somedude
8d ago
Oh man I just went back and had a second look at the exchange where you guys supposedly banned him for "single issue posting" a few weeks ago. Turns out @self_made_human didn't realize which parts of the mod system were publicly viewable and the listed reason for the ban was actually:
Jew-posting with a boner so hard that the fig leaf fell. Build off Amadan's recommendation to ban him if he did it again.
But gosh golly gee whiz, I thought he was impartially banned not for the content of his existing posts but for failing to post upon a wide enough variety of subjects? You know, that incredibly important rule about the number of subjects one posts about? The one that totally isn't an excuse to punt people who post about the wrong things.
While I'm at it, here's a reminder of how Zorba phrased it:
Just go post about something every week! Here's a nerd making goat noises! Here's some nerds comparing cards in a game they've never played! Here's another nerd taste-tasting AI-created cocktails! this is not hard
Because I figure we're about halfway to the point where "just post a youtube video about goat noises or something" suddenly becomes "ackshually we have to feel like they're good posts with sufficient effort" or whatever.
somedude
3mo ago
I'm just going to go straight to another 30-day timeout, and probably a permaban the next time you do this.
You should probably make note in the rules that only Hlynka gets infinite temp bans. People seem to be getting confused.
somedude
5mo ago
Europe doesn't have anything. The entire EU together couldn't come up with its promised million shells. Meanwhile North Korea just pulls that out of its back pocket when Russia calls. It's not a video game, they can't just magically turn GDP into ammunition and arms factories instantly.
somedude
5mo ago
Doesnt need to be instant. I havent seen this deficit of european arms and great north korean bonanza result in significant russian victories.
You've seen the Ukranian counteroffensive flop while NATO officials openly tell you to "expect bad news" in days to come.
To carry on war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money.
No, you need weapons, which come from factories, which the west by and large doesn't have anymore. The US hopes to produce 100k shells per month by fiscal year 2026, while Russia is expected to ramp up to 2 million per year in the next couple years. Meanwhile the EU says a lot of happy horseshit but gets dunked on by North Korea singlehandedly.
somedude
8mo ago
How low does activity here need to drop before things aren't working as intended anymore? Will you be happy with one post per week as long as it's four times longer than it needed to be?
somedude
2mo ago
The only crowd I've ever known to take an interest in this sort of thing, outside of academic philosophers, are internet theists who've given up on ever winning an argument anyone else cares about. Imagine busting this out because you saw someone chortling at the idea that Star Wars lore is real, and you'll understand how it looks from the outside. The part where everyone gains so much epistemic humility that they quit snorting whenever someone brings up the will of the Force in a serious conversation just isn't coming.
somedude
2mo ago
Yes, I do.
Furthermore, if someone wishes to disagree, they can make an actual claim to the contrary and then defend it with something outside of their own head. Empty metaphysical non-arguments are deeply unimpressive.
somedude
7mo ago
So yes, fluff everything out to triple length with AI, but don't admit it, got it.
somedude
1mo ago
Tagging @marten too so I don't have to post twice.
Look, I'll be honest: If you're not playing some kind of game that amounts to wanting people to stop snorting when someone brings up god in an intellectual context? If this isn't the usual goofy theist sophistry and you're actually just parsing the differences between degrees of philosophical certainty that no one out in the world ever thinks about when making decisions?
Then I'll leave you to your hobby and continue to be puzzled as to the appeal. Back in the world where people make decisions, the fact that science does in fact produce functional results obliterates every other consideration anyway.
somedude
1mo ago
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Okay well in that case it's also hypocritical to criticize Cthulhu and Star Wars lore for not being literally true. Hooray, solipsism. This entire line of argument advances absolutely nothing.
It essentially amounts to a theist's special request for their beliefs to be treated as intellectually serious even though they can't point to any justification for them that exists outside of their own skull, because hey after all, nothing is really certain, right?
Bluntly, request denied until one of these arguments successfully and meaningfully distinguishes Christianity, theism, whatever, from an infinite number of bullshit things I could make up on the spot.
somedude
1mo ago
No matter what example you give me, Natural Selection will always be the correct explanation, because it is no explanation at all.
Listen, this shit you're doing right here isn't going to cut it. You picked the example where you could prevaricate about what a bunch of scientists in the twenties did or didn't predict, and conveniently cut out the other example which elucidates my point in a way that leaves no room to dissemble.
I'll make it really direct this time so that there's no room for misunderstanding: What you're trying to tell me is that there's no way to predict how likely a living thing is to survive based on its traits and the environment it occupies. That it's a total mystery.
You've painted yourself into a ridiculous corner where you have to pretend you don't know whether brown rats are more likely to survive than grey rats on an island where the snakes can't see brown. Because if you do know, then you can predict that the grey gene is eventually going away, natural selection gains predictive power, and this whole silly facade collapses.
Also I still don't know why I should care if true things are tautologies.
somedude
1mo ago
TikTok has competition that consists of viable social media platforms, not government-mandated crippleware, so I feel like comparisons are limited. If you're going to force Americans to use that crippleware at gunpoint in pursuit of nebulous social engineering goals, you may as well just ban everything and make them go outside.
somedude
1mo ago
You're forgetting the part where there needs to be a reason for anyone to care if you expect them to participate. Exactly who do you think the audience is for a social media site that randomly deletes people from your friends list, spams it with total randos you don't give a shit about, and goes out of its way to avoid showing you videos anyone finds too interesting?
YouTube has been doing this thing where they throw random small creators into their suggestions and I hate it. It's gotten to the point where I just immediately block any channel in my feed if the video presented has under a thousand views, because so far they've been poorly produced dogshit 100% of the time.
somedude
2mo ago
I'll consider worrying about the other mechanisms as soon as I see them come up in any context other than atheists dragging religion and someone wanting to chastise them without having to actually defend it. In a quarter-century of internet, so far that's literally never happened. Everyone seems perfectly content with logic and reason under every other set of circumstances.
somedude
30d ago
Note to @SecureSignals to make sure he posts a bunch of random bullshit he doesn't give a crap about in between real posts. Just go to the Friday Fun Thread and drop some funny cat videos or something and ignore any responses once you've hit your quota. Just make a complete mockery of this stupid ass non-rule until they reach back into their ass and decide that actually total wordcount per subject was the real metric all along.
somedude
8mo ago
If this guy bites it without breaking any actual rules, who's actually going to believe that it was for not posting about "other stuff" enough? Just ban him for posting badthought too cogently and spare us this kind of farce.
somedude
3mo ago
and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.
Calling it, this dude is an alien or something. No human being would communicate this to another as if it were something anyone would ever give one iota of a shit about.
somedude
2mo ago
I've met too many 60th percentile ASVABs who were demonstrably capable of organizing/supervising complex evolutions involving hundreds of people and dozens of moving parts
This seems to be a great time to bring up one of my favorite subjects when it comes to this debate. You know it, you love it, it's McNamara's Morons.
For those of you who might have missed this little tangent, during the Vietnam War, Secretary McNamara decided to lower the required score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test to as low as the tenth percentile in order to raise a bunch of cannon fodder for the Army. Shockingly, this experiment was a catastrophe. You can read the Wikipedia article here.
Now this particular instance, of someone coming into a complex field that actually intersects with reality and lowering the required scores on standardized intelligence tests, causing disaster to ensue, would seem to be a significant data point when it comes to the relevance of standardized intelligence testing.
I mean, you'd think so, right? Nonetheless I have been chasing this dude around the forum like the Terminator trying to get him to make a post that engages with the example in any meaningful way, to absolutely no avail, all while he continues to bang his drum about how meaningless standardized tests are.
If you happen to click, make sure you expand the comments on that second link. Look at where he goes "How is this an argument against individual merit?" out of literally nowhere, just completely arguing with someone who only exists in his imagination.
At this point I don't really expect any kind of worthwhile response, but I may as well throw this out there if he's going to continue to post about the subject and expect to be taken seriously.
somedude
2mo ago
Listen, once you reserve the right to disregard the other guy's actual post and respond to the one you imagined him making, you're not participating in a forum in good faith. If you're going to respond to someone with "How does this prove X?" like it's some kind of comeback then X can't be something the other person has never posted about.
You can suspect whatever you want about what kind of autistic power level hiding fatlords everyone is, but you have to respond to posts that exist. You have to participate in the conversation people are actually having.
somedude
2mo ago
Oh get out of here with this. Dude routinely reserved the right to ignore others actual posts and try to call them out over arguments they never made, and would sit there fantasizing about what they "really" thought and what bad people it made them. There's never been a version of this place where that was tolerable, other than in the case of Hlynka himself and the "999 strikes and you're out" rule he was allowed to live and die by. It's absurd that he lasted this long.
somedude
7mo ago
He's doing a killer job of things, too. This was an actually decent effortpost that had nothing to do with the J-word but was still Nazi-adjacent enough to make sure everyone knew what he was doing.
Combine this level of dedication with his ability to not just break down and call people horse fuckers, and they're going to have to REALLY bend over backwards to get rid of him.
Mods should probably specify what proportion of X to not-X posts are allowed.
somedude
1mo ago
If I introduce a species to a different environment than the one in which it evolved, what framework should I use to predict the sorts of changes most likely to occur across generations?
I could consider the traits of that species in light of how pleasing to god I think they are. Maybe slap together some hokey system of analysis based on Biblical zoological references and spend a couple decades losing arguments about it on the internet.
Or I could examine the selection pressures likely to be present in the new environment and make my predictions on the basis of natural selection. Which of these do you think is most likely to generate correct results?
somedude
1mo ago
Because the assertion that I am endorsing is that the appropriate way to group ideologies is not by position statements, which observably change with some frequency, but rather on core axioms and values, which do not.
I won't comment upon this assertion except to point out that this was absolutely not what Hlynka was doing. Hlynka would just tell people they were lying about their positions, make up some of his own to attribute to them, and then strut off as if he hadn't just made a fool of himself.
His bullshit system of categorization wasn't leading him to some deeper insight others failed to understand, it was leading him to make stupid nonsensical posts where he attempted to call people out for failing to defend arguments they had never made.
Did you make a point against his IQ skepticism that he doesn't want to answer? Prepare to have him ask you how your point is supposed to invalidate colorblind meritocracy. Have you ever posted about meritocracy before? Doesn't matter if you haven't. Are you actually in favor of it? Fuck you, Hlynka can read your mind and knows you really aren't.
Horseshit. Banned for posting badthink too cogently, using a rule that doesn't seem to actually exist and which I've never even heard of outside the context of this particular poster. Completely transparent.
You guys can't even invent a reason that this post breaks any actual listed rule, so you've concocted a rationale out of thin air where you can ban someone for not making other posts that you feel they should have.
Like what's the proportion of X to non-X posts someone is allowed to make? Does it matter how often they post? Does it matter how long the posts in each category are? You don't know because you're pulling this out of your ass.
Massive loss of respect. You'd look less ridiculous just banning him for being a wrongthinker.
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