naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
4d ago
On one hand, this seems like a not-uninteresting proposal?
On the other hand, this was almost certainly written by AI (which is in this case quintessentially low effort), and is being posted by a fresh-rolled account so there's no user reputation weighing in your favor.
On balance, I'm not approving this post.
naraburns
nihil supernum
19d ago
Did it become official at some point?
No, but emojis often fail to meet the standards for effort (particularly when posted without other text) or inflammatoriness, and they are in almost all cases also egregiously obnoxious. I do feel like I've seen at least one of the other mods use emojis on occasion, and I don't think I've dropped a ban on emojis more than a handful of times, though. I think I may even be the only mod who has ever done it. Fortunately, that may be because it has rarely been necessary; people seem to pick up pretty quick that this is not really the venue for that sort of thing.
naraburns
nihil supernum
20d ago
Since I am participating in this thread as a moderator, I'm not going to get any further into the substance of the argument than I already have.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Banned one hour for use of emojis.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
Speak plainly, please, and respond charitably. The article directly addresses what I take to be your sarcastically-expressed criticism. If you do not think it addresses your objection sufficiently, you should explain that clearly and effortfully. Mockery does not raise the level of discourse.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
I am neither being ironic, nor am I aggressively misunderstanding you. Thankfully options exist outside your false dichotomy!
It looks from this post as if "aggressively misunderstanding" is still in fact what you're doing, though--including, here, by skipping the most generous recommendation I could think of. Look--
Your post was a mix of whataboutism, if it's true that there are nazis on the right it's not their (red tribe) fault, and oh, while I hate nazis they'll treat me better than the woke police. Insofar as 'running cover' implies you have some secret agenda to promote Nazi material, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as you're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing (lol Tiki Torch cosplayers) and whatabouting - yes, you're running cover for them.
My point was that magicalkittycat was engaged with a mixture of whataboutism and the Chinese Robber fallacy that is presently circulating in furtherance of running cover for Leftist antisemitism. Insofar as 'running cover' implies the news media has some secret agenda to promote antisemitism, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as they're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing and whatabouting, yes, they're running cover for antisemitism.
Every once in a while it will happen that I am in a conversation with someone here, using the terms and tropes of this place, and it will turn into a kind of "no, you" debate. This seems to be most common with motte-and-bailey arguments--"no, I'm not playing in the bailey, you're playing the bailey!" Sometimes people find ways out by finding a good word to taboo, or through careful charity, or whatever. I'm honestly not great at this (Zorba is genuinely great at it) but I do try. Anyway we seem to be in one of those circles now, where I get accused of whataboutism (maybe simply because I'm not the OP, and so there's a "first mover" advantage or something) for pointing out how OP's sources are engaged in a kind of whataboutism.
But dude, I have to actually invoke that progressive argument here, much as it pains me. You fit the trope of the partisan pretending to be objective and principled to a T to avoid confronting the fact that you are, in fact, also waging the culture war most of the time.
Right, and the circlular firing squad for this argument is the one where I point out that you're playing the role of the leftist who simultaneously speaks as the arbiter and adherent of objectivity and truth while downplaying the possibility (or at least likelihood) of objectivity and truth. Why is it that forums with actual free speech so often begin leaning to the right--almost as though leftism can't stand on its own two feet? Clearly I am not without my priors! And yet exactly one of us in this discussion has frankly admitted the existence of, and offered criticism against, both right-wing and left-wing antisemitism and racism, and it isn't you. I wasn't kidding, here:
My beef is with identitarians.
Your beef is with the vast majority of the modern left. Seriously, replace identitarian with vast majority of the modern left - is your statement significantly different?
Yes! White supremacy is not a new kind of identitarianism, though the term "white supremacy" has gotten woefully overextended and maliciously distorted in furtherance of Leftist aims. And I think a lot of Leftists are not identitarians, though sometimes they have to be reminded of that. The anti-Woke Left is not a group of insignificant size--and relevantly, my sense of this forum is that most users are anti-Woke leftists who have been surprised to find themselves in the center-Right of the Overton window, as radicals have stretched it to reach the territory of identitarian spoils systems.
The main difference between left-wing identitarians and right-wing identitarians so far is that left-wing identitarians mostly control their political coalition (the Democratic Party) while right-wing identitarians remain at the fringes--albeit, less at the fringes than they were before the Great Awokening. With specific reference to antisemitism, the antisemites on the Right are reactionaries who fetishize a failed effort to implement national socialism in a country they often know nothing about. The antisemites on the Left, by contrast, are the vanguard of Islamofacism, a movement with at least tens of millions of supporters around the globe, who are prosecuting a centuries-long grudge against the ideological descendants of Judaism and Christianity. I don't think it's "whataboutism" or "running cover" to suggest that if we're going to talk about political antisemitism, we should talk about all of it, not just those bits of it that are most convenient to our preferred narratives.
I honestly can't tell whether you're being ironic or just aggressively misunderstanding my point. I feel like the most generous thing I can say might be "keep in mind your aims in writing this response to me; now go back and read my post with the idea that I was trying to make the same point to magicalkittycat, for analogous reasons, as you had when writing this response to me."
Less charitably, I did find this line to be unmitigated bullshit:
You and others running cover for antisemitism on the right
I am not running cover for antisemitism on the right, and nothing I wrote can be reasonably construed that way. Hell, I am occasionally accused, here, as a moderator, of running cover for the Jews! But neither do I think that the antisemitic left should be simply allowed to do what it does because everyone is so distracted by the tiki torch cosplayers they fail to notice (or outright excuse) blatant antisemitism from the left and its political allies. (And while the 9/11 hijackers weren't formally "leftists," their presence in the United States was arguably traceable to changes in American immigration law plausibly attributed to the left.)
My beef is with identitarians. To my mind, the main difference between leftist identitarians and right-wing identitarians is that right-wing identitarians are a bunch of reactionaries doing reactionary things. Leftists set the stage, defined the terms, and picked the fight. Reactionaries are doing exactly what (as @Fruck correctly observes) the radicals were told they would do. I don't like it. I don't agree with it. I think that nothing good will ever come of identitarianism, no matter how righteous-minded its practitioners. I don't think any of it is good. But neither do I think it reasonable to apportion blame equally to both sides; this is a mess of progressivism's making.
The only remarkable thing about this post is the political valency; what is this place if not nut-picking to wage the culture war?
Discussing the culture wars is not the same as waging them. Yes, I acknowledge that people do wage them, to various degrees. But we do try to discourage that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
22d ago
In the 10s - far before 2021, by my observation
It's not without reason that people often peg the "Great Awokening" to ~2014. I don't know how the literal President of the United States can be an underappreciated contributor to social trends, but nevertheless--I think that President Obama's direct impact on the federal bureaucracy was to replace broadly egalitarian neoliberal political machinery with explicitly identitarian political machinery.
This article also has empirical data on the explosion of identitarian propaganda in the news media beginning with Obama's first term in office.
naraburns
nihil supernum
22d ago
As others have pointed out, it's difficult to not see this entire post as an artful, nut-picking troll.
But even setting that aside, left wing antisemitism, or perhaps more specifically Islamist antisemitism from left wing political parties, is so frequent that people scarcely bother to report on it (or, perhaps, they actively suppress it because it hurts Democrat narratives). The "free Palestine" shooting of the Israeli embassy couple was much more "Nazi" in character than anything Andrew Torba has ever done. I suspect that highlighting right-wing antisemitism, real or imagined, is a case of "accuse your enemy of what you are doing while you are doing it."
That said, just speaking from personal experience, in my social feeds earlier today I read some surprisingly outright racist remarks in response to Ketanji Brown Jackson's ill-advised suggestion that being a racial minority be considered a kind of disability. As an anti-identitarian liberal this concerns me greatly, but I do think it is (as others have suggested) directly downstream of leftists spending decades crying wolf. If you spend enough time and energy insisting that your political opponents are Nazis, at some point your political opponents are going to decide that they might as well break out the jackboots, then. The story of Liu Bang, Emperor Gaozu of Han comes to mind--
Liu was responsible for escorting a group of penal labourers to the construction site of Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum at Mount Li. During the journey, some prisoners escaped; under Qin law, allowing prisoners to escape was punishable by death. Rather than face punishment, Liu freed the remaining prisoners, some of whom willingly acknowledged him as their leader and joined him on the run from the law.
I don't know any Nazis, and I prefer it that way. But if--and I do not think this is the case now, but if it ever were--I were one day forced to choose an authoritarian regime to live under, and the only choices were some kind of white nationalism and some flavor of socialist wokism, I'm confident that my chances of both survival and prosperity would be much, much greater under the nationalist regime.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
Designed to be perfect, but disturbingly generic.
That's the movie's whole shtick. It's the emotional equivalent of ludicrously empty calories. This takes real skill to accomplish, and I'm genuinely impressed with how well the movie and the music really present as the apotheosis of pop. It's the perfect emotional dessert--utterly devoid of nutritive value.
Then unfortunately, your "fixes" made your post indistinguishable from AI slop.
I'm literally just telling you to write the argument in your own words, same as anyone else. Nothing could be more fair. Nobody comes here to talk to LLMs, and if you post something that has been touched by AI, chances are good others will notice and this will distract from substantial discussion. There's just no reason to use AI here.
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