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13d ago
While you may be right, I'd quibble with considerably. Moving from Reddit is going to do that regardless because Reddit's rules make a place more left wing because they restrict what you can talk about to begin with. And you lose people that would prefer Reddit over other places and they'd probably be more left wing just going by the idea that: 1) someone using reddit at all is more likely to be left wing. 2) people leaving reddit for another site are more likely to be right wing. The entire idea that the motte leave reddit at all is explicitly right wing coded. Discussing HBD is right wing coded. Discussing trans issues is right wing coded (I say that because discussing means there's more than one view represented). In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded. Most of the people I know and most of the people I encounter are left wing and have no interest at all in talking about anything to do with actual issues, they have their stance they've taken and if you talk about it deeper you're a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, shitty person. Unless you're dedicated to proving right wing people wrong in every situation you're simply a bad person. I've heard this many times. And I suppose it's mostly a confluence of most people being left wing and most people really being unable to tolerate content they disagree with and being almost wholly uncurious. But all that being said, it's like IG-111, we're here because we're witches and they allow witches here. The 1000 witches problem is never really going to go away.
I do think that you're posting this in bad faith, however. Considering your examples of most upvoted comments are sitting at 7, 10, and 18 votes and your summary of each being both inaccurate and uncharitable. Why did no one respond to your HBD post about white suffering, because almost no one cares about HBD anymore. The idea that HBD has been talked about to death has been talked about to death, here. But you made it very clear in your post that you didn't believe what you wrote, it wasn't a trick like that post about one movie destroying a child's brain. Do you believe that no one read your disclaimer or that no one here respects steelmanning an argument they don't believe? Is that why you didn't bother to link to it? You brought up none of those rebuttals yourself but instead make a top level post calling people out who actually had the courage to make a post about something they believe and you're mad because they got a marginal amount of internet points and that nobody brought up your own points. It's hard enough to have the energy to argue your own thoughts, now you want us to argue yours as well.
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15d ago
Allen's accusers are celebrities themselves, I think it makes a massive difference given that the investigators dismissed them at the time. If Mia Farrow was nobody and her kids were nobodies too this would be a weird fact that nobody knows about Woody Allen. Though, I think his marriage makes it not just easy to believe it about him it's weird enough that he basically has to prove a negative to make himself look right. I mean, he was investigated twice for months at a time and both investigations concluded that abuse did not take place. Maybe he's good at hiding it but it's always seemed to me to be that Mia found out Woody was sleeping with Soon-Yi and either invented the abuse in her head or just lied about it for revenge. But I don't really know, that's just the reading I get from the wikipedia article about it.
Either way, Woody's a joke because he married his daughter. That's the biggest reason he's a soft target, and the reason, even if he didn't do what he's accused of, most people will believe it regardless of if there's even evidence presented.
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17d ago
I don't find that report very convincing at all. They don't even know the mechanism of what's happening. They just present a bunch of Russians that exist around these events and then say there's classified intel they have that makes it clear that it's Russians but they can't reveal what that is. It's possible sure, but this report basically has people saying they have had Havana Syndrome, there were Russians around when they got it, and there's classified intel that makes them sure it's Russians. It all seems like highly motivated reasoning.
Tonight, we're reporting for the first time, an incident at last year's NATO summit in Lithuania—a meeting that focused largely on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and was attended by President Biden. Multiple sources tell us that a senior official of the Department of Defense was struck by the symptoms and sought medical treatment. We told Greg Edgreen what we'd learned.
Greg Edgreen: It tells me that there are no barriers on what Moscow will do, on who they will attack, and that if we don't face this head on, the problem is going to get worse.
I mean this was included, as near as I can tell it's nothing. It doesn't even say that they think it was actually Havana Syndrome it just says he had symptoms, then they turn to the talking head to confirm that Russia definitely did that. Why not target Ukrainians? I tried to ctrl-f looking Ukraine in the fairly long wikipedia article on it and got no results. What makes Americans and Canadians so special? I also don't know why the Office of National Intelligence would release a response saying that it's unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible after this report because, at least in my mind, it's favorable for the US to pretend its true even if it's not because bolstering Russia as a boogeyman is a valuable distraction against anything happening domestically. Especially when the FBI and the White House released statements that basically said nothing at all except acknowledging that Havana Syndrome exists. All that being said, I don't think it's super unlikely just that this isn't convincing.
She asked us to withhold her name for her safety. She's the wife of a Justice Department official who was with the embassy in Tbilisi. She's a nurse with a Ph.D. in anesthesiology. On Oct. 7, 2021, she says that she was in her laundry room when she was blindsided by a sound.
Anyway, this is actually what I wanted to post about about anyway. What, they couldn't list her height and weight and DOB?
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1mo ago
In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
I didn't know Sweet Baby Inc existed before a post about the new Suicide Squad game was on the front page of /r/all on reddit which was a dossier in the game written by Lex Luther praising the Amazonian culture of Wonder Woman for not having "toxic masculinity" and the comments were talking about Sweet Baby Inc as the reason this kind of writing exists.
That aside people complain about "woke" writing in videogames all the time. It's just that the people that do it usually either do it very badly or the ones that do it badly are very heavily exposed and then completely dismissed. The Last of Us Part 2 was heavily criticized for bad writing and injecting woke themes to the detriment of its plot aside from people not liking the plot itself or the way it was told. That was huge in the gaming sphere and was a much bigger bone of contention than Sweet Baby Inc is now, mostly because the culture war was used as a cudgel to deny any merit to criticism of the game.
From what I've seen, on reddit at least, there's nothing like a culture war touchstone like gamergate, everyone just shits on the writing of Sweet Baby Inc and there's not even any pushback at all which is really rare. Probably because it's like that diversity tool that blizzard made, people who don't care or like woke content will defend it at all costs if they think it's real artistic intent but the fact that it's counterfeit corporate checkboxing to make sure the game is woke probably pushes any defense the people who would defend the games woke content would have away. Naked corporate manipulation for profit (though, I can't imagine how this is profitable, but I also can't imagine how to spin these things any other way that's not them nakedly saying they're paying people to create propaganda tools/writing) is on the same level as being generally right wing. Which is a long way of saying I don't think people are heavily invested in this because most people are at the very least vaguely aware this was happening already, they just maybe thought it was from agenda pushers involved in the game dev process, the reveal that it's ingrained at a corporate level doesn't change much for people who didn't like the fact that it was there and definitely isn't a damsel that people need to rescue like Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkesian.
I was just perusing /r/kotakuinaction to look at what they were saying about it and one of the comments was "might as well call it Jan 6 "Insurrection" part 2 since they have as much in common."
It feels like outlets that got a lot of traffic from gamergate are trying to push the name again to generate more ruckus for clicks or attention on both sides.
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1mo ago
I think you're right but it's not just a torch being passed on. Writing in general became about representation both from the author and in the writing. Look at the many amazing reviews of the writing for the new True Detective series because it was run by a woman and was about women. Or basically any of the many threads we've had about book awards even among those that people acquiesce is well written it also almost always is about something that has an ideological purpose/bent to it.
It's probably harder to identify the good when you have to include a bunch of other conditions on the writing for it to be considered worthy of praise/awards these days. I'm not saying it doesn't exist but even before this became a big part of identifying what is "good art" these days there was a glut of basically everything that no one has time or really care to dig through.
I wonder what happened to ghost writers for movies though. Used to be you'd get people like Tom Stoppard rewriting almost all of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Quentin Tarantino punching up Crimson Tide, Aaron Sorkin rewriting the Rock or even Tony Gilroy and Aaron Sorkin improving Enemy of the State, so even in these popcorn action movies we'd get some quality dialogue. Now, I guess they figured out that it didn't matter or don't care or the writer's that would be ghostwriting are just making indies? It's a mystery but I think it's why modern action movies often feel soulless compared to older ones because they don't ever bother to try to improve them. Or more likely people don't care about the difference, say what you want about Joss Whedon but there is a stark difference between his writing and someone aping his writing but I'm sure most people don't care to notice the difference. A large portion of people like Fallout 3 better than New Vegas and can't even understand how the writing is any different. And most people who are into "good" writing don't care about making things that are pulpy better they want Disco Elysium they don't want the next God of War to be written like that or even care if it's rewritten by a better writer just to make the dialogue better. I wonder if anyone who likes an action movie that was rewritten several times to get the script in a better state could ever identify that they liked that movie because of the writing, anyway?
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1mo ago
Just chiming in to say you're not crazy and I remember that as well. I don't know if he ever actually got unbanned but I do remember someone saying they would unban him and then ban him again if he started only making posts about how hard it is to date women. It was in a friday fun thread.
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1mo ago
About 10+ years ago when I signed up for tumblr I took the username I have now and boy, oh boy, did I get a lot of messages from people who wanted it badly. They offered to buy it, they threatened me over it. There were many exclamation points. So, I'd agree with the idea that this is just an old thing with a new name.
Though, I do agree that plurals is definitely a thing that has expanded beyond its normal base because of people's fetishism over identity these days. It's like diagnoses from doctors are now invitations to a fandom rather than treated as any actual problem. I feel like every person I meet online under 30 is either furry/bi/trans/nonbinary/plural/etc. because, I suppose, there's power in being something more than just normal. Most just put it in their bios and I wouldn't know if I didn't check them but there are a few, notably ones that are plural that have a lot of performative elements to their identity specialization where they make new discord accounts, change their account name constantly, etc. They're like Anthony Hopkins in Magic when he tries to stop talking as the puppet for five minutes. They have to tell you all about their multiple personalities, it's impossible not to.
It's also interesting to me that unlike whatever fiction on MPD I've seen where they put on a big show, the plurals I've noticed change nothing about their presentation except to deliberately tell you how that personality is different (this one is gay, this one is a girl, etc) but there's no discernible difference to me in the text, it's just the same person telling me a list of biographic details. I suppose back before 'systems' you'd have to perform to get a diagnosis, I somehow doubt you'd have to now if someone is handing out diagnoses for this, and even if they aren't self-diagnosis is good enough, anyway.
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1mo ago
I take everything from Gen Z with a grain of salt. I'm sure there are some people that believe these things but I really think it's all just irony and post-irony all the way down. Just replace sarcastic with ironic here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=udJw-CzX7sA
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1mo ago
The critics had the whole season available to review. You can click on all the good reviews by critics here and see that. https://www.metacritic.com/tv/true-detective/season-4/
But you're right, it was poorly reviewed by a lot of outlets, it's just to come out looking good on aggregators you only have to have a few 100s/90s to balance that out and still look well reviewed.
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1mo ago
I've heard only negative things about it from anywhere online that wasn't part of, or tangentially part of, the mainstream media. I'm actually surprised it's rated at 61% (though almost anything below 90% for a TV show on RT is abysmal). But it should be noted that reviews are just not worth anything anymore. Almost everything receives either universal acclaim on Rottentomatoes which translates to about 70-80 on metacritic, almost anything outside of this usually comes from a much lower amount of reviewers even bothering to review the media to begin with.
Night Country was interesting to me because I was kinda annoyed that they brought in new people but Pizzolato last two seasons were underwhelming (Though, to me, I'd put that on mostly not having Cary Fukunaga to direct every episode). I was waiting for it to finish but it was heavily advertised and I noticed it a lot. Basically it was on my tablet when opening an empty tab in Brave it puts paid news there if you scroll down and Night Country was there every week like clockwork. First, it was the rave reviews, then the huge viewership numbers, and then it was basically articles taunting people who disliked it by saying that despite a small number of online detractors it was the most successful True Detective season ever both critically and in viewership numbers. When the finale rolled around it literally used the Rolling Stone review that said it was the best ending the series has ever had.
Naturally, I went to reddit's television to see what they thought and they were aghast. Game of Thrones season 8 levels, and this was in normal non-fandom subreddit. The show's main subreddit was just memeing all over it. The best people could come up with was meek, "I didn't think it was that bad." being heavily downvoted at the bottom.
I half expected this because we're in a revival era, but nobody who actually made the original shows is participating in the revivals. They brought back Justified to make a show that was nonsensical and bad but worse was not really in any way the show that had come before. They didn't bring back any of the writers and didn't really bring back anyone but the main character, and Olyphant brought his daughter in real life to play his daughter in the show and it was just painful to watch. They brought back In Treatment but replaced Gabriel Byrne with Uzo Aduba and I just didn't even want to deal with it because aside from not bringing back the star they also didn't bring back the creative team. Frasier they brought back Kelsey only and it really shows. It's just a modern shitty/middling sitcom that happens to have the same character. Why are they not even bothering to try to make these good at all? The exception I'll give is Party Down which, funnily enough brought back everyone they could, including the creative team. Even when it was blatently political and culture warring it was still better than these lazy ersatz elevator-music cover songs of something people used to like.
Night Country is just an example of things that have come before and haven't been noticed because most of the time things can squeeze by with just the right amount of mediocrity. They put their leads and creative lead front and center and girl-bossed their way into being called a good show, after they stole another show's name for seemingly little reason other than marketing. But all these things compound the other way. The better your show is supposed to be the worse it seems when it's not and this goes similarly to taking another's show's name for no reason. The culture war only exists when these projects fail, you don't like it you're sexist/racist/etc, otherwise it's yaasss queen slay even if it's just barely clearing the bar of success.
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1mo ago
For firefox and not mentioned by others: old reddit redirect.
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1mo ago
I really didn't like Knives Out because of how simplistic the plot felt to me. I never really thought about race in that movie. But I've heard someone say they liked that you could tell if someone is racist because they've disliked that movie. It broke my brain enough (and I was basically "outing" myself as a racist if I questioned this) that I didn't try to get any elaboration.
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1mo ago
I think you're right. I have a friend in academia who's been trying to convince me that I'm actually autistic rather than my previous diagnoses of anxiety and depression. And I'll admit that it would be nice to have that diagnosis instead, even though I don't think I'm autistic, and certainly don't fall far on the spectrum if I am. Autism just feels like a more tangible/acceptable disorder than simply saying depression/anxiety. Though my friend seems more into the idea of it being an identity for me than anything else.
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2mo ago
Yeah, I hate Destiny 2 because they basically took away things I spent money on and both pvp and pve just feels like a treadmill of weekly chores/missions, but man do they know how to make shooting things fun.
FPS games aren't really my thing but I've recently heard good things about Trepang2 but it's apparently very short. I've also heard near universal acclaim for Titanfall 2 and it's, from what I've read and heard, the epitome of move fast and shoot stuff.
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2mo ago
I know nothing about gridiron football or Taylor Swift but it seems obvious that it was an ad. I can point to the fact that during the entire NFL season the entertainment news site Deadline (which doesn't do celebrity gossip) ran a weekly story basically about Taylor Swift sitting in the stands during the games. It had the same vibe as these SNL ad stories they do every weekend where they basically describe the opening monologue from SNL and two sketches as if they need to be covered and are part of the zeitgeist but it's just another crappy sketch from a show that hasn't been relevant in years. I mean it's likely a circle of different media companies (Taylor, NFL, entertainment media) feeding and trying to broaden all their fanbases. Like a car commercial inserted into a TV show that's handled clumsily. Even people that don't realize it's a commercial can recognize that something is inauthentic about it. Maybe there's nothing intentional on either Taylor (probably impossible to tell) or the NFL (I haven't seen any of the broadcasts with her) about this but the entertainment media is absolutely using this, stoking it, and reveling in it when it might not even exist as a thing if they didn't.
My thought was, at first, that it must be a huge spectacle style distraction for them to run a news story about it. But the consistency of the articles and lack of any substance made it obvious it was an ad. The complaints make sense to me "Why do you care they're cutting to Taylor three times a game?" Because it's an ad and ads are annoying. Ads recently have an ideological bent which makes conservatives especially wary of them. Conservatives, to some extent rightly, see weird astroturfed media shit all the time dedicated to hating/destroying them because the media is mostly their enemy. The fact that they decide to create a conspiracy because the astroturfed weirdness of this is obvious and they're just making the mistake of thinking that this is political because most of the weird astroturfed stuff from the NFL in the past years has been political is understandable. And the fact that conspiratorial complaints get platformed to discredit real complaints is just business as usual for the media.
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2mo ago
Well, now you're moving the goalposts, I wasn't talking about whether they broke the rules but if they were comparable to the above post's rulebreaking.
It's not about length, you literally didn't put in enough effort for me to adequately understand what you meant by your response because it was just a vague half-answer that may as well have told him to google something. Which could have been a glib dismissal (as a sarcastic example of the responses to yours) or a genuine attempt to direct him to information but it was vague enough that I couldn't parse it.
I don't think anyone should be in trouble for their posts in that thread but if they are it should start with the OP. The OP post was literally just boo outgroup disguised as boo ingroup with some extra boo outgroup thrown in as well. The fact that you were hurt as a vegan is important but you never made mention of that in your post and kept it vague. If you hadn't been vague and said you were a vegan and effective altruists/rationalists have a good handle on explaining the rationale behind their lifestyle that isn't annoying then the responses to yours would be as bad as the one you're saying is comparable but you didn't, which is my point about being low-effort, not that you broke the rules but that you simply didn't put the full amount of effort I would expect of someone invested in the topic to give, which as a bystander makes me think you don't care all that much on the topic and the responses to yours may break the rules but don't really matter all that much because they're responding to someone that doesn't care all that much.
Maybe it's just me but I think the rules are sieved through each response made. Nearly every post three deep breaks the rules but eventually it becomes "no fun allowed", no quips, no jokes, no turn of phrases, no statement of opinions without reams of ink. If you have a problem with those posts they stem from the OP and you really have a problem with that which basically stated the exact same thing but also said "change my mind." I understand you were hurt but you really shouldn't hold onto it like this because this situation is not comparable.
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2mo ago
I rarely agree with Hlynka but there's a wide gulf of antagonism between referring to groups and going after individual posters. Also, those responses to your post were about as low effort as your response was and not directed at the higher effort top-level post, so I'm not sure why you're complaining about this being analogous.
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3mo ago
This is how I rate them, if I think the comment is breaking the rules but isn't likely to lead to more breakages then I'd say bad. If it breaks the rules and will likely lead to more breakages I rate it with a warning. I think I've only ever said something deserved a ban once but I save that for anything I think deserves a permaban only.
I'm more lenient than the mods (not lately though, things are pretty chill these days compared to reddit) but I also find it hard to ever say something definitely deserves a ban without context so most of the time I treat the warning as if it would lead to an actual warning/a short ban/a week ban because with more context it could be any of those things. I also rarely get served up with duty for egregious comments, anyway.
I mean how should you rate it? Use the metarule and treat janitor duty as a way to hopefully shape this place in the way you'd want it to be through suggestion. Otherwise I wouldn't dwell on it too much. I don't think they're using the janitors as juror votes.
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3mo ago
Leftober is kinda cool but the 13th month will always be Smarch to me.
And what's the next part of that thought? Because KMC started his comment saying that this was an argument against "sex work is work" and not tennis is different than sex it just happened to be applicable in that situation. I mean arguing that sex work is different from other work seems trivially true and not actually what people are talking about. Shame and discomfort can be applied to many kinds of work for many kinds of reasons and I don't think that disproves that they're real work, whatever real work is supposed to mean.
I mean the subtext here is that sex work shouldn't be allowed, should be shunned, something along those lines? And not just proving that sex is something that evokes discomfort and shame for many people and that its especially exacerbated by imagining or experiencing their family in sexual situations.
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4mo ago
It's also not a fair hypothetical unless you think there's no difference between incest and sex. There's not a different name for playing tennis when you do it with your family.
The indirect hypothetical has more to it but I also wouldn't hire any of my family as a doctor, a contractor, to clean my house, be my personal trainer, but I also think this also works from the other way around. A lot of people who are of certain professions wouldn't want to have to do it for a family member either and wouldn't want their family to participate in helping them financially, and it's probably very much related to shame but mixing personal life and work is just innately uncomfortable for some people.
It's a wide net though to catch shame and discomfort or government compulsion. If the idea is that it's fake in the sense that being a model, actor, streamer, artist, athlete, is fake either because it's something that people would do for fun or it's not particularly hard, then I get that angle a lot more but then I'm not sure what the validity is for. I'm sure a lot of people are ashamed of their relatives for playing videogames on twitch and wouldn't tell anyone about it or watch them do it, but a lot of people wouldn't read their novel written by a family member if they thought it was too prurient or violent or was just something they were culturally opposed to. I'm sure there are many people ashamed of family members being janitors. garbage men, house cleaners and wouldn't hire them or recommend them to friends.
Anyway, I think if the original hypothetical is as ridiculous as saying tennis and sex are the same it's not really helpful to just up the hypothetical up a notch and say that incest and sex are the same.
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4mo ago
Is being a gynecologist not work because a mother would refuse to let their daughter do a pelvic exam on them? Or if you require opposite sex if a father refuses to let their daughter do a physical/prostate exam/colonoscopy?
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5mo ago
I remember reading an askreddit thread of a European or possibly Australian asking why there was so much toilet clogging in their media when it literally never happened to them. Some people who had experience in America and different countries explained that American sewage pipes were an inch or more smaller than European sewage pipes.
I couldn't find that specific reddit thread but there was a thing that had this link: https://pottygirl.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/why-do-american-toilets-clog/
Which suggests the clog factor is mostly about different design.
You're assuming I'm right wing because I have that opinion. Call me self-deluded if you want but most of my opinions are far left of anyone here. Though I read your union and abortion til birth opinions sound pretty normal left wing to me but I admit I live in a bubble. Most people I know are all or nothing and don't really care about nuance about things, if they believe in unions they believe in every aspect of unions if they think abortion should be legal they make no distinctions on it about how it should be practiced at all. I know it's because they mostly don't care about meting or puzzling out complexity but I also think even if you sat them down and made them think about it there's only a small proportion of people who would be moved to make specific lines about how much of their belief should be used in government mandates/laws. But I live in southern California, maybe that paints my life different.
But I didn't mean to suggest that right wing people are the only ones that will talk, I mean to suggest that it's right coded right now, because they're not in power, because they're the minority, because they will let the discussion touch ends they don't like or want possibly or probably because of those reasons.
Left wing people, in my experience, limited as it may be, will shut down conversations with insults or insults by proxy the moment it becomes even close to being about something they don't like. I've had right wing people talk to me about deep state stuff and it starts off with "I know you think I'm crazy but this is what I believe..." and when I question it they get excited that I'm interested and tell me more like the more they say the more I'll believe. And when I questioned the Steele Dossier's accuracy I had someone switch their tone of voice to the way you talk to a very small child and question my mental fitness and this was just a mild like "I don't know it seems kinda far-fetched..." And that's from people I know, people I don't will just respond with things like "oh so you're a shitty person" or more likely use the originator of a claim or opinion or the biggest name espousing it and then call them a piece of shit so they don't have to call you one. I'm sure they'd be perfectly happy and cordial to talk about a discussion where I was in full agreement with them, but I don't know that I'd consider that a discussion.
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