Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
My own experience with using Claude or ChatGPT to comment/beta-read fiction is that its advice looks reasonable and thoughtful and as detailed as any developmental editor might provide, as in your example, but it turns out to be much the same no matter what you throw at it.
Telltale lines like "earns its premise" and "is doing real work." It will always pick some of your stuff and say things like that, then pick some other things and say "Where I'd push you" with phrases like "load-bearing moment" and "carrying too much weight."
Right now, I find AI story critique is really more like a tarot reading which might spark some things to think about, without taking any particular observation too seriously, rather than an actual critique from a reader that can really spot strengths and weaknesses.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
I mean, I wasn't asking for proof of work. I'd take your word for it.
fwiw, I do not have a problem with using AI to proofread and act as a beta-reader. Just with letting it generate the words.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
This looks like your words. Please tell me it was all your words and not GPT-enhanced. I don't want to be taken in. The writing is good, but bloated, which is why I am still narrowing my eyes a little.
As for the substance: well, you are right that this writer is a pathetic specimen. Now and then some woman writes some shit that seems almost perfectly attuned to misogynistic sensibilities. "Hey, you know how some men think women are vapid, narcissistic, neurotic, self-involved special special princesses incapable of genuine self-awareness, reflection, or taking responsibility for their own emotional reactions but expect the rest of the world to manage their needs? Yeah, let's write an article to exemplify that starring me as the main character." Really, it looks like ragebait but this woman is probably real. 2000 words to say "I am fat and my friend wants to not be fat and this made me have feelings."
Your response is more coherent but honestly, not wholly different in substance: she wrote something that touched a nerve and set you off. What you produced contains more insight and is more intelligent but should we really care what this specimen is feeling any more than she should care about her friend's medications? That is, do her feelings impact us any more than her friend's medications impact her? If they do, we should consider why we are allowing them to do so.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Funny how we have other people openly post about genociding Palestinians and that doesn't seem to get anyone banned.
This is a meaningless whine unless you have a specific post to talk about.
"Posting about..." is not a bannable offense.
Searching for the exact term "muslims believe" leads to 314 search results on the motte. Many of these comments are negative. There are over a thousand comments with the phrase "Russians are". Do they need specification as well?
Expressing negative opinions about Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, or Russians is not a bannable offense. Yes, this needs specification as well. I just told you above that you are allowed to have "negative opinions." I gave some very clear guidelines for what sort of "negative opinions" cross the line.
You show me where someone talks about Palestinians, Muslims, or Russians the way you talk about Jews. You show me someone with a history of raging about Palestinians, Muslims or Russians and not being told to cool it.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Between this post and this one, the mods are now discussing whether you have earned the permaban you were promised last time you crashed out about Jews.
For now I am inclined to just tell you to chill out, despite the fact that I warned you no leniency would be granted last time. The reason for this is not because I think there is any chance you will moderate your behavior and stop being absolutely unhinged every time you post about Jews, but because threads about Israel and Jews always wind up here, and it's hard to say you are significantly worse than several other posters, who are more verbose and circumlocutious when they argue that Jews are monstrous and evil, but are expressing essentially the same sentiments.
The next post I see from you in the mod queue is probably going to be the trigger, though.
So just to review one more time for all our Joo-posters: you are allowed to hate Jews. You are allowed to say you hate Jews. You are allowed to advance theories about Jewish "behavior" and why they deserve hatred. But you cannot just "boo" your outgroup (e.g., Jews do this, Jews do that, Jews are blah blah blah) without pinning these accusations to specific groups. "Jews" are not a "specific group." You cannot realistically argue that there is something inherent to every single person of Jewish heritage that causes them to act a particular way. (I mean, if you want to, go ahead and present your biological/genetic evidence for this claim.) You cannot realistically argue that every single person in the "Jewish community" thinks a certain way or that everyone practicing the Jewish religion believes a certain thing. Because that is very obviously not true. So if you want go off on "Jews," you are almost certainly on thin ice, not because "Jews" are a protected class but because we mod people for doing exactly the same thing wrt every other group.
As always, you must proactively provide evidence in proportion to the inflammatory nature of your claims, and since claiming that an entire ethnic group is inherently treacherous, malevolent, and hostile to "our" interests is clearly inflammatory, you need to very diligently dot your i's and cross your t's every single time. And you don't.
Just as an example:
The jews see the goyim as cattle with no soul.
Really? "The Jews"? All Jews? All religious Jews? All Jews who are culturally Jewish regardless of their religious inclinations? You can argue (as some people do) from selected Talmudic excerpts that there is a strain of Judaism that considers "goyim as cattle with no soul." I think this is pretty clearly bad-faith cherry picking and you still need to, you know, point at the actual scriptures that say this (even @coffee_enjoyer only manages to produce some distorted and disputable texts to argue that that's what the nefarious Jews actually mean), but there are at least words you can point to as evidence that some Jews think things like this. There are rabbis who shitpost on Twitter and you can say "See, some Jews talk shit about goys."
But that's not sufficient evidence to claim "An ancient text says this, therefore all Jews believe this." Or "A prominent rabbi said this, so this is representative of what Jews think and we can indict them all on the basis of his words." It should go without saying that such standards would indict essentially every religious or ethnic group. But we've been over this before. Jew-haters gonna hate, but we're still going to apply the rules. Evenly.
You continue to post on very thin sufferance.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Yeah, if you read mutual accounts of Israel/Palestine they both make a combination of plausible and risible claims about who was there first and who's been there longer.
There are Arab revisionists who claim that ancient Israel is a myth and the Jews literally never lived there at all (they focus on denying the Israel of the Old Testament and kind of ignore extensive Roman history- the Romans would have been surprised to learn there were no Jews in Palestine and Israel didn't exist). Zionist revisionists, for their part, will point out that small populations of Jews have existed in the region since antiquity, but try to link that to some unbroken lineage going back to King David.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
I don't know that any of the founders of Israel ever regretted it (though I am not that knowledgeable about all the personalities). Certainly they knew from the beginning that it was a fraught project that might fail. They were definitely aware the Arabs didn't want them there, though the more optimistic ones thought they'd eventually reach an accommodation and normalized relations.
The thing is, they really didn't have a lot of other choices.
Despite the fact that I am usually in the role of "Israel defender" here because the Jew-haters are so tediously disingenuous and ahistorical, I actually am not particularly invested in Israel. I wish them well but I also wish the Palestinians well - my preference would be for an impossible peace. I blame the impossibility mostly on the Palestinians, but not entirely. I also don't think the US should be so heavily invested in Israel. What do they do for us, really?
But I do like to understand where both sides are coming from. For example, I completely dismiss the "This is our ancient homeland" argument because that only plays if you are religious. Otherwise, no one has a right to land just because your ancestors lived there 2000 years ago.
That said, there are a lot of lies about Israel being a "settler-colonialist" project as well.
If you don't want to read books, my favorite current media figure speaking from the Israeli POV is Havig Rettig Gur. He has a YouTube channel and he is a Free Press columnist now. He's unabashedly Zionist, but he's very articulate and a clear explainer, without any of the anti-Arab vitriol you get from some Israel-explainers.
I wish there was an equivalent on the anti-Zionist side, but aside from people like Norman Finkelstein, there aren't many who aren't just antisemites with a coat of paint.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
To some degree, it's the euphemism treadmill. But it originated with the well-intentioned desire to treat mentally retarded people more humanely. Telling children not say "retard" did not, of course, cause children to become kinder, especially to retarded people, but since you asked for a steelman, it is now much more widely accepted in society that insulting and abusing the disabled is a shitty thing to do and the status of the mentally retarded is better now than it used to be.
That obviously didn't happen because we made "retard" a no-no word, but it can be argued that the mindset that tabooed the word contributed to greater awareness and sympathy.
I still think tabooing words is retarded, lame, and stupid (no shit, I've been lectured by SJs that "stupid" and "dumb" are offensive and ableist) but you asked for a steelman.
We had a small discussion last week about "Negro" and "Chinaman." Both of those words used to be perfectly acceptable. Now they are considered rude at best. Why? Mostly arbitrary shifts in usage, but those shifts came with improved racial conditions. The one didn't cause the other, but they are associated. Now "Retarded," "Negro," and "Chinaman" to describe a person all sound reductive and dehumanizing.
The advantage, of course, is now you have a power word to use when you really want to be offensive.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
I feel this describes most of the Jewish Americans that I knew in college and highschool. Especially the ethnically and culturally Jewish that did little of the actual religion part.
I think "opposed to the existence of Israel" spans a spectrum. There are people who think Israel in its present form is an oppressive ethnostate and it needs to be reformed ("reform" meaning anything from a one-state solution to a two-state solution to various other proposals that have been floated and failed over the years), and there are people who think Israel should literally cease to exist and if that means Israelis literally ceasing to exist, oh well.
Jews and other progressives who oppose Israel on moral grounds but don't actually hate Jews tend to be more of the former; they don't like Israel, but they also tend to not like the United States, or indeed the West. But they don't want to see a bloodbath, however unrealistic the alternatives they suggest.
The actual anti-Semites, of course, tend to be in the latter category, with their answer to "What about the Israelis who live there now?" ranging from "They can all move elsewhere" to "They should die."
It just seems like a doomed project to have an ethnostate and religious minority in a third world area, and neighbors with one of the most war happy religions out there. I am confused how the Israel project seemed like a good idea ever.
In all seriousness, read a few books on the topic. (I recommend reading both pro- and anti-Israel historians.) It might not convince you the Israel project was a good idea, but there are definitely reasons that made sense at the time, both ethno-religious and otherwise. Of course there were many alternative plans besides Israel itself; Uganda, Madagascar, Venezuela, and Alaska were among the proposals. It was both practical and historical reasons that lead to Israel proper being the location chosen. It may well be that it was doomed from the beginning, but for example, "Let all the Jews who want their own state move to America" was definitely not an option when the Zionist movement began in the 19th century, and it wasn't even an option for all the Jews to flee to the US after WWII.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack.
Such a sly rephrasing.
What @FtttG said was:
- sympathetic framing of the perpetrator ("his family were killed in an airstrike in Lebanon")
- claims that such attacks are bound to be expected as a consequence of the war in Gaza i.e. victim-blaming (as if a handful of Australian Jews, many of whom had presumably never set foot in Israel, have the slightest say in Israeli politics or IDF tactics)
- outright suggestions that the attack was staged by Mossad as a false flag attack
This is accurate.
We could perhaps add:
- Pointing out the problematic social media posts of one of the victims.
You're right, almost no one is going to go mask-off and say "I support shooting Jews because I just really fucking hate Jews."
Even the most vehement Jew-haters are more sly than that.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
This is condescending and antagonistic. Don't do this.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
Rarely do we say "You're right, that post should have been modded but we didn't notice it because no one reported it."
Instead, we tell people not to publicly demand someone be modded or attack them, but simply report the post if they think it warrants it.
People do over report, but that's because they use the report button to mean "I don't like this." We prefer that to public callouts, but people should really just let things go if they're mad at what someone wrote unless it was truly a bad post. ("Bad" in the sense of being against what the Motte is intended for, not bad in the sense that you don't like it.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
Not every CW post has to fall strictly along tribal lines.
I suggest making use of the scroll button rather than demanding a Motte precisely curated to your tastes.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
6d ago
What are you even saying here? You agree, you disagree, you want to argue but don't have an argument, you just want to express snarky disdain, you understand and acknowledge the point? This is why we have a rule against low-effort posting. It's annoying and contributes nothing.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
6d ago
I think mods should intervene… somehow, because these posts are getting too frequent, too obviously agenda-laden, and aren't even remotely about the culture war (though AI discussion as such is necessary). It's becoming one guy's AI Bad blog.
I could name half a dozen topics that come up again and again, sometimes in tedious fashion, and sometimes by a few individuals who post about little else. Generally speaking, we don't "intervene" because someone is tired of topic, or even because we are tired of a topic.
And everything is "obviously agenda-laden" to people who have an opposing viewpoint.
If you don't like a post, you can ignore it or respond to it. You can even report it if you genuinely think it violates the rules. (Most reported posts are not violating the rules, they are just violating the reporter's sensibilities.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
6d ago
"Chinaman" is historical usage that harkens back to the 19th century. It may not be a slur, exactly, but it's kind of like calling a black person a "Negro" - it is not plausible that you are unaware that it's no longer considered polite.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
Low effort and obnoxious comment providing no value. Banned for two days.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
12d ago
Argument by Google/Wikipedia is obnoxious and low effort. "What do you think that means?" is generally not a request for a literal definition and you know that.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
12d ago
When someone is antagonistic to you, report the post, don't respond in kind.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
12d ago
This sort of comment was not acceptable on the Motte even when we were on Reddit. Don't do this.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
14d ago
Your "prediction" has no circumstances in which we could say it was wrong. I suppose if Iran literally conducts an atomic test, you might concede you were wrong about that (though I am not even confident of that: it seems you would spin it as "We did not allow them to do this until we did/until they snuck it past us, and obviously we will punish them for it and not let them actually use their nukes"). But otherwise, if we are in exactly the same place we are now a few years from now, you will say that's fine because we made our point and can always bomb them again. That, to me, is not a "victory." If you were actually willing to define victory and own that that's what you're saying-yes, we may be perpetually at war with Iran and we will have to keep doing this- then I would disagree with you that that is a favorable outcome but at least we'd have something to disagree about. Instead, you are just saying "We won, we will win, because winning is whatever Trump says it is."
The difference is my predictions have conditions under which I will have to say "I was wrong." I don't TDS out, however loosely you define TDS, and say "Everything Trump does is bad and nothing he accomplishes could possibly count as a victory." I am not saying "The US lost the war." I know some other people are saying we did, by virtue of not having accomplished our goals. I am also of the opinion that we have not accomplished our goals (though it's also not clear to me what our goals are), but there is a difference between "losing" and "failing to achieve victory." Militarily, we won. How many times do I have to no-duh that? But winning anything worth calling a victory requires more than just inflicting a higher body count. We could say we're going to put an end to lawlessness in Haiti and drop bombs on them and say we won. Yeah, and?
"What are we doing here and is it worth it?" is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
14d ago
Since no matter what "peace deal" there is, you will say it's good, yes, you are just defining yourself to be correct no matter what.
This is cartoonish.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
14d ago
Yes, I think destroying their military "matters." You are ignoring every objection raised to pretend your dissenters are blind and not responding to points they have responded to.
So that's a no. There are no conditions in which you will consider yourself to have been wrong.
It's very easy to declare yourself the only one able to see the truth with such a posture.
I sympathize. I really do.
I, personally, do not like racists. I do not like antisemites and Holocaust deniers. I do not like misogynists. I do not like a lot of people. I sometimes struggle to be polite to the most hateful people here. It's a daily exercise, trying not to hate the haters.
But the answer to your question: are you expected to lay out some "intellectual-ass rebuttal" to people saying, in so many words, that black people are orcs, is yes.
There are Jews here. They have to read people talking about how Jews are responsible for every evil in the world and are secretly conspiring against the goyim because Jews are sneaky evil parasites who hate everyone else. They aren't allowed to just go off on the antisemites and call them names. They have to engage politely, or choose not to engage.
There are women here. They have to read people talking about how women are non-sapient hypergamous slutwhores who should be kept the property of their fathers for the good of civilization, and definitely not allowed to work or vote or even have a say in who fucks them. They have to engage politely, or choose not to engage.
We have Democrats and liberals here (not the same thing but for practical purposes almost always treated as the same thing here). They have to read people talking about how "Blues" are hypocritical amoral stupid mindless traitors with no principles or reasoning abilities and we can't wait to line them up against a wall. They have to engage politely, or choose not to engage.
That's hard, and not everyone can do it, and now and then we have someone who flames out because they can't. Being a black person, I understand why you'd be tempted to flame out at people advocating Jim Crow or apartheid or just casually talking about black criminality and low IQ.
But the Motte is a weird place. It's intended to allow the most outrageous views, the ones that are unsayable in most places, to be civilly debated. Hopefully views that are truly outrageous and offensive- like "Black people should be slaves" or "The Holocaust didn't happen and it's good that it did" - will be debated and pushed back against. And usually they are! But you may be disconcerted to realize that many people in fact agree with those views. Is that infuriating? I am sure it is. Sometimes I'm angry at the shit people say about black people or Jews or women, and I am not black or Jewish or a woman. But the Motte lets you bring your hottest take, your most controversial opinion, the things you want to propose that you know would get you kicked off most mainstream sites, and put them out there and see what people say about them.
Hopefully, if your views are just stupid and offensive, you will be persuaded to rethink them. (Yeah, this rarely happens.) But that's the purpose- to allow the conversations that aren't allowed anywhere else. People can talk about HBD here. People can talk about evpsych here even in the most reductive "are-women-actually-people?" way. People can talk about pedophilia and accelerationism and the Holocaust and trans people here in ways that make peoples' heads explode everywhere else.
The Motte is a weird place. A lot of people are offended by our very existence. We have trolls who come back again and again to call us a bunch of Nazis because they just can't believe we allow literal Nazis to post here. I have been attacked, personally, for participating and modding here. The assumption being that if I enable a place that allows horrible views, I must support those views. Of course I don't. But I support having a place where those views can be expressed, so I can see what sort of people seriously espouse those views. I have learned a lot about the real, unironic Holocaust deniers and white nationalists and rape enthusiasts from people who were mostly just Internet boogeymen until I started talking to them. I like to think it's made me better at arguing with them, but I can understand why those who think we simply shouldn't platform them at all would think this is delusion.
I am proud of what the Motte is, as an actual bastion of free speech, and disheartened by what it's become, when you actually allow free speech. I would not want every other place to be like the Motte. I assure you I would prefer not to deal with Holocaust deniers and segregationists and pedophiles on my other social media sites. At the same time, I am like many disaffected liberals who have been driven off of many other social media sites because even asking questions that offend people is unsayable there.
Since this is personal to you, let me make it personal. I am a Gen Xer. I grew up in a world where we believed everyone was supposed to strive for the goals of that Martin Luther King speech. We were all supposed to become "colorblind." We wanted racial harmony and believed it was possible. We believed in racial equality and thought all we had to do was stop being racist and it would happen.
Those hopes and dreams have crashed and burned. Not just because I have come to the sad realization that HBD is real and that, in fact, there are racial differences in behavior and IQ. No, hear me out, I am not trying to make an argument for why the racists are right! I am telling you that eventually people like me notice things and have a hard time reconciling them with our ideals... and then we're told that Noticing such things makes us racist. I have had... mostly unpleasant interactions with black people. I wish this were not so. (I also have black friends. Yeah, yeah, "Some of my best friends...") I still believe every individual should be treated as an individual. I still want a world where we can coexist. But what has happened is on the one side, we have the most awful people in the world who unfortunately make some compelling arguments, and on the other side we have people saying "Shut up. Stop noticing things. Racist!"
Who do you think is going to win?
I wish you would stay. I wish you would participate, even if it means gritting your teeth to make "intellectual-ass arguments" against people who want you put in a reservation. I get that it's probably not easy, but we have a lot of people putting up with awful things being said about their group who do put up with it. Yes, if you just call people "cracker bitches" you will be banned. But I assure you even the most racist people will engage with you civilly if you engage with them civilly. And if they don't, they too will be banned, because while we allow "controversial" opinions, we also do not allow people to just say "Black people are orcs/criminals/subhuman." (And people have been banned for that.)
You can decide whether the Motte project is for you or not. It's not for many people. We have very few people at the pointy end of debates here who stick around, and it's easy to see why. Who wants to hang around with a bunch of people who barely consider them human and have to be polite to them? But I hope you will give it a shot.
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