Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
15hr ago
Why is periodic warfare not an acceptable outcome here?
Because it's expensive and kills people and destroys things. In other words: war is bad.
At the risk of repeating myself for the slow kids in the back, that doesn't mean I am always against all wars. But I am against fighting wars just because we can.
I especially don't want American lives lost and American property destroyed, but as little as I think of the Iranian regime, I would also prefer not be killing Iranians and wrecking their shit without a good reason, one that benefits me and my fellow Americans.
You've gone from "We totally won, Iran is over, this was worth it!" to "What's the big deal if periodically bombing Iran is just something we do now?"
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
16hr ago
They would not be asking questions as perceptive as that: they would beat their chest and scream and feel pride (and they would be right to do so.) In the strength of their military, of their confidence as a Great Power, and of the simple fact that their enemies are dead.
Yes, they probably would.
I am not Russian, and I would prefer the US not be like Russia.
These figures not only hate the United States, they have killed American soldiers through proxies and terrorist attacks. They are dead now. This is a good thing. It really is as simple as that.
If all we wanted was revenge, we could have achieved that a long time ago. What I want to know- pardon me for making "simple" things complex- is whether we have decreased the number of proxy and terrorist attacks that will kill American soldiers in the future. And for how long Iran will remain defanged. (Countries can in fact rebuild rather quickly unless bombing Iran is going to become an annual sport.)
If you are unsatisfied with the conclusion of the Melian dialogue, that's fine. But it is an answer, and I'm not hedging it.
In the Melian dialogues, Athens was the aggressor, unapologetically saying "We will crush you because we can, and you should submit to us because we are more powerful." There was no pretense that Melos had done anything to provoke them or earn this treatment.
Yes, I would be very unsatisfied if the answer to "Why are we doing this?" is "Because we can."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
16hr ago
Okay. So if the Russians did all that, and Ukraine was still threatening to join NATO, Russians would credibly ask "What was the point of all that?"
Of course, if Russia did all that, they could literally walk into Ukraine and annex it with barely a whimper. This is manifestly not the case for Iran.
So again, if we are back here again in a couple of years, then what was the point?
Have we destroyed their nuclear program? Have we really?
Are ships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz without any concerns about Iran?
I would like the answers to these questions to be "yes." Instead, the answers to these questions are carefully hedged.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
17hr ago
Eh, Theodora was an actress, which was synonymous with "prostitute" back then, but:
For she had an especially quick and biting wit, and soon became a star feature of the show. There was no shame at all in her, and no one ever saw her embarrassed. She would provide shameful services without the slightest hesitation and was of such a sort that if someone slapped her or even punched her full in the face she would crack a joke about it and then burst out laughing.
This is from Procopius, who hated Justinian and Theodora. Does that not seem just a wee bit over the top?
It strikes me as much like Pliny's story of Messalina (Claudius's wife) having a fucking contest with the city's prostitutes (which she won, naturally).
The Romans definitely got up to some shit, but the hit jobs written by their political enemies should be taken with the same grain of salt as stories about Trump's pee tapes and Melania being introduced to him by Epstein.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
21hr ago
Okay, so since you're hung up on the word "forever," how many years is it reasonable to expect this victory to take Iran out of play?
I don't have a bias against any action. I have a bias against actions without articulable win conditions and end states. I am not a dove. I am not an Iranian sympathizer. I am not suffering from TDS. I do more and have done more for my nation than you.
I am asking reasonable questions about what my government and my tax dollars are doing.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
22hr ago
I'm not ranting. Don't be absurd. This is not personal animus.
What I am doing is noticing. I'm noticing that I am not the only one asking you to define victory, to define winning, to define "allow." You just keep repeating "We bombed Iran, we won!" And reasonable people are asking "What did that gain us?" "How does this change the situation?" And most importantly "Can you actually make a prediction with falsifiability?"
Here's my prediction: in one year, Iran is still our enemy and at the very least, is credibly accused of still funding terrorist organizations. Within 3-5 years, Iran is credibly accused of continuing its nuclear program, and is posing an ongoing threat to the region, with a reconstituted military presence. In that time, we do not have normalized, let alone cordial, relations with Iran.
This is all predicated on the cease fire holding; if we go back to bombing, maybe a ground invasion is still on the table. In which case I will adk what our best case "victory conditions" will be.
Will you acknowledge that if my predictions are correct, you were wrong? Or will you weasel out of admitting any conditions in which you could be proven wrong.
I will acknowledge that if American tourists are vacationing in Tehran in a few years at Trump hotels, Trump was a very stable genius after all. More seriously, Iran ceasing to be a threat in any of the ways I have described will prove me wrong.
Your move.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
I am sorry that four-letter words offend your sensibilities while you boast about hot tub cuckoldry. But I understand cause and effect just fine.
There is a thing called history.
All of your predictions are weasel-worded so that no matter what actually happens, you can claim you were correct.
Iran will not be "allowed" to…
What does that mean?
Does it mean the US says "You're not allowed to do this"? We are already telling them that. They weren't "allowed" to build nukes, bomb their neighbors, and fund terrorists before the war. And yet they did.
Does it mean that if Iran does any of those things, we will remove their government?
Does it mean that if Iran does any of those things, we will bomb them until they stop doing it?
And if we do that, do we bomb them until their latest facility is rubble, their latest salvo of missiles is expended, and then brush our hands off and say "Mission accomplished"? You will write another ode to Trump's historically unprecedented brilliance as you clasp your hands staring up at him in girlish starry-eyed adoration, and then a few months later Iran starts doing the same thing again, but that's okay, we didn't "allow" it so you can insist Trump totally won. Just like they aren't "unilaterally" tolling the Strait of Hormuz if they aren't literally invoicing every ship that passes through. You have constructed "victory conditions" with great craft and maximum wiggle room.
If we are in exactly the same place in two years, with Iran developing a nuclear weapons program, launching missiles in the Gulf, threatening the Strait of Hormuz, and funding terrorists, and our response is another very strict spanking (bombing), you will claim your predictions were correct because, well, we're not "allowing" Iran to do these things.
What have we accomplished?
What we have accomplished is relearning the lesson that you can't just bomb a country into submission, that "Shock and awe" only goes so far. A lot of Americans still have this fantasy that we can just bomb, bomb, bomb until our enemies are glass, we will "bomb them into the stone age," and no boots on the ground or compromises will ever be required.
Unless we're literally willing to go nuclear (and maybe not even then), no, we can't.
The closest we ever got to this was World War II. We literally nuked two Japanese cities, we firebombed Tokyo (doing much more damage than the atomic bombs did), and Japan's navy and air force was more thoroughly annihilated than anything we have done to Iran. And still we were facing the very real prospect of having to invade the Japanese islands at enormous cost.
Think about that. Japan had been as thoroughly curb-stomped as any nation in history, and we still thought we'd have to go in to finish the job because bombing wasn't enough, and if we didn't finish the job, they could eventually rebuild and become a threat again.
Japan ended up surrendering more because they were worried about the Soviets reaching them than because they were afraid of more cities being bombed.
If you (and Trump) are not willing to treat Iran like we treated Japan in World War II, complete with the commitment to invade if necessary, then we have not curb-stomped them. The threat is not removed. We have not "won" anything meaningful to us. Iran losing doesn't mean we won.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Good post I mostly agree with, but just an aside:
Sometimes atheists read and appreciate them as well, and with all appropriate grace and charity, while I'm glad that others read them too, I don't think they make as much sense for atheists. The Christianity is too foundational - too much of Lewis and Tolkien's writing is impregnated with faith - for them to make sense otherwise.
Something a lot of Christians forget is that many atheists are either former Christians themselves, or have had enough exposure to Christianity that they understand it even if they don't agree with it. We are perfectly capable of reading Lewis and Tolkien and "getting" what they are saying about God and faith and morality.
It's possible this is more true of Americans than Brits, as my impression is that while religion is a pretty weak force in the UK, even among those who still believe, in the US even atheists probably have regular exposure to sincere, hardcore believers. If you grew up in an atheist home and never went to church at all, maybe your only impression of Christianity is a kind of sneering disdain for the god-botherers. But most Americans, at least until the current generation, probably had parents who at least took them to church occasionally. The idea that atheists find religion alien and unfathomable (and that all atheists are militant sneerers) is not true across the board.
I don't know what Pratchett's childhood was like, but he was born in 1948 so he probably didn't grow up atheist. I think you are right that he clearly became one, of the "angry at God not existing" variety.
Well, mainly just for the reason I said. I think it doesn't work because it's a straw-man. Nobody believes that justice comes in atoms, or mercy in molecules. Things that aren't elemental particles are not lies, or any less worthy of being valued or loved. Death's rebuttal of people who believe in justice does not land, and because I know Pratchett was a brilliant author and extremely capable fantasist, I believe that Pratchett could have come up with a metaphor that worked. It is not beyond his imagination to make the same point in a more artful way. After all, most of his other books make the same point, often more successfully.
Yes, it's a straw man in that of course justice doesn't exist in physical particles, and neither Death, nor the author using him as a mouthpiece, thought people did think of justice that way. His point, whether you agree with it or not, is that a lot of people believe in justice and mercy and goodness as intangible but very real metaphysical forces in the world, manifested by divine powers (God, for Christians, obviously). And he's pushing back against that, saying no, these things only exist in our heads, they only exist to the degree that we create them. The metaphor was perfectly coherent to say what the author was trying to say: there is no Just World, there is no deity who is going to make sure that good and bad people get their just rewards in the end. Justice is only what we make of it.
Perhaps it is you, only able to conceive of atheism as nihilism or an angry reaction against religion, who finds it difficult to comprehend the speech from an atheist author's point of view.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Okay, but I don't count third worldist AI bots as people. Are there real people who believe this? Eh, there is someone who believes any proposition you can verbalize.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
My understanding is that marital prospects for the median Indian guy are pretty dire, actually.
Incidentally, do you think Americans moving to lower cost of living places (which has a negative impact on the economy and housing for locals) is evil? How about American "passport bros" going to poor countries where their American dollars (and US passport) allows them to outcompete local men?
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Those are social advantages, but yes, an American in Mexico would have more or less the same buying power and quality of life as a local. That's why many less affluent Americans' retirement plan is to move to a poor country.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
I was waiting to read your take from God-Emperor Trump's Naruto-world.
So look- it was never in doubt that the US could inflict massive amounts of destruction on Iran, and that any military conflict would be one-sided in our favor. This is not news. Of course we can bomb Iran's infrastructure to rubble. We've always had that capability. No one thought Iran was going to pull a rabbit out of its hat and clear the skies of US planes or take out a carrier group.
Hell, we could invade, conquer, and occupy Iran if we really wanted to. It would be enormously costly, but I don't think anyone doubts that the US could do that if we were willing to pay the cost.
Your definitions of "victory" seem limited to "We hurt them worse than they could possibly hurt us," along with a lot of wild predictions that the Iranians are so completely cowed now that they will be good boys and do none of the things they've been doing for the last 50 years that have so aggravated us. No more sponsoring of terrorist groups, no more inflaming regional conflicts, no more threatening oil shipping, no more trying to build nukes.
The problem with your triumphal narrative about how Iran got totally recked is this: yes, they did. We have totally recked countries before. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. (I'm not reaching back for WWII, because those countries we actually occupied and changed regimes and turned into the good boys they are today.) The US is very good at wrecking countries.
As events play out even today, we know that Iran can and will rebuild, even after losing most of its military capability. And it's still capable of firing missiles at its neighbors, it's still got oil money which will still go to Hezballah and the Houthis, et al, and as for tolling the Strait of Hormuz, let's just say it seems that what the US is saying and what Iran is saying are two very different stories.
I know you do not believe it's possible to doubt Trump's glorious divinity without suffering from TDS, and that no one who does not bask in his aura will ever do anything glorious, not even sit in a hot tub contemplating fucking another man's wife. But I just read your confident predictions about how Iran will totally no longer be in the nuclear or terrorism or troublemaking game at all, followed by you denying that any continued conflict with Iran could possibly be evidence that perhaps they have not been brought to heel quite as throughly as you insist they have, and all I can say is -
What the fuck? Seriously. What the fuck.
What did we accomplish? Yeah, we kicked the shit out of Iran. Whoo-wee. Never doubted we could do that. It's ridiculous in one sense to say the US "lost" the war when Iran is the one with a bunch of dead leaders and sunk ships. But what was our objective? What was our win condition? All the things you say we have already achieved, which Iran is denying we have achieved at all, and which you are tacitly admitting we will still have to fight them again in the future to prevent them from achieving. Spending all this money, causing all this destruction, for an end-state that appears to me to put us in no better a position than we were before it started, at great economic cost, if not "losing," certain does not look like "winning" to me.
We "won" in the same sense that we "won" in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. No one would argue those countries scored any kind of military or economic or political defeat against the US. And yet. Does anyone really think we "won" those conflicts? That we achieved our objectives and it was so worth it that we'd do it again if we had it to do over? That we couldn't have spent national treasure on better purposes?
When the war started, I was not enthused, but, well, I also do not like Iran. So if we actually toppled their regime, or at least crushed them so thoroughly that they became a non-player in the region, and we will never, ever have to worry about an Iranian nuclear program again, I'd have considered it a questionable but at least definable victory.
Instead, right now I see a Trump TACO and you still insisting he's the greatest thing ever with the fervor of a Maoist admiring mangos.
You are right. You cannot make other people see reality. What do you even want me to say?
Iran will not be allowed to maintain a nuclear weapons program
Iran will not be allowed to continue manufacturing missiles to bomb its neighbors
Iran will not be allowed to continue funding paramilitaries to harass and terrorize its neighbors
Iran will not charge some kind of unilateral toll on the Strait of Hormuz
!remind me 1-3-5 years
(And don't think I don't notice how much weasel-room "unilateral" gives you.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
What value does this comment have? What's it's point other than to be randomly nasty, unprovoked? Don't do this.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
This is becoming tiresome, and you're very close to a permaban already.
I'm loathe to ban you for such a petty, low-effort comment that from anyone else would just be an eyeroll, but you have exhausted all slack and charity. Yes, I know, you were joking. (But not really.) You do not have the leeway to throw jibes like this.
You are duly warned. Next time, I will ban you. Yes, even for something as minor as this.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
copypasta like this is more appropriate for the Friday Fun Thread, and arguably not there.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
The fuck, man? How is this useful? You don't have to encourage or validate people posting in the Wellness Thread, but it's also not an appropriate place to take a knife to someone asking for advice just because you have a bone to pick with them.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8d ago
Well, not to keep getting post-modern, but who defines what is and isn't post-modern? Like I said, I think Cormac McCarthy is very much a post-modern writer, but there are critics who disagree.
Catch-22 didn't seem post-modern to me. But it has been a long time since I read it.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8d ago
Dunno that "everyone" hates neocons, and even if there aren't any here, this is definitely an attempt to build consensus.
I should ban you for the trolling and personal attacks, but you're kind of amusing. The trolling isn't that amusing, though, so that was your one freebie.
Remember, while you feast on the schadenfreude and disrespect, the schadenfreude and disrespect is also feasting on you.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8d ago
Here's my take:
I don't think people should write posts using LLMs, and my inclination is to warn/ban anyone who does it.
The problem is that I have to be pretty damn sure because it's easy to register false positives. Already people tend to assume any long wall of text was probably written by an AI. So given a choice between being trolled by AI posts or overzealously banning anything that smells at all like AI, I'm going to mostly let it go.
Of course when you admit using AI it presents a problem, because we appreciate the honesty but don't want you to keep doing it.
There is also a gray area where people are using AI to "help" them write posts. We obviously cannot ban anything touched even a little by AI, but how much is too much? @self_made_human uses AI to draft some of his posts. I dislike this, but....shrug
Personally I like AI, but not for writing anything I care about. Your words here should be your own...unpolished, half thought out and all.
That's my opinion but we haven't really settled on an official mod position other than pure AI posts where you just paste the output of an LLM are right out.
Your record as a troll means I'm less likely to look on this charitably, but other mods seem disinclined to mod it and honestly I was only suspicious, not certain. So you get a pass this time, but do not treat this as an invitation to keep testing how much you can get away with.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8d ago
I agree with @07nk. Shakespeare is meant to be performed, not read, and reading a play is almost always an inferior experience. Sure, some people do enjoy reading his plays because most of them have some banger lines, but the drama, the humor, the intensity, is all in the performance. It's why there are so many "interpretations" of Shakespeare using the same lines but completely different sets and costuming and you can still deliver a compelling experience even if they don't look like Elizabethans.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8d ago
Well, I wasn't posting as a mod, so I appreciate the sentiment but you're allowed to dislike my posts.
I thought my thesis was clear enough, but evidently not.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
9d ago
Oh boy, literature sniping, my favorite kind of geek-out.
So, what is art? You're right to observe that "If I like it it's good" is a shallow way to judge artistic quality. Clearly the purpose of art is not merely to entertain and enthrall.
On the other hand, "To increase collective well-being?" Shades of Fredric Wertham–all that is not wholesome, morally fortifying, and artistically meritorious should be thrown out! Art can be just a thing to entertain.
Art, in my opinion, is all the things people look to it for: entertainment, escapism, a display of talent and craft, a few moments of amusement, but also meaning, reflection, new lenses through which to see the world, education, enlightenment.
No book or other work of art, of course, is going to be all of those things. Some will be none of those things.
I am one of those people who thinks there is such a thing as "good" and "bad" writing and that there are, if not completely objective, then at least generally agreed-upon rubrics by which you can judge it. It's more than style (19th century classics would be considered "badly written" by modern stylistic standards) but it's also more than theme or symbolism or capturing some essential essentialness of the human experience or your place in the world or the current zeitgeist or whatever.
I'm going to take the very unchallenging centrist view that you can like high literature and comic books at the same time. You can enjoy both experimental postmodernism and Extruded Fantasy Product like Brandon Sanderson.
If you are incapable of critically examining what you consume (at least to the degree that you recognize, "Yeah, this is kind of crap, but it's fun") then you probably aren't getting much out of anything you consume but whatever time it takes you to consume it. But that doesn't mean reading things just to be entertained is bad in and of itself.
Of the works you mention, I have yet to tackle Infinite Jest (I read DFW's debut novel, The Broom of the System, and was so thoroughly unimpressed I've been putting off tackling IJ). I have read Thomas Pynchon, and while I still love The Crying of Lot 49, it's not a coincidence that that's one of his shortest novels. Gravity's Rainbow was an ordeal to get through, and I only finished it out of sheer determination. Like several other commenters, I would not categorize either Slaughterhouse-Five or Catch-22 as post-modern. Satirical and cynical, certainly, but post-modernism is not just irony and counter-culturalism.
I think, therefore, that you are completely wrong about post-modern not being "real" or there not being anything "there" (at least two of your books aren't post-modern at all, and they definitely do have clear themes and plots). Post-modernism is also not just a "stylistic" exercise. Post-modernist books are generally characterized by being "experimental" and defying the conventions of traditional novels–hence, non-linear storytelling, unreliable narrators, metatextual references, disregard for conventional plot and characterization, etc. But there are always ideas there, and I would argue most of those books do have a cohesive (if meandering and self-indulgent) narrative.
I'm bemused that you praise Blood Meridian (which is also one of my favorite books), as many people consider Cormac McCarthy very much a post-modernist writer, and if anyone can be accused of writing in an abstruse way as a "stylistic exercise," it's him. (He demonstrates both how you can break punctuation and sentence structure rules, and why they exist.)
The fact that what you love, someone else will hate, and what you find deep and meaningful, someone else will find cheap trash, is why it's very hard to arrive at any real consensus on artistic "quality." I've dunked on Brandon Sanderson plenty, but I have read a lot of his books, and I have seen people say that they got a lot of value out of his handling of various kinds of mental illness, etc. (To which I want to say, "read something better," but there I go again.) I both love and hate Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon (I'm 50/50 for any given book), and there are people who are fierce devotees and people who think they're both just orthographical prestidigitators.
The vast majority of writing is crap. This has always been the case, we just didn't have so much writing produced at such scale. People will argue that the likes of Charles Dickens and Herman Melville and Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes are only well-regarded today because they had comparatively less competition; this is true, but they also had a comparatively much smaller audience. They are admired today because in one way or another they captured something about their time and place and wrote about human lives we still find interesting and relatable today even if we are far removed from those eras.
But! All of them (except maybe Tolstoy, who was rich and also batshit crazy) were also writing for money! They were very much writing to their markets (Cervantes wrote the sequel to book one of Don Quixote because a rival was plagiarizing him!) And a lot of people dunk on all of them for being pedestrian or prosaic or culture-bound or just boring and consider them to have been the Brandon Sandersons of their day. (They had plenty of critics in their own time.)
I remember reading an interview once with Piers Anthony, the original Dirty Old Man of SF&F, who was once an enormously prolific bestseller before kind of falling out of favor with the fandom. He genuinely considers himself to be a Great Author who will someday be recognized alongside the likes of Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy. While it's hard to imagine the author of The Color of Her Panties being so remembered, who can say? It may well be that Brandon Sanderson is remembered as the great American fantasy writer of the 21st century. I think there is something to be said for telling literature snobs to get their heads out of their asses. At the same time, there is something to be said for telling Millenials whose literary horizons never expanded beyond Harry Potter and Twilight to Read Another Fucking Book. (But you could say the same thing to a lot of hippies and neckbeards who never read anything but Tolkien and Heinlein.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
9d ago
@JeSuisCharlie isn't just accusing us of being biased towards each other, though. He's accusing us of giving special protection to Indians because of you.
Presumably the only reason we haven't banned the Joo-posters is that none of the mods are Jewish (afaik).
Whoops. Yes, apologies.
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