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This most recent iran thread is a complete shitshow and I lost braincells reading it. Can the mods make a containment thread or something, I think it may have reached the point where it's necessary.
Edit: Just fuck off and give me a 6 month - 1 year ban or even permanently instead of this weaksauce bullshit. The below iran thread is seriously reddit and twitter tier on both sides and if this is what the mods think of as good high effort discussion then just do me a favor and show me the door. Otherwise I can't resist responding in kind.
Right now I kind of wish this place had location markers, or at least an optional flag we could choose. But the best proxy I guess is how opinions seem to change drastically depending on time of day. Specifically, it's when the European posters go to sleep and the American posters wake up.
Most regulars are known to be American, Indian, Russian, Jewish, Chinese, Finnish, Dane…. I also keep a mental catalog of who might be what nationality based on their respective knowledge on things if they never explicitly revealed their nationality. I don’t think anyone’s intentionally hiding it anyway, so what real use does a location marker have?
How do you remember all that about everyone here? It's really hard for me to remember who anyone is here on sites like this where there's no profile pic or anything.
If you make a habit of reading usernames and try just a little to remember, you end up retaining a lot through brute forced reinforcement.
For example RandomRanger and magic9mushroom are Australian. Southkraut German. 4bpp and quiet_nan are a little more coy but they're easy to round off to "generic European." Gasshk and MaiqtheTrue are women. And etc. all off the top of my head.
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Many people have profile pics, basically a blob of color. Their flairs are colored, and their usernames have a specific pattern. Yours, for example, starts with a capital B, has three capital letters, and is medium in length…
A lot of regulars also mention their nationality or ethnicity once in a while. Eventually you just remember.
I dunno. Maybe it’s my autism showing, but the autism prevalence here has to be really high.
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What are you talking about? A profile image shows up next to every comment, though it appears that everyone in this thread except me has not bothered to set his image.
That's what I'm talking about. And most people don't have anything else to really distinguish themselves either.
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Nothing is stopping you from putting such information in your flair or your profile text.
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There was recently a discussion about this, and given the number of expats, we would need a dual flag system to mark country of origin and current location.
We were the rootless cosmopolitans all along!
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“🇺🇸 (Brazilian)”
“🇯🇵 (American)”
“🇬🇧 (Pakistani)”
Lol. Try on:
“🇬🇧 (🏴)”
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"🇺🇸 (American)"
I spontaneously burst into cheers of "USA! USA! USA!" and my favorite foods are Hamburgers, Freedom Fries, and Fried Chicken.
I cast a side-eye at all the Catholics and non-Hajnal Euro types around here.
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I'm really curious what is your impression of the differences? Are the majority of pro-Zionist posts made by Americans? I don't visit this forum much anymore, so I don't know about the situation here. But I feel like Europeans are generally more critical of the genocide in Gaza and the current attack on Iran.
This community is a spinoff of a spinoff of a rationalist community, there are is no question there are a lot of Zionist Jews here.
The MAGA types that would be here are more likely to be of the variety highly skeptical of the war (the low-IQ MAGA rank-and-file that supports the war at like 90%+ are not represented here much as far as I can tell). High-IQ Iran War supporters here, very likely to be Jews. Not to say there also aren't skeptical Jews as well.
But I don't get why people would want a location marker to correlate people's opinions on this question. If you really wanted signal you would want a different kind of profile badge that would not be appropriate for this forum.
It's interesting to see the parts of the American conservative coalition that are represented even after we account for tastes in intellectualism(like duh, megachurch Evangelicals do not want to engage in philosophical political discussion. That's not to say they're stupid, but they simply have different tastes). We have tradcaths but no orthodox Jews and I've never seen a confessional Lutheran. We have libertarian techbros and NrX types but few of the deep red RFK fan lifestyle skeptics- you know, the real life Ron Swanson types. Really very few crunchycons at all. None of the black dissidents you see hanging around conservative intellectual circles but lots of white nationalists. We've had conservative housewives in the past, but I think all of our women are working right now.
Hello.
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Speak for yourself! Some Evangelicals get C.S. Lewis-Pilled.
Are you a "megachurch" evangelical, though?
Eh. Depends on your definition. I’ve been at small churches and bigger churches over the years. Current church is on the big side, but I don’t know if it’s “mega”. I’m not sure how many members we have exactly, but there are two different service times and several hundred people at each service. Plus there’s a “satellite campus” on the other side of town, and another one up in the valley.
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What does that mean, in this context?
A Lutheran belonging to a body which split from the main Lutheran body in his country over the belief that that body doesn’t embrace the Augsburg confession anymore. In the USA the main such body would be the Missouri synod, very common in intellectual conservative circles and big enough to be locally dominant in some areas- but all the self proclaimed confessional Protestants here seem to be reformed.
I actually had to look up the Lutheran church I grew up attending... Evangelical Lutheran, apparently (which is, confusingly enough, not "evangelical"?)
All I know is, the pastor was insistent that nobody bring lutefisk to the smorgasbord, which always disappointed my grandmother. Dunno where that falls ecumenically.
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Presumably it means, “Lutheran, with conservative theology,” or in other words a Lutheran who believes in the real presence as a literal metaphysical belief and takes the Augsburg confession as a literal statement of truth about reality.
Though I’m not sure it’s true we don’t have any. I know we have some confessional Protestants who have positive views of Lutheran scholasticism. Presumably at least one of those is a Lutheran.
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Yes, my impression is that the Europeans are much more critical of the war in Iran and the US in general, for obvious reasons. Americans are... pretty split about Zionism, but a lot more likely to support Trump. But I'm just generalizing wildly based on time of day and how people write. I have no idea where most of the people here are from.
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FTFY. But that's my impression as well.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds
I'm not going to debate it in this sub-thread.
Then please don't make drive-by shitposts on the topic. If you don't want to have the conversation, don't bring it up.
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Most regulars are relatively open about what they support and what their broad tribal identity is, I don’t think this is a big issue here.
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