned for low-effort boo-outgroup posting a year ago... but instead of taking three days off, you disappeared for a year. It took you less than a week of posting to get my attention this time.
You're banned for a week, but you can expect that to escalate sharply if you continue posting like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Most of those are "little 8 year old Timmy has cancer" not "CW grifting".
I regard both of these as examples of grifting.
Do you also have a deep-rooted envy of lottery winners, because you do not have a gift for sheer dumb luck?
Oh, it's much worse than that. I know a lot of people who make a lot of money doing fuck-all. Often, they are active hindrances to things getting done. "Bullshit jobs" and the like--but also many people in education, government, large corporations, et cetera. I'm not even sure "envy" is the right word, exactly, but I'm trying to be open to the possibility that it is just a kind of envy. Except that I don't actually want to be them--I just can't help but wonder why I so often feel the need to work when so many of my fellow humans seem to get by just fine without it.
It's on the news because it's rare.
...so? I'm not sure what conclusion I should draw from that. This may be an extreme case of grifting, but that just makes it helpfully illustrative; I'm annoyed by smaller, more common examples, too.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
This isn't even "making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike", it's just plain making things up.
This is not sufficiently charitable. Specifically,
we ask that responders address what was literally said, on the assumption that this was at least part of the intention. Nothing is more frustrating than making a clear point and having your conversation partner assume you're talking in circles. We don't require that you stop after addressing what was literally said, but try, at least, to start there.
It's fine to raise questions about source veracity, but if you're going to respond to others, you need to actually be responding to the substance of their posts--not ducking into your motte when they raise points you don't care to substantively address. Actually several of your comments in this thread do the "law of merited impossibility" and "Russell conjugation" thing, where you oscillate between "this isn't happening" and "it's good, actually" while rhetorically re-framing specific concerns. This kind of engagement creates frustration and lowers engagement quality, even though it basically keeps to the rules on tone. If done deliberately and repeatedly, it amounts to a kind of trolling. Please engage with what people are actually saying, rather than substituting your rhetoric for their substantive concerns.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Eh she seems to at least be marginally smarter than Sotomayor. Sotomayor consistently has the most braindead opinions of the entire court.
You may be right about this, I don't have a strong view here. Either way, people who find themselves in high political office based more on their skin color or sex than on their demonstrated merit often end up in over their heads. And yes, when I say that, I get a lot of pushback from people who want to tell me all about Jackson's merits, but like... Biden himself said it. He wasn't even looking for the best candidate, just the most plausible black woman for the job.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
I am not saying she is conservative by any means, but she does have a very specific jurisprudence that can lean what has been described as libertarian on criminal matters.
To the extent that "Woke" is downstream of stuff like BLM, this would appear to be a case-in-point of my read on her decisions. A consistent libertarianism (e.g. on Murthy, where the Democrat appointees sided with Roberts, Barrett, and Kavanaugh to empower the federal government against the First Amendment) would have shown some sophistication. Someone who is libertarian when it protects petty criminals from local LEOs but statist when the federal government wants to bully corporations into doing things the federal government is forbidden from doing, does not have a sophisticated jurisprudence. They have a results-oriented political agenda.
And I do think that Murthy shook out in approximately that way, split between plausibly principled jurists and mere creatures of the state. Barrett is the one I have the hardest time pinning down, it seems I am as often disappointed by her as I am impressed. They all get it right sometimes, and they all get it wrong sometimes, and that's to be expected. But the "freedom contingent" is small, and gains allies only inconsistently.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
You are part of the identitarian left since you support identity politics for Jews
Uh, no. I don't, and I'd appreciate you not putting words in my mouth. Who do you think you're talking to? What "identity politics" do I support for Jews? What do you think "identity politics" means in this context?
For the sake of clarity, when I say "identity politics" I mean "advocating for and allotting special benefits to individuals purely based on their membership in a particular category." So for example, I favor the state of Israel against Islamic terrorism because (1) terrorism is bad and (2) Israel is a reasonably successful pluralistic state in a region of the world that desperately needs more such things. And you might say "aha! This is still advocating for special benefits based on nationality!" But I would disagree, because there are no benefits I would extend to the Israeli people that I would not cheerfully extend to anyone whose behavior is reasonably comparable. Since I do not give any special consideration to the Jewish people or Israeli nationals (many of whom are not Jewish), it is nonsense to say that I "support identity politics for Jews."
In fact if the world were arranged according to my principles, there would be little to no government at all, anywhere, but the world is not arranged according to my principles. This is not a "commie immoral ideology," it's much closer to libertarian anarchism... but I'm not really a libertarian, so much as a classical liberal. I'm conservative enough to think we probably need some regulation, and some government. But mostly I think people need to be left alone, and not have their social existence engineered by the Leviathan. If people want to form interest groups, they should be free to do so. And government actors should be forbidden from giving any of those groups special treatment based on group membership.
Objective differences between individuals is a different story, and sometimes these will be expressed in the language of groups. But for example treating "men" and "women" differently (in situations where the realities of sex matter) is fine, but strictly speaking that's not allotting special benefits based on membership in a category, it's arranging behavior in response to real individual differences.
Why shouldn't the majority ethnic group have their collective interests be taken seriously by its rulers?
Because there's no such thing as collective interests. Or, perhaps it would be better to say that collective interests are an abstraction which erode proper attention to individual circumstance. My rejection of interest aggregation in moral reasoning (I am a Scanlonian contractualist) extends to a rejection of interest aggregation in political action.
Of course, in practical terms, it's very difficult to carry out sweeping government intervention without engaging in interest aggregation. To me, this seems like an excellent reason to not have sweeping government interventions. Government should focus on coordinating behaviors for the good of everyone. Thus for example, having a standard for traffic flow is good. It doesn't matter who you are, you stop on red and go on green; this is not a deep moral principle, it's just the otherwise-arbitrary standard we all follow so we can all accrue benefit from the common use of roads. That's a totally appropriate use of government power, on my view, and there is not so much as a whiff of "identity politics" in it. Many things are good for everyone, and many things can be appropriately targeted toward objective individual differences rather than group membership.
Maybe you have a different definition of "identity politics?" But as far as I can tell, you're simply wrong. Certainly you're wrong about me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
22d ago
So I ask again- why bother? Is the time for talking over?
Well... it isn't 100% on point, given the different context, but I would invite you to read what I wrote to Kulak's exit and imagine how the substance of my post might apply to you.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
That one is doing that which is approved by the Cathedral, yes? Left-wing speech is activism, right-wing speech is delinquency.
Well, it's been a while since I was really on the bleeding edge of these cases, but my experience is that it's rarely overtly political, except to the extent that "good student" sometimes codes "left"--which is less often the case in high school than it is in college. Kids who get detention and bully others don't get free speech. Kids who get good grades or excel in athletics do. Leftists may be more inclined toward activism? But at the high school level it tends to be silly stuff rather than serious culture war issues. Though perhaps in the last few years that has changed.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
If we're in agreement that "child mutilation" is an insulting and deeply uncharitable description, then my objection is pretty well resolved.
I agree that "mutilation" can be unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric. I would stop short of calling it inflammatory per se, however. Referring to the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes as "mutilation" seems like a supportable framing, but context and charity matter.
I do think I've been consistent in my stance: SRS is a surgery like any other, and calling it "mutilation" is ridiculous hyperbole.
That can be your stance, but you aren't entitled to its adoption by others. Many humans object to cosmetic surgery generally, and those kinds of surgeries do not usually interfere with bodily functioning. Interfering with bodily function seems to raise the stakes. "Mutilation" may be ridiculous hyperbole in some contexts, but it does not seem per se to be so.
Calling it "child mutilation" is doubly ridiculous, since as far as I know, kids under 18 genuinely are not having surgery. I'm not saying kids don't transition, I'm saying they don't get surgery under 18, and that it's not mutilation.
The main reason I am replying to you again, here, is that you still don't seem to have grasped where you went wrong in the first place. WhiningCoil did not say "children are being mutilated," but rather that children were being put "on a path towards mutilation and sterilization." You cannot charitably read this to say "children are being mutilated," but rather "children are being channeled toward life outcomes that eventually include sterilization and the removal of healthy organs." Demanding evidence of children having functional tissue removed for aesthetic purposes is failing to address what WhiningCoil actually said, and hence a rules violation.
(For whatever it's worth, "gender affirming mastectomies" clearly involve the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes, and do not appear to be terribly rare in adolescents aged 12-17. If someone were to call that "child mutilation" I would probably need to spend some time weighing whether I regarded the rest of the comment as inflammatory, "boo outgroup," or otherwise rules-violating, but that characterization of the data in isolation does not look like a per se rules violation to me.)
I am responding to what was literally said.
Your response was insufficiently charitable.
Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction?
First, other people's bad behavior is irrelevant to your own. Second, I already banned WhiningCoil for comments in this thread. If that wasn't enough to stifle your whataboutism, then I don't know what else I could possibly do to assuage your persecution complex.
Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?
There are ways to make substantive assertions along these lines, and people often do. But they have to do so within a context of following the rules, which you have failed to do here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Sure, those are all very pragmatic reasons to do undemocratic things.
That's just my point, though. There are a great many reasons to not fret if the democratic process of referendum elections gets disrupted.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
We clearly disagree about some important things, but at this juncture it seems like you are more committed to making personal attacks and aggressively mischaracterizing my position, than you are to understanding and dialogue. So there doesn't seem to be anything else to say. I am only responding now to note to anyone else reading this thread that you've put a lot of words in my mouth, here, and all of them are wrong.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
No, that was me failing to open the italics properly, sorry.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Just to add to @Amadan's take on this, it's hard for me to take you very seriously in a discussion about "good faith" when you link to that comment I made, without also referencing my direct reply to you in that thread where I elaborated:
...I have vague memories of this being something the mod team was maybe disunified about for a while (maybe still is). It's also possible I'm giving the wrong impression with the phrase "affirmative action." It's possible different moderators have had, and expressed, different ideas of what amounts to "affirmative action" in various cases. Zorba has always made it our top priority to make this a
place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases
which necessarily involves having people who don't all share the same biases. So we've always tried to moderate in ways that would encourage the development of such a community.
On the other hand, the mod team is accused somewhat regularly of going too easy/too hard on red tribe/blue tribe posts, and we have often cited this fact as evidence that moderation is not actually especially biased in one direction or the other; everyone always feels like their ox is the one being gored. Thumbing the scales a bit in favor of including heterodox views does not rise to the level of nuking the rules, any more than QCs do. And I don't think we've ever thumbed the scales for tribal reasons (either pro or con)--just for specific users in specific cases, where it was, say, understandable that someone might get a little hot under the collar.
So I would suggest that the way to parse all of this is that moderation is a qualitative and adaptive process in a reputation economy. We do go easier on new users, generally. We go easier on people who make QCs or otherwise contribute to the health of the community (e.g. by expressing heterodox views), for the most part. We go harder on people who habitually make bad posts, or express unwillingness to abide by the rules. We moderate tone rather than content. What that amounts to, in the end, is... what we have here. If you're getting moderated occasionally, it's probably nothing to worry much about. If you're getting moderated a lot, it's definitely because you're breaking the rules and showing no inclination to even try doing better.
(Emphasis added.) Your refusal to engage in open, honest, charitable discussion of these nuances is a far, far cry from us engaging in "manipulation attempts." When you ask a question and get an answer, then pop up months later writing as though you never read or understood that answer, like... I don't know what more I can possibly say to you about it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I'd actually be curious if you'd ban gwern for the 2012 comments linked in that thread, btw.
Maybe! But Gwern seems pretty cognizant of context in those comments:
real-time chat cannot and should not be held to the same high standards like, for example, LW posts or comments
Gwern perceived IRC as a sort of "locker room," speech-wise, while Startling disagreed. I wasn't there so I have no opinion as to who was right, beyond a tendency to suspect that it's always a bad idea to bet against Gwern. My guess is that a hypothetical Motte-posting Gwern would express himself a little differently, when posting here.
The SSC subreddit and the Motte are different contexts, too. Has the Motte shifted left? I don't think so, but then I am pretty regularly accused of bearing some personal responsibility for this place shifting right. We're not explicitly conservative, so Conquest's Laws say we will eventually become progressive. But maybe the foundation counts as an explicitly conservative alignment, for such purposes? We've definitely had more mods bail because they found this space insufficiently progressive, than because they found this space insufficiently conservative. On balance, I remain pretty satisfied with this space (when I'm not feeling surprised that it has managed to continue existing for as long as it has!).
But like... if you don't like entryists, you really should stop giving the mod team shit over moderation decisions, ever. We're not perfect, we make mistakes. But even our most progressive moderators are much more committed to the foundation than they are to advancing any particular political narrative.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
The charity failure in cartman's comment was that WhiningCoil argues that children consenting to sex acts is analogous to children consenting to treatment for reasons of sex or gender preferences, i.e. "if children can't consent to sex acts then children can't consent to puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries, and if parental authority does not extend to vicarious consent for sex acts then it also does not extend to vicarious consent for puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries."
People can argue about whether that analogy is a good one. But if one person builds their argument on the validity of the analogy and another person builds their response on the invalidity of the analogy, then they are not really talking to each other, they are just competing for who can make their take on the analogy into the consensus by being loud and insistent about it.
This is a complicated thing to moderate because we moderate on tone rather than substance, but like most informal fallacies, it's hard to recognize this one without some grasp of the substance of the argument.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Using alternate accounts to post things that might otherwise violate personal OPSEC rules requires moderator approval?
Correct. See the rules page:
We strongly discourage people from making alt accounts without good reason, and in the absence of a good reason, we consider alt accounts to be bannable on sight. Alt accounts are almost exclusively used for mod evasion purposes and very rarely used for any purpose that helps the community; it makes moderation more difficult and it makes conversation more difficult.
If you do feel you need an alt account (most commonly, if you're a well-established user who wants to post something that can't be linked to their public persona), please ask the mods.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Any advice on getting one?
There are many ways, but in my experience the most decisive step toward getting paid large sums of money to tell other people to do things they would do better without your interference is to get an MBA.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
That's not the work I intended that phrase to do. It was more of a factual observation about the extent to which outcomes are actually (not) within OP's control, which was the overall point of my post.
Specifically, "ought" implies "can." Ensuring that some people are employed might be the right thing to do; say for the purposes of argument that it is in this case. If in such a case it's not really up to you that those people will stay employed, it can't really be a moral requirement that you keep them employed. The claim "if you don't do it, eventually someone else will" is not a justification for any particular course of action, but an empirical claim about the extent to which a certain outcome is likely (not) within OP's control.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
It gave me Thomas Sowell, and when I asked for others it suggested Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Apparently I missed my calling as an economist.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Where should I post this?
Reddit? You seem keen to make a reddit alternative, there is a whole subreddit for those.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
It's not just you.
I heard a right-coded radio host mention the New Orleans attack somewhat recently, but it was only a passing reference in connection with a Biden gaffe.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
It ain't over 'til its over, and I still pretty much expect to wake up tomorrow to Pennsylvania or Georgia explaining how they found half a million Harris votes in a mailbox somewhere and how that's totally normal.
But just this moment I'm getting some real Hillary vibes out of this one. Remember when people were arguing that she was going to flip Utah blue? I've grown pretty accustomed to news coverage about Kamala winning, say, North Carolina--or all seven swing states. But as of right now, dreams of a mandate were clearly just that; if any of Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin do turn red, she's done.
If it does become clear that she's lost, will Harris concede? Or will she recycle Hillary's advice to Biden and instead set lawfare into motion? Would Democrats try to steal the election again, like they did in 2016, with faithless elector schemes or attempts to prevent the certification of the vote? Would the up the ante?
I am still skeptical that we'll get a chance to find out, but people have been speculating about Trump and Republican "sore loser" scenarios for months. What does a Harris loss look like?
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