Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
12hr ago
Maybe 5-10% of the lines are about family life. The majority of the content is about brothers-in-arms doing things
It's an epic about a war. War and brotherhood was a central feature in that story. It does not support your argument that the ancients did not place a high importance on family.
It's not just the battles and the gods and the monsters that are important. It's *why" they did all those things. The climax of a story may be the only place a hero's motivation is mentioned. That doesn't mean it's not important.
Your reasoning and your theories are very shallow.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
15hr ago
The only thing more amusing than your ahistorical just-so stories is your confidence that you'd totally p0wn GK Chesterton.
women and the family an annoying requirement to keep things moving
What a truly miserable attitude.
However, as I have pointed out many times, while Rome and Greece and other ancient societies were certainly patriarchal, there is ample evidence (in poems, other writings, and contemporary histories) that feelings of love and affection for wives and children (including daughters!) were not some alien innovation introduced by modernity.
You cite the Iliad and the Odyssey as being all about the bros, nothing but bros, ignoring that the entire reason for the war was the abduction of Helen. You will probably say that was just men fighting over a bauble and the dishonor of having a bauble stolen from them, but Homer, and later poets such as Euripedes and Herodotos, speak of much more complex motivations. Menalaus loved his wife, and whether she betrayed him with Paris or was forcibly abducted depends somewhat on the narrative, but her own thoughts on the matter are expressed as well.
And in the Odyssey, Odysseus's primary motivation is trying to get home to his wife and son! And Penelope is a figure of nobility and faithfulness who is worthy of his devotion.
Try reading what you cite.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
I'm aware. Even Brits and Australians have more free speech than Chinese, though, and I think you'd be foolish to say you'd rather be governed by the CCP.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
I'm sorry to hear all that, but how does it have anything to do with the conversation
I'm sorry this is not evident to you. I'm resigned to the fact that we're mostly beyond the moral event horizon.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
It takes some effort to exceed the already low level of charity in this thread, but you've done it. Thanks for serving up an example of what I was just talking about, I guess.
This post is nothing but culture war (and calling it "culture war" is generous) and "I hate my enemies." No matter how much Whining you do, you are still not allowed to just vent about how much you hate your enemies and look forward to making them suffer. You are still not allowed to just snarl "Boo outgroup!" You are still not allowed to make broad generalizations rather than talking about specific groups and people.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
Sans-cullottes, Red Guards, Khmer Rouge, they may have been as murderous as the Nazis, but they were leftists and Nazis were (and are) rightists.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
Oh, such a zinger. How many times have I talked about having to censor myself on social media? I have had similar experiences to those of @dr_analog. You know why I don't talk about my personal life here much? Because a good chunk of right-wingers are also crazy and evil, and I have received literal death threats. I don't feel particularly threatened by a few mentally ill cheeto-inhalers, but I am mindful that if the crazies are saying it directly, other people are thinking it, so I should not widen the attack surface. Sure, leftists who cancel family members for having the wrong opinions about trans people and BLM are "evil," I guess, but I would submit that so are the people who eagerly express what they want to do to their political enemies in the coming civil war they can't wait to break out.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
6d ago
Looks like you are speed-running nominative determinism.
Two weeks ban this time. If you're just here to provoke, go away.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
6d ago
Strunk & White's Elements of Style gets a very bad rap for this. It's considered the "bible" of proper writing by many English teachers, but they forgot that S&W were addressing college students who were absolutely hopeless at writing essays. So it beats proper grammar, punctuation, and communicative style into you, but it was never meant for creative writing.
(Knowing your S&W is good for fiction writers too, but if you treat it like a bible you'll write correctly but boringly.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
A literal open borders advocate (which is how I would interpret "no person is illegal") might indeed say that even criminals (for crimes other than illegal entry) shouldn't be deported. But saying we should go after businesses rather than targeting individuals doesn't mean open borders and no one can ever be deported. My guess is those making the latter argument would mostly say illegals should only be deported if they commit other crimes, or if their appeals/application process is denied.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
To add to this, most people underestimate how truly terrible most submissions are. I don't mean "Not a particularly good or interesting book," I mean "So bad that the agent can tell within the first few paragraphs that this writer is hopeless." If you get them to read three entire chapters you're ahead of the pack.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
Hah - it's flattering to think I have fans here, but even if so, I don't think my posts give much of a sense of how I write fiction.
Ironically enough, my only actual professional writing credits are with Steve Jackson Games. It's amazing to me they have survived all of Steve's really bad decisions. I guess Munchkin keeps them afloat.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
It's SF, actually.
Honestly, I've given up trying to find an agent or publisher with this particular book. I might try the indie publishing route someday, but I'd want more books in the pipeline to do that.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
I've heard that January is a bad time to query, precisely because agents know a lot of people have just finished polishing up their NaNoWriMo novels and are sending them out. Don't know how true that is.
One of these days I will finish one of my other manuscripts. The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
I wasn't using rhetorical flourishes. I was using words to communicate things that I actually believe.
You read my statement and your conclusion is that I believe "going after the employers is the best and only reasonable way to do anything about illegal immigration and, as a result, going directly after illegal immigrants is cruel and should be verboten."
Is that correct?
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
f we go back to Nybbler's actual claim, that people believe "going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten", we see that PmMeClassicMemes clearly does not want immigration law used against actual illegal immigrants, even illegal immigrants with previous criminal histories.
It is not clear to me that that is true, but I tire of trying to engineer semantics to cast what someone "really" means (especially when this is done to me) rather than just asking them directly.
But Nybbler's statement wasn't "literally no deportation against anyone, ever, in any situation, no matter the case". He said "going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten".
I suppose in fairness I should ask @The_Nybbler directly, then. Does "going directly after illegal immigrants is cruel and should be verboten" mean one believes no illegal immigrant should ever be arrested and deported under any circumstance?
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
The two statements you quoted are not perfectly consistent.
Adjectives, adverbs, and qualifiers alter the meanings of sentences.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
I do not think @The_Nybbler was referring to "their strongest form." I am aware there are people who genuinely believe immigration laws should not be enforced and everything ICE does is illegitimate. @PmMeClassicMemes does not seem to be saying "immigration laws should not be enforced" (in fact he says the opposite), and I don't know of anyone other than the most radical leftists who'd agree that literally no one, not even a convicted felon, should be deported ever. @The_Nybbler seems to be merely taking a shit, as he usually does, on people who have moderate-to-strong opposition to the maximal position.
The other posts you quoted seem to be generally agreeing with my own personal position, which is that immigration laws should be enforced, but the administration is unserious about really doing that because they are more interested in setting up confrontations on the streets than applying any pressure at all on the businesses who continue to incentivize illegal immigration.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
Do you think any nuance exists in these objections? Perhaps something less absolute than "going directly after illegal immigrants is cruel and should be verboten"? Is it possible the presence or absence of certain qualifying adverbs might impact the meaning of such statements?
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
I'm not "punishing" either of you, I'm just telling you to give it a rest. I am not trying to judge who was "more" at fault here, because no one is getting banned.
No, I would expect my readers (listeners actually) to understand complex themes, and not read one level deep , counting sentences to determine what is most important to me.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are not about "domestic issues" or family life. But they also are not saying those things were not important.
The Greeks didn't "make" them their "foundational works." Those stories were mostly oral histories of which Homer's written version is what survived. We made them the foundational works of Greek literature. There's considerable survivorship bias in saying "The two most famous poems we know of tell us what was most important to the people listening to them "
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