somedude
2d ago
You are nowhere near a good enough poster to adopt this tone and be taken seriously.
Case in point, last week you made statements referring to stay-at-home mothers as breeding machines and house servants. It was the kind of thing that would get updoots on most of Reddit, but you were clearly and utterly unprepared for any sort of pushback.
When asked what it was about an average menial job outside the home that elevates a woman from the status of machine or servant you completely imploded. I personally love the upvotes and downvotes here. They tell me interesting things, like how your claim that I was putting words in your mouth persuaded absolutely no one.
You aren't some hero fighting the good fight, you're an /r/atheism midwit who's out of his league.
somedude
2d ago
Imagine what the forum would look like if every progressive who flamed out and tearfully quit after losing an argument didn't do that.
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
11d ago
Me:
So are stay-at-home mothers mentally deficient breeding machines and house servants, like you just said they were one post prior,
You, one post prior:
Well then it sucks to be the kind of person that would enjoy life as a breeding machine + house servant. Maybe some people love it, but that is pretty close to being dosed with alcohol as a fetus so you'll enjoy being a Delta in a Huxley book.
I seriously can't believe you even tried to play the "putting words in my mouth" card. Like you realize everyone can see all these posts, right?
When you give women the option not to be a stay at home mom...most take it. When they have the option to have fewer children, most take it. Hence the reduction in family formation and lack of children. Revealed preferences.
That's nice, but I didn't ask you about any of that, did I? No, I asked you what it is about a menial routine job like most people have that elevates a mother from a subhuman object of your personal contempt to, presumably, a real human being.
somedude
11d ago
I think being a parent is cool too, but if you're expected to do all the house work, childcare and also work a job outside the home that is a terrible deal.
So are stay-at-home mothers mentally deficient breeding machines and house servants, like you just said they were one post prior, or did you decide during the intervening three hours that it's actually okay since they don't have to also work outside the home?
Also, can you explain what sort of virtue is conferred by... say... a job schlepping boxes at Amazon, such that it distinguishes real human women from mere broodmare house slaves? What is it you think makes schlepping so much more righteous than maintaining one's own family home? Do you think boxes are more important? Do you think Amazon appreciates it more? Please, by all means, enlighten us.
somedude
12d ago
If you want I can make up an arbitrary position, ascribe it to you, give you hell for not defending it, and then conspicuously stop responding when you point out that you've literally never said such a thing.
somedude
13d ago
Sure, once some intelligence utility maximalist comes in and decides that in this scenario the guy has an infinite amount of steak to hand out. Also it goes without saying that our hypothetical intelligent wolves won't be clever enough for any failsafe or contingency on their part to make any difference. Nope, our smart dude will just say something so smart it makes them all want him to hold a gun to their heads.
somedude
13d ago
How are you on this website without realizing how hard it is to control a superintelligent AI?
By seeing arguments about it that are usually vague and lame. It's always either "just trust me bro it's impossible" or some weird unfounded faith that sufficient intelligence equals infinite capability regardless of circumstance.
According to you guys, a naked human being surrounded by a pack of wolves should be able to just genius his way out of being delicious as long as he's smart enough.
somedude
24d ago
And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee".
The terms of the agreement are right there in your link, can you please point to the one you think obligates the US to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine? As far as I can tell this claim is pure /r/worldnews tier cope crossing the line into blatant lying.
somedude
27d ago
Arm them with what? Europe is a bunch of demilitarized vassals who popped their monocles and scoffed a few years ago when Trump told them to meet their 2% NATO commitment. It's not a video game, they can't magically turn GDP into missiles instantly.
Ukraine was cooked the moment it became clear their last counteroffensive wasn't going anywhere. China is going to go for Taiwan at some point this decade, and the US doesn't want to squander its air defense munitions in a forever war. Otherwise they'd have found a way to arm-twist or otherwise persuade the House GOP holdouts by now.
somedude
1mo 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.
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.
somedude
1mo ago
Yeah watching him say shit like "well when I said people like Rowling I didn't actually mean Rowling herself" while getting downvoted fifty points through the floor on every post he makes at least contributes some humor value. Just try not to ban too many otherwise okay posters for getting frustrated with him along the way.
somedude
1mo ago
You guys are still going to end up permabanning him at some point down the road. Same as Darwin the first time, same as Hlynka. The trajectory of the mod team's qUaLiTy CoNtRiBuToR charity cases is always obvious from a billion miles away.
somedude
1mo ago
I did respond to your other example, I literally said that there are things we can predict (remember the shark example?) - just that we don't need to read Darwin to predict them.
Utterly and completely irrelevant. We don't need to read Newton to know that things fall down when dropped, either. Which principles of a theory were commonly known before that theory was codified is totally meaningless. What a bizarre criteria to try to impose.
But that doesn't change the fact that there are things that we can't predict. Would the brown rats still be as likely to survive in one thousand years? How about in one million years?
So what, things are tautological or otherwise invalid if they don't offer infinite predictive power over arbitrary timescales? Or do you have some kind of threshold of validity? What is it, and how did you arrive at it? Where are you getting this stuff?
On the other hand Natural Selection does not gain any predictive power from stating the obvious, that individuals who get devoured won't pass on their genes.
So now theories are invalid if you think they're too obvious? Okay well, you'll just have to deal with the fact that your claim to being the King of Science is likely to go unrecognized.
Seriously, these are not good arguments. These are all complete asspulls with no actual principle behind them.
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
So if we take a bunch of bacteria and keep exposing them to antibiotics on a consistent basis, there's no reason to worry that we might be creating resistant bacteria?
What if a species of critter that naturally occurs in two different colors gets loose in an environment full of predators that can only distinguish one of those colors well? You can't think of any way to predict what things are going to look like down the line? None at all, it's all just random to you?
Nonsense. Not only is natural selection a theory capable of generating predictions and thus not tautological, you haven't given us a reason to care if it is. Like that guy trying to tell us that the scientific method "rests on faith" last week, informing me that obviously true and useful things don't meet your arbitrary philosophical standards just tells me your philosophical standards shouldn't be terribly important to me.
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
Link? All I can find are an instance where they were friending random people and it turned out to be a bug they apologized for, and various complaints about the algorithm filling feeds up with suggestions people don't care about. Nothing on the order of "it keeps unfollowing Taylor Swift because something something celebrity worship."
More to the point, whatever they're doing, it's not because "Zuckerberg agrees" with you. Firstly because there's no way Zuck gives a shit about redistribution of social capital as a goal, and secondly because there's no reason to imagine that trying to force people to read one another's unwanted spam would generate social capital in the first place.
You seem to have this naive conception that people sit down and say "Time to use social media to find common ground with the rest of humanity!" It's so out of touch that someone in this thread actually had to take more than one post to explain to you why he wants to read about his local football team and not random teams he doesn't give a fuck about. Like... what? I don't think you understand why people use these things.
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
I don't think you fully appreciate what an unappealing product you're describing. Social media under US control would quickly become a derelict husk. You would need to either exert Chinese levels of authoritarianism over the internet in order to try and prop up your crummy domestic social media, or else watch American public discourse move under the control of other powers.
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
1mo ago
My argument isn't about parsing degrees of certainty
No? Because it sort of sounds like it to my Philistine ears.
Is this like a hypocrisy claim? That since science isn't literally true it would be hypocritical to criticize theism for not being literally true?
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Except one of these things can produce consistent on-demand results that wouldn't be possible if its claims were false, while the other cannot. By any standard of truth-seeking that doesn't succumb to solipsism and ludicrously rule out observation of the world as a means of understanding it, the former is obviously much more true than the latter.
Ah but while science may contain observable truth, it doesn't meet Nelson Rushton's standard for being "the source code of the universe" and that's important... why exactly? Telling me you have a standard of truth under which apparently absolutely nothing is "literally true" isn't actually interesting.
The reason I keep thinking this is about getting atheists to stop snorting is because I can't think of any other purposes for this whole argument, charitable or otherwise. Like okay, nothing in the universe meets the Rushton Source Code Standard of Literal Truth. Neat, why should anyone care? What decision should anyone make differently now that they've heard this?
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.
Anyone who's been around long enough could name names. "I lost an argument about HBD and the mods won't ban anyone for it, time to make a dramatic post about how everyone is Nazis and I quit" was a meme for quite a while in the Reddit days.
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