domain:aerosociety.com
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
Why wouldn't they survive? Would they succumb to the temptation to be vitriolic and disingenuous too easily, too?
ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr comes to mind. While he gets a little hot under the collar sometimes, certainly I won't cast the first stone for someone getting frustrated, he's never been such a slimeball as Darwin or seethingly hateful as Turok. I think it's quite easy to avoid the particular issues those two represent; it's that the kinds of leftist-progressive types that aren't exceedingly combative don't enjoy playing defense all the time.
The Schism exists back on reddit, the policies are only slightly stricter than here, it's derived from the same Scott-reading social milieu, and it has all of ten regular commenters, in a good month. It has one regular troll now on a yearly cycle of suspensions. Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.
DelendaEst
1hr ago
Legit question, how does getting downvoted censor him? The sorting method on here is by newest, not by top rated.
I already gave you one, and again, if you don't know the Smollet thing, you don't know anything about the guy.
And if you didn't interact with him much, then how are you making the claim about "the only reason people hated him"?!
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
I didn't interact with him that much since I didn't share his views. He was far more left-leaning than I've ever been.
Again, I request examples of your claims. If he really was as bad as you claim, you should have no problem posting examples of where he was particularly egregious instead of just broadly motioning at it.
Did he actually say that GuessWho is his account, or are people just assuming that?
Yes, he did. On what grounds are you telling people "the only reason they hate him" if you're not familiar with his posting history here at all?
Then we have Gattsuru who did this.
I'll grant you that Gattsuru's antipathy for you is somewhat strange, and for the good of both of you, he should just ignore or block you if he can't. If you think the lack of immediate moderatory action is evidence of some bias, you're wrong. It's standard procedure to be a bit more lenient for quality contributors, this is exactly how Darwin was allowed to post here for years with almost no mod actions against him.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue,
I get why it feels like that from the perspective of someone who disagrees with the majority of the forum. People start blurring into a single indescript swarm, and it's all the same to you if it's one guy being and asshole one day, and another guy on another day. But this is madness, and I do not believe that you would ever accept the framework off aggregating assholes by ideology, and deploying moderatory actions adjusted for that, if it was your ideology, or you personally in the line of fire
Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
If you're trying to tell me gatsuru is somehow as bad as AlexanderTurok, you're going to have your work cut out for you. For starters, don't you think keeping up with all these court cases required several orders of magnitude more effort than anything Turok has ever done here?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
Did he actually say that GuessWho is his account, or are people just assuming that? Can you link me to where he said that? Also, I'm reading through it and nothing really seems that bad at least without diving more into the context.
you've also said elsewhere that plenty of right-wingers have resorted to making series of personal attacks on you without getting modded. Do you have any examples of either?
Sure, in this interaction the guy claimed my arguments were so bad that I was "living in denial", and he repeated this over and over and over. Then we have Gattsuru who did this. Then we have Zeke who continuously accused me of being "dishonest".
I think negative utilitarians have an ethical obligation to disclose this state to people at the top of everything they write so people know to dismiss their opinions.
Did you read the composting article? His logic is basically: composting is good for worms, so then they reproduce and there's more worms, and then they experience suffering which is bad, so composting is bad. If you follow this logic to its conclusion, it implies we should genocide all life forms so they can't suffer any more. And, mathematically, if your utility function literally only counts negative values and doesn't recognize positive values then this follows.
Anyone whose moral philosophy implies that we should destroy all life is either evil, or hypocritical and illogical by only extrapolating as far as it serves their current purpose. This is why my flair is "Good things are good." Because some people literally believe the opposite. If this person says eating honey is bad for bees, the largest term in his math is probably beekeepers helping bees thrive and reproduce which means more of them exist, and all the things about artificial circumstances are probably rounding errors.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
We are all "there", because most of the posts on the Motte are still available. You don't have to appeal to faded memory through the mists of time, you can just look up compilations of his actual posts, or go digging through the posts themselves.
- He was indeed probably the most progressive commenter. Quite prolific, too.
- He was indeed a capable debater, but he made an art of violating the spirit of the rules by refusing to speak plainly, extend even minimal charity, refrain from building consensus, etc, etc.
- He stuck around a long time, actively working to degrade most conversations he participated in.
And the one you left off:
- He was so blinded by his ideology that he made an absolute clown of himself going all-in on the Jussie Smollet hoax, and then doubling down over and over again when people stood up to predict that he would be proven wrong. He was then proven wrong, and got blown out in truly spectacular style. If he learned anything from the experience, I never saw any indication of it; his behavior just got worse.
If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like, or explain how my examples are poorly interpreted.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Sure, here's the JK Rowling debate (starts second post from the top). Surely you're familiar with the Smollet thing? If not then I don't know if you followed the conversation this guy spawned much at all.
Forget GDP, GDP is just a number.
GDP is a number that correlates pretty directly with the ability of the state to purchase goods and services, such as military equipment, from other states, unless you’re going to argue that money is fake and that allowing Israel to buy arms from Lockheed Martin at market prices using a medium of exchange like dollars is some unexplainable act of charity on the US’ part.
It's not a liquid market, buying more can just make the price go up. Few countries make these things. Israel can't produce munitions at scale because they're a small country, they don't even have a domestic steel industry.
This feels like throwing out random tangents.
Furthermore, military aid always roars up whenever Israel actually needs it, it went up to about $22 billion in the year after October 7th. See here: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael
Suggesting that the market for military equipment isn't as illiquid as you made out. In any case, I'm not sure this is any more evidence of Israel controlling the US government than Ukraine does, given the $61 billion of aid that the US gave them in April 2024.
No, the USAF and RAF literally, directly, provide air defence for Israel directly. US F-16s shot down Iranian missiles attacking Israel. Plus US warships nearby fire their expensive ABMs to defend Israel.
I don't know of any times the US has ever provided direct air defence for Israel beyond the two recent episodes when Iran shot missiles at them, and while they doubtlessly appreciated it, it’s no different to what the US would do if missiles were fired towards Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or any of their other middle eastern allies, and far less than what the US would be obliged by treaty to do if someone started firing missiles at a NATO ally. The US does less for Israel than it would do for Estonia in this context.
Saddam's Iraq was an anti-Israel force. Israel bombed their nuclear reactor in the 80s. In the Gulf War Iraq Scudded Israel. In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, in large part due to false intelligence about WMDs which the Israelis contributed. Plus a bunch of US policymakers talked about how the real reasoning was that Iraq was a threat to Israel. See my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/765/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/162796?context=8#context
I’m not even sure this is a motte and bailey, given how unlikely the claim that the US went into Iraq primarily for Israel’s sake, just a bailey and a slightly less rickety bailey. In any case, the claim that US foreign policy is mostly dictated by Israeli interests is so extreme that the Iraq claim could be true and it still wouldn’t be sufficient for your argument given that US hasn’t deployed ground troops to take out any the modern threats facing Israel in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza or Iran.
Yes. If you think people only hated Darwin because he was unabashedly left-wing, you should consider if you're not doing the inverse. Maybe you only liked him because he was going against the grain (and maybe that's the only reason you like Turok).
If you told me "come one, he's not that bad, you just have an axe to grind against him" about almost anyone else, I could hear you out, but the fact that you think this is a plausible claim about Darwin in particular makes it extremely likely that you're the one that's irrationally biased.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Sure they are. Some more than others.
You’re treating “cruelty-free” like it’s “vegan,” which has an obvious single condition to meet. But it’s more like “pescatarian,” an awkward wastebasket taxon that doesn’t quite match the literal name. It’s just that most people don’t bother distinguishing oysters from lobsters from tuna even though they are happy to draw the line at whales. We could add prefixes until we partitioned out the 12 principled pescatarians, but it is not generally considered relevant.
The partition for “Cruelty-free” means not complicit in a subset of acts which are considered cruel. It’s not exhaustive, and you can catch practitioners in weird edge cases. But 99% of the time you can get them to agree, hey, that thing they do to male chickens is in the “cruel” category, right? Then they’re supposed to avoid it.
How is this different from asking pescatarians if whales are fish?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Yes, I was there too. There's nothing obvious about it. There are plenty of capable debater progressive posters around here that don't get banned. Even Darwin didn't stop posting here due to the ban, he was posting here until fairly recently, and only tapped out after he made dishonest claim, briefly tried pretending he didn't actually make it, and saw people are buying it even less than his excuses for the Jussie Smollet fiasco.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
What? Can you link this so I can see it in context? I just don't understand what I'm supposed to see here.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
Do you have an actual point here?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I understand. My point is, every generation has always had this complaint about the one following it.
And my point is that it's not true. It's a thought terminating cliche deployed every time someone points out things are going in a direction that implies that capital "P" Progress is bad. Off the top of my head, one member my family was a big fan of steam trains, and while he did lament the knowledge of how to maintain them is going extinct, it was more about liking to look at the things go "choo choo", he was perfectly aware that diesel and electric trains are taking over, and offer something better. There's also a long line of electrician (and -adjecent) professionals in my field, and while the progress from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits, to transistors, to microprocessors, caused some "I don't know if I can keep up with this" angst, it again did not result in any claims about following generations losing essential skills of maintaining vacuum tubes.
When it comes to ChatGPT, it's important to bear in mind that this technology is very new. We may soon find that having it at our disposal affords us the ability to perform intellectual tasks we couldn't do otherwise, or frees up our time which would otherwise be wasted on time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks.
I'll grant that I can imagine a way to use the technology in a way that's compatible with the growth of humanity. What I'm saying though is that looking at every thing we've done recently developed technologies, this is not the direction we're moving in. We are moving, in a way that is hard for me not to see as deliberate, in a direction of dumbing down, centralization of control, and mass manipulation of society. The point of all these complaints is to stop and think about what the hell we're doing, and averting this.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
I have a laundry list of bad interactions with MAGA aligned people on this forum, but I can't really supply evidence of any specific poster being bad over and over again since I typically just block them if they're sufficiently bad even once. The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue, and not just one or two bad apples that slip through the cracks.
Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole
This type of vibes-based moderation is just a glaring invitation for mods to be arbitrary. At the very least there should be a sentence or two that should be close-enough to breaking the rules that it can be cited as the issue, and then the rest of the post's tone can be used as context for whether to pull the trigger. Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1hr ago
Can you argue that it is not ok to intentionally avoid conception?
No, because my point is about a problem with a combination of your views, not which direction to resolve it.
I think the definition of sexual intercourse is apparent by looking at the genitals and what they do together
Theres a general sense of "this thing goes in here" that I think is apparent. But just from looking at it, I couldnt tell that "oral sex to right before orgasm, then sticking it in" is fine but "Sex with a condom" isnt. Those would be question marks, to be filled in by a more formal understanding. If you think its obvious, that might be because you know the answer already.
Where does the ejaculate go?
First, your descriptions says "in", not "into", so technically it doesnt matter. But I would say that if it is in the condom, it is also in the vagina. Yes, you can ask questions which sound similar to your original formulation and lead to different intuitions, because language can be sensitive to details like that - but again, you wouldnt know where and which of these reformulations to use, if you didnt already know the answer. And then what about a diaphragm? There it definitely goes into the vagina, just not the part where an egg might be.
I notice that youre mostly not answering my examples about what might or might not count. There are a lot of contraceptive methods, even if we only consider the ones that are actually used in the real world - but apparently none of them are acceptable to the church, no matter how close to conception their mechanism of action is, except various forms of "not having sex". Its very unlikely for a principle to act this precisely, without somehow refering to conception - this is why Im expecting some argument along those lines, not just because of what Im familiar with.
Tree
1hr ago
I was there, and he was definitely banned for his political opinions. It's obvious because :
-
he was the most progressive commenter
-
he was a capable debater
-
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
The minor character of the Green Man was included in the Book of the New Sun just for you.
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
It seems to me that people hated Darwin because he worked tirelessly to lower the quality of discussion in the forum. He did this through a pattern of behavior that was so unique that it made his alts recognizable to people who'd actually tried to argue with him in the past.
The discussion linked above has a number of examples and detailed analysis about his iconic method of argumentation and how or how not to approach it, but the TL;DR is that he routinely presented arguments that he would routinely present arguments through implication and indirection, and then refuse to respond to engagement since he was only presenting an argument, not his argument, thus granting himself license to ignore any counter-arguments or evidence that went against what appeared to be his claims. As a rule, he argued to win, treated the space as a battlefield to be won, refused to speak plainly and absolutely would not extend charity or good faith to those arguing with him. He was also one of the best rules-lawyers I have encountered, and was an absolute artist for riding the line. I learned much from him, and believe others should have as well.
Unfortunately, his personal style of absolute certainty and total inability to admit doubt or error interacted poorly with reality, and he fatally beclowned himself somewhere around the Floyd era.
People, usually Blues, occasionally bring him up as an example of the quality posters we've lost. I challenge those posters to present some examples of his quality posting. We have in fact lost a lot of high-quality Blues over the years. Darwin was not one of them.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2hr ago
He also seems to really distrust and maybe dislike white women. Which is going to make having white babies very hard. I hope he found happiness with a good Mexican or Asian woman, since he doesn't much seem to like white ones.
Reading that article and a few others of his, the story isn't that hard to put together. He's a manipulative and hyper-verbal BS artist (he's a guy with 2 email jobs and calls himself a pirate, c'mon), and his style works very well for seducing leftist women who have poor defenses to that approach. He moved to the midwest, and his approach was less successful. However, at one point he tried to run his game on a disagreeable, intelligent conservative woman (whom he describes as a "Dagny Taggart" type), and she saw through him and hurt him in a way that still smarts a decade later. He asserts it's because he showed weakness and wasn't "batman" 24/7, but far more likely is that she realized he was unable to live up to his BS claims and was disagreeable enough to hold his feet to the fire.
ChickenOverlord
2hr ago
X as well with Seymour wanting to become Sin so he could give everyone the sweet release of death
Ah, OK, fair point on that. Thanks for the link. Now if anyone can point me to anything particularly egregious he posted on that alt I'd accept it as a point where darwin himself was egregious.
I'll admit I'm only somewhat familiar with his postings instead of intimately familiar, yet everything I saw really didn't strike me as the kind of poster who'd post obviously egregious things. This notion has been moderately reinforced as I've consistently requested an example of such behavior and people haven't been able to give it to me.
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