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WhiningCoil is flirting with a permanent ban himself, actually.
"Deport them all" is certainly an opinion some people have here, but as loudly as it is sometimes expressed I would not bet that it is prevailing. It's not uncommon for people to make the libertarian argument for open borders, for example--Bryan Caplan has some cachet in the rationalsphere.
I think your circumstances are not unusual. But there is a potential rejoinder you might want to consider--
That's great--my classical liberal heart is warmed--but it would be interesting to know for certain whether you are indistinguishable from their family in the ways that matter to them. If one demographic says "we love everyone, we help everyone equally, this is how we all work together to make the world a better place," but the other demographic responds "thanks for the help, we're going to take everything that is given to us to help our ingroup and, if possible, to become the dominant power, at which point we will then suppress our outgroup." The quote from Frank Herbert's Dune books is--
I am not saying this is how your neighbors think! I hope it is not how they think. But that is the angle and the concern that tends to arise when people make arguments like the one you have made here.
Yeah, about that, I sent a modmail about this accusation that I'm running alts, because it's bullshit, and I'd appreciate a response.
You should just make some alts. The trick is that the alts should say absolutely nothing the least bit controversial at least until the current main is kaput. They should just make obvious little comments and build up a few points until it's time for them to become the new main.
By the time your new main goes from "newbie with a clean record so far" to being someone the mods remember in their own right, your last account getting banned should be old news.
You also need to manage IP addresses and browser fingerprinting. It's quite frankly a lot of work to do well, especially at scale.
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Oh, thanks for outing yourself. I already banned you for two weeks because you keep making shitty comments, but since you just admitted to being a very specific ban evader, I will make it permanent.
I don't get why you think this makes you clever, but whatever.
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Hopefully you see my response. I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts. In the past year you have accumulated AAQCs, warnings, and bans in approximately equal proportion. These are always hard cases for us, because we can see that you're smart enough to understand and follow the rules, and you create excellent content for the community on a regular basis. So we actively resist banning you, but you blatantly violate the rules way too often for us to simply ignore. Your current balance is such that you really are flirting with a perma, or at least a very long term (90+ days) ban.
Two days ago.
"He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit,"
Less than a day ago.
"I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using."
Both from @Amadan.
I see. Yeah, no, as far as I know that's just a reference to his reddit username, which is/was not "WhiningCoil." The mod team was discussing WhiningCoil's status just yesterday and no one made any mention of alt accounts at that time.
I don't think so.
Numbering is mine. Amadan seems to think I've had at least 4 accounts and is holding this against me in his moderation decisions.
I did believe you have gone through at least four accounts between reddit and here. I did not hold that against you in my moderation decisions.
You have told me (in modmail) that this is incorrect, you never had any other accounts. As I told you in the response you apparently won't read, I will take your word for that and apologize for my error. But it doesn't matter, because as @naraburns and I said, "running alts" was never one of the issues with you. (I never claimed nor thought you were using alts for ban evasion.)
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Alright, well, this is news to me, and I'm not holding it against you, and Amadan isn't the only moderator warning you or banning you. I'm communicating all of this to you because I would like to not ban you. This is the same process we went through with TPO, with Darwin, with penpractice, with others. We assure you that yes, actually, we do appreciate your good posts, we insist that this does not give you unlimited leeway, and so on, and so forth.
You're not banned yet! You can totally keep it that way.
I genuinely can't. I get that the mod consensus is that I know exactly what I'm doing, and it's all on purpose, and I delight in thumbing my nose at the rules and skirting by with just enough plausibility to avoid punishment. But I honestly try. I really do. It's just that all my life experience is so utterly divorced from your realities, that my heartfelt best behavior effort post like this gets met with sneering dismissal by one of the people who decides when my next ban (which I've been informed will be permanent) happens. Like I said, I wrote and rewrote that post 3 or 4 times, feeling deep in my bones that no matter how I phrased it, while still saying what I needed to say, I'd probably eat that last permanent ban for it for some errant turn of phrase I enjoyed, or being inflammatory, or having "more heat that light" whatever that's supposed to mean anymore. Every post I make I make like it's my last, because I honestly don't know what the fuck I'm doing wrong. It just comes down to our lived realities are too different, and to preserve yours, I'm going to get shuffled out the door at some point.
Edit: I want to elaborate further. I ended my effort post with "So it goes to be conquered." I agonized over that last sentence. I loved it. It was the thesis of the entire post. It was the most important sentence. When I was in school writing essays I always told "Tell em what you're gonna say, say it, then tell em what you said." I must include that sentence. But it's also the most dangerous sentence. Instead of seeing an effort post, someone might just see inflammatory rhetoric, bullshit anecdotes, more inflammatory rhetoric. Permaban. But if I don't include that sentence, there is no point to any of the rest that I wrote. Probably makes them even worse as it's just a series of inflammatory anecdotes with no reason to state them at all.
I can't control how you people read that. Even when I try to include context, half the time the context just gets ignored and a single sentence, or sentence fragment, or single word gets plucked out as being ban worthy. Sometimes large portions of my post are skipped, rewrote or concatenated together out of context to achieve the perception of greater offense than a plain read of the entire post would have produced! There is no fixing this.
I genuinely believe that you can. It's not about your experiences, it's about your insistence that your experiences are sufficiently bad to excuse inflammatory rhetoric, boo outgroup posts, writing like you actually do not want everyone to participate in the conversation, and so forth. Don't write angry posts! Don't write screeds! Don't come here to vent your spleen. This is a place for discussing the culture wars, not waging them. And yeah, we're kind of bad at making that happen. But we're trying, and I genuinely think that you can succeed, too, if you're willing to try.
At least two moderators have broadly recused themselves from even bothering to moderate you, because they are just fed up with your antics. I'm a much less active moderator than I used to be, but there's a very good chance that if you do get perma-banned, I am the one who is going to have to write the mod message. I don't want to write that message. At minimum, it's likely to require a bunch of effort I would rather put into writing things people enjoy reading instead.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you really just... cannot... open yourself to the possibility that you are in some way mistaken about your outgroup and the views you have developed as a result of your experiences. Or maybe you just can't stop yourself from expressing it in maximally vitriolic ways. But if that's right, then--for all your many quality contributions--maybe this space is, in the end, a poor fit. That's a possibility. But I will be sad about it, if so.
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It's great that you don't feel any ill effects from this because you can apparently afford to live in NOVA. I briefly considered moving back to NOVA to send my kids to a very specific and unique school I once attended, but real estate is so outrageous that even with my pretty decent tech salary we would be mortgage-poor if we tried. I visited my old neighborhood -- a nice middle to upper middle class neighborhood -- and it is now apparently entirely Indian/Pakistani/Arab, each driveway has a bunch of cars so presumably the houses are packed with people, and our local grocery store now looks like a halal bazaar. Even if I could afford to live there, I don't think I would, because I don't think me and my (nonwhite!) American family would fit in anymore.
If we hadn't had have massive immigration, there would be less pressure on real estate and housing (fewer people, lower cultural acceptance of people packing in like sardines and paying insane rent/mortgages) and thus a higher standard of living for existing Americans, and my neighborhood would still be recognizably American instead of some Indian/Middle Eastern colony. It's easy to be shielded from this sort of thing when you apparently make enough money to live comfortably in NOVA -- you're probably surrounded by other very affluent people who have integrated well.
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Oh, depending on your age, there's a very good chance you're not missing out on any freedoms at all. At worst, maybe you've been passed over for university admissions or a job or a promotion as a result of affirmative action or something--and given the abundance of all those things in America, even then you may not have so much as noticed.
Your comment alludes to the process of integration and I think that historically there is much to be said for it. European immigrants faced much the same concern as that directed toward South and Central American, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian immigrants today, but a couple generations later they seem to have integrated entirely. It might be observed that the integration of descendants of African slavery has gone a bit less smoothly, but of course we didn't really start trying to integrate them throughout the nation until about 75 years ago.
Nevertheless, there is in certain corners a tendency of some political groups to assert "whiteness" as a kind of original sin. Job postings listing essentially every demographic except straight white Christian men as "preferred candidates" come up a lot in Canada and even sometimes in the United States. More importantly, just the fact of identifying as "Republican" or "conservative" is enough to get you dog piled and even banned from certain online communities. If you in fact found this space via Twitter, you might not be familiar with some of the more "canonical" writings that created this space, but I heartily recommend them:
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
Neutral Versus Conservative: The Eternal Struggle
None of this is to suggest that I really disagree with you. I have high hopes for the long term, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that liberalism is dead (or if it is, that we should stop trying to resurrect it). But that means I strongly oppose identitarianism both from the Right ("alt-right") and from the Left ("Woke"). Identitarianism is illiberal and works against your own expressed preferences for integration by instead demanding ideological conformity. The worry toward which I am pointing is that identitarianism appears to be on the rise since ~2014, first on the Left and then on the Right. Many people only get alarmed about the identitarianism happening in their outgroup (since the other kind is a personal benefit). But I think also sometimes people don't realize that just because you don't think someone is in your outgroup, doesn't mean they actually consider you part of their ingroup.
Y'know, your comment helped me clarify a thought I've had. It seems that there are several different beliefs that often get confused for one another because they are only subtly different.
so far, do familiar. But then
Did I miss any?
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What are some of these freedoms that an older person might be missing out on?
Sorry, I was thinking in the other direction--I think young people are the ones who may have better reason to feel this is all constraining their liberty. The 1990s seem to have been "peak America" in several ways--probably the best "Free Speech" era, certainly an economic dream time, cost disease in education had begun but was years from spiraling out of control, etc.
We do have much better video games now, though.
I feel like jokes about political correctness are somewhat peak 1990s... but I'm happy to cede something along the lines of "If we only knew...".
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I appreciate everyone taking the bait, but: I did say 1990s, I would not include the early 2000s (particularly since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) is still among the best-written CRPGs in history).
The Super Nintendo was indeed an excellent console with some timeless classics (FF4, FF6, Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu 2 & 3, Super Mario World, Super Metroid) as well as foundations to future franchises (Mario Kart, Star Fox, Harvest Moon) and strong entries in others. The Nintendo 64 struggled but brought amazing first party titles (Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Super Smash Bros.) while the PlayStation brought mature themes and writing to new prominence. Final Fantasy 7 was a tour de force. No question: the 1990s were fire.
But almost every single franchise I've mentioned so far has stronger entries now. The Final Fantasy franchise has fallen off, but Expedition 33 is as good or better than FF7 along almost every axis but chocobo breeding and cinematic summons. Super Mario Galaxy (and its direct sequel) are better games than Mario 64, and Donkey Kong Bananza on the Switch 2 reinvents 3D platforming with equal aplomb. Red Dead Redemption 2 exceeds the writing, design, voice acting, etc. of basically every game that came before it. It's not just "better graphics," though it certainly has those. The Grand Theft Auto games from III to V were just one masterpiece after another. Even indies--you can argue that Stardew Valley lacks originality since it's just an evolution of Harvest Moon, and yet given a choice between Stardew Valley and the SNES Harvest Moon, I don't know anyone who would pick Harvest Moon.
I sometimes go back and play old games for nostalgia, but I almost always bounce off pretty fast. Some few games hold up surprisingly well but most just don't. We owe past developers a debt of gratitude for breaking new ground but the level of polish the years (and billions of dollars) have brought to the industry can't be ignored. Yeah, bad games get made, but that was always true. The best games of today are leagues ahead of the best titles developed in the 1990s, along basically every axis of comparison except pure originality (since originality was lower-hanging fruit in those days), and I don't even think it's close.
Yes, for me, video games are straight up just the best they have ever been. More than ever are releasing and they are excellent in so many ways. I wanted to hedge this by saying that there are some tradeoffs, like hardware being more expensive, but that's not a factor if you don't want it to be. You can remain an herbivore gamer and just play indie games that run on anything and those are still head and shoulders above most stuff from 30 years ago. We've figured out a lot about how to make things fun since then. And everything is way more accessible now, since you can buy games without leaving your house. I suppose you could say that there is less nostalgia now, if you've been playing games a long time, but that wouldn't be a concern for some kid starting to play video games right now. Also,
Everything else has tradeoffs, at best. Medicine is much better now, but the average age of the United States is much older, and healthcare costs have ballooned. You can reach so many more people with your effortposts and read whatever you want, and that would be great, but it's turned into such a double-edged sword, with echo chambers forming and subcultures within subcultures growing ever more toxic and distanced from reality, and in the last year, we seem to be seeing a return to ideological terrorism. Movies are stunning, but shallow, lacking the balance and variety that the 90s (and 2000s, probably) had. Pop music seems to be more vulgar to me now, and will never be a shared cultural touchstone as it had been in the years before the 2010s, though you can listen to anything from across the entire world now. College is probably actively worse than it was in the 90s, it costs more, there is rampant leftist ideology influencing many classes (though not all, I had plenty of great history courses, the art ones were where I really ran into it), and the degrees seem less useful.
You already mentioned most of that, but if many people thought the 90s was close to the peak, I wonder, had smart phones been invented in the 90s, would the same trends we saw in the 2010s happen, with people widely critiquing lack of healthcare and historical oppression of women and minorities? Would they fail to recognize the golden age they were living in? Probably, if you ask me.
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+1. "Better graphics", undoubtedly, but that doesn't make a better video game.
And even then, the only real improvement has been in photorealistic 3D graphics. 2D graphics had already peaked by the late 90s; there's not much further you can go after you can already make gorgeous games like Marvel vs. Capcom. Stylized 3D graphics took a little longer, but by the early 2000s we already had beauties like Wind Waker.
I'm a big believer that the whole quest for MOAR POLYGONS is a mistake, and that we would have all been better off if we had just stuck with the PS2 and Game Cube instead of upgrading our hardware every five years to ever more expensive consoles with ever more expensive games, all in the name of making photorealistic 3D titles look slightly better with every iteration.
Which is why I'm a PC gamer now; I just buy old games on the cheap from Steam.
King of Fighters XIII?
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I've been a PC gamer since I was a kid, I always was ok with mouse and keyboard but I can't use a controller to save my life(s). When PC gaming and system building started to get big I was pretty startled at all the attention the PC was getting, I was just a geek who liked tinkering with systems and suddenly all my male relatives are asking me for PC recommendations!
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I wonder if some of the problems people have with this kind of in-group bias is the reverse: immigrants who are culturally different and need to exert a lot of effort to catch up will get along with mainstream Americans, but immigrants who are multiple generation assimilated are more likely to use their immigrant heritage for identity politics.
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The comment you replied to is filtered.
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