domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
I think that a month is much too much, given how many right-wingers here get away regularly with breaking the rules and the ethos of trying to bring light instead of heat. Which I'm not blaming the mods for, given how much content there is to mod, but it's a matter of proportionality. I think a week would be fair. Giving him a month just feeds into the narrative that critics of the right are being persecuted here for being critics of the right, instead of just being modded when they are snarky and so on.
I like Amadan's comment a lot, I think it's one of the best mod comments I've ever read on any forum and is very fair, but I think that "Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy." is not really a good reason to mod people, since people really shouldn't be blamed for writing things that are "so against the grain here that it drives people crazy", which can apply to all sorts of good comments. You can mod him for being repetitively unnecessarily inflammatory, same as various right-wingers are modded for that. If you ban AlexanderTurok for writing things that drive people crazy, you should also give WhiningCoil another ban for the same reason.
FtttG
5hr ago
Yes, but it's a social realist drama where a big part of what makes it engaging is getting to know the low-rent ghetto drug dealers really well and understand their quirks and motivations. Per @WandererintheWilderness's point, I don't think an episodic murder mystery series set in the same milieu would be engaging: in a murder mystery, the killer has to be someone unsuspected, and solving the mystery has to be at least something of an intellectual challenge. "Low-rent ghetto drug dealer murders rival drug dealer by shooting him in the back of the head" is prime fodder for a crime drama, but probably not for a self-contained episodic murder mystery: there is no mystery, about the identity of the perpetrator, their motive or their method.
NunoSempere
6hr ago
Should have been https://www.chinatalk.media/p/xi-rumors , thanks
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
Quoting a tweet that "someone made on Twitter" without attribution or source is a... choice. If it was made with the intent of rules-lawyering our BLR guidelines, by not submitting a link at all, it was made poorly.
I might be missing something, but I thought the point of the "bare links" rule is to provide commentary (which he did in spades), and not just leave people with... bare links. So I'm not sure what rule posting, or not posting a link would supposed to be circumventing.
Celestial-body-NOS
Why should Man not rebel against Nature, when Nature herself is in rebellion against Justice?
6hr ago
One of those irregular verbs from Yes, Minister; 'I'm questioning received dogma, you're spreading misinformation, he's lying.'.
ChickenOverlord
6hr ago
Pay your pest control contractors or they'll murder your children.
phailyoor
6hr ago
Sure that is a valid interpretation as well. But if you heard that some right wing influencer posted it then it's more likely the former.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
Goldbugs in shambles (if and when anyone actually makes fusion power): https://x.com/MasterTimBlais/status/1946291116954763388
Also some nominative determinist fun.
This is the last straw, Alex.
Barely a day ago, @Amadan gave you some rather clear operational advice, with his mod hat on:
There is a problem here, and the problem is you.
The problem, specifically, is that you post a lot of these kinds of sneering borderline kinda-making-a-point-but-mostly-just-sneering comments, and increasingly people are getting frustrated and angry and snapping at you, and then we have to mod those people (because you are not allowed to attack someone) and it's starting to look very much like this is your game.
Sometimes we ban someone not because any one post was terrible but because their overall effect on the community is so negative that there seems little value in allowing them to keep throwing shit. We don't like to do it; it's very subjective. We can't read your mind. Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy. But we've warned you enough, and you keep doing exactly the same thing, that I suspect you know what you're doing and you're doing it on purpose.
So I'm telling you now: stop it. Or I will propose to the rest of the mods that you should be banned under our catch-all egregiously obnoxious category.
He said it well, I can't say it any better. Our (very weak, if it even exists at all) Affirmative Action policy for left-wing trolling is, shall we say, not up to the task of tolerating this any longer.
Quoting a tweet that "someone made on Twitter" without attribution or source is a... choice. If it was made with the intent of rules-lawyering our BLR guidelines, by not submitting a link at all, it was made poorly.
That's a minor quibble at the end of the day. You have been repeatedly warned to behave yourself, and you've clearly annoyed both the commentariat and us mods well past the point of being justifiable on merit. You are being egregiously obnoxious, and show no signs of stopping. We tolerate more from those who give the forum more. You're not there, quite the opposite.
Banned for a month. Consider this provisional, since the other mods are asleep and I've asked them for their opinions regarding a duration. Me? I'm open to the idea of a permaban.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
8hr ago
Your agility and recovery declines first, even that's not noticeable very clearly unless you play some sport at a high level, strength keeps increasing for a long time. The real decline is when that stops too.
anon_
8hr ago
but acktually the media and journalists are spreading it, not witches on twitter ad 4chan
Or it could be both? It could be that the media, journalists and a large swath of the rest of society torched the integrity and trust in reliable institutions and now in their absence cranks have taken over.
Those two kind of are complementary theories.
Yeah, but gay rights activists are angry that MSM can’t donate blood, because they feel it stigmatizes being gay.
But I agree with you, people valuing defeating stigma more than protecting people from serious diseases is a really bad thing. I think the gay community has long been in denial about how seriously HIV/AIDS created rather than reflected stigma against gay men, and my understanding is it became something of a rite of passage back in the day — “I’m pozzed, so I no longer need to worry about it.”
BahRamYou
8hr ago
I just watched "Wheel of Time" and it's so, so bad in that regard.
Like, it's a major part of the worldbuilding that the world is fragmented. Every country has its own description and way of speaking. You can easily tell where someone is from. The main character, especially, grew up in a super isolated small town, and everyone looks at him weird because he has red hair. It's very obvious that his mother was an "outlander" as they call it. Big plot hook mystery what happened there.
Meanwhile that same town has two black women and... no one bats an eye? No one asks questions? Huh, OK. And of course they just happen to be the two women with the most power in the town. In fact, their role has been cranked up even larger than it was in the source material, stealing a lot of important scenes away from the main character.
The same pattern seems to repeat endlessly, with every single person of authority made to be a black woman, amping up their power and authority, and no one seems to question how this came to be. It's somehow both a post-racial utopia where noone mentions race, but also one with extremely clear racial boundaries.
It actually makes things pretty confusing. To be fair, it's a long book series with way too many characters, so I can appreciate how they have to cut a lot to make it work for television. But they put so much emphasis on the black characters that the white characters are left kind of pointless, with nothing to do. They just take up space on screen and make it harder to remember everyone's names.
ABigGuy4U
8hr ago
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any roles for Extraterrestrial-American actresses. I’m just saying these roles should be where historically and dramatically appropriate. Playing a genetically engineered creature in Morgan? Yes that’s a perfectly reasonable role for an ayy. Queen’s Gambit? It’s a bit of a reach, there were no ayylmao chess grandmasters back then. But given how much covert extraterrestrial involvement there was in the Cold War it doesn’t seem too ridiculous. But we don’t need to go cramming an ayy into a movie set in Scandinavia in the 11th century. It’s intentional human-erasure. And they clearly take special glee in casting her in romantic relationships with Earthmen. It’s about as subtle as a pornography video from PROBED .com.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
8hr ago
pied piper of Hamelin
To be honest, I don't recall the details of the actual tale. I was just using the phrase in its usual metaphorical sense - I just double checked Wikipedia, about this, and it suggested that "The phrase "pied piper" has become a metaphor for a person who attracts a following through charisma or false promises.".
Skimming the Wikipedia page for this makes the tale, and its history, sound pretty interesting in its own right, but I don't have much to add to that.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8hr ago
I'm talking exclusively about peak capabilities with intense training. If you're a couch potato till 25 and only later start exercising seriously, you can certainly do much better. Conversely, if you're already physically maxing yourself out, then you won't be able to get any better, and will likely notice decline. Someone claimed this can be further broken down into strength and endurance, which I'll have to check out later.
anti_dan
8hr ago
No, it’s not. It’s not the reason we bailed on Reddit, either.
HOLD ON NOW! Anti-white racism was certainly a large contributing factor why reddit was no longer a hospitable place.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8hr ago
Side note:
Mike Tyson is the greatest SPORTS champion who ever lived ... probably. But we will never know for sure.
After Cus D'Amato died and the Don King organization brain fucked a literal homeless kid from New York, it derailed Tyson's career with no possibility for a comeback in boxing (although his podcast / movie / pot farm career seems to have been, and remained, quite lucrative).
He was a physical freak who also had an insane natural, prodigal understanding of boxing itself. If you watch the 80s videos when he's still pretty much a teenager, his movement is not only fast but anticipatory in ways that usually only come with experience. He sets up sequences before launching them - which is made all the more unstoppable by the fact that his punching power is generally beyond measure.
I've been contemplating the idea of writing a long effortpost on "Did Money Actually Ruin Sports?" and Tyson and boxing would be at the center of it rather than the usual suspects of the Big Four (Football, Basketball, Baseball, Hockey). The primary reason for that is that, with a longer lived Cus D'Amato and the blocking out of Don King et al., I think Tyson would be the absolute consensus pick for "Greatest American Athlete" of all time.
Yes, the guy who founded the Nazi planet in that episode explicitly believed that Nazi Germany was an extremely well-organised society. He says that it was the "most efficient state Earth ever knew". He thought that he could save this society by giving it a social model that had all the benefits of Nazi organisation and cohension while stripping out the evil goals.
This is not, I believe, a historiography that any competent modern historian would agree with. The Third Reich was quite inefficient in many ways, and frequently made poor decisions. Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.
I would normally say that it's possible John Gill is just meant to be wrong, IC, and his belief about the efficiencies of Nazism are wrong, but the episode does seem to take his side. The problem with Ekos is not that Nazism is ineffective; it's that Nazism is evil. Gill's failure was thinking he could remove the evil, not in thinking that Nazism is effective. Spock himself agrees with Gill's first judgement:
KIRK: Gill. Gill, why did you abandon your mission? Why did you interfere with this culture?
GILL: Planet fragmented. Divided. Took lesson from Earth history.
KIRK: But why Nazi Germany? You studied history. You knew what the Nazis were.
GILL: Most efficient state Earth ever knew.
SPOCK: Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated, rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.
KIRK: But it was brutal, perverted, had to be destroyed at a terrible cost. Why that example?
SPOCK: Perhaps Gill felt that such a state, run benignly, could accomplish its efficiency without sadism.
And it delivers the moral pretty blatantly at the end:
SPOCK: Captain, I never will understand humans. How could a man as brilliant, a mind as logical as John Gill's, have made such a fatal error?
KIRK: He drew the wrong conclusion from history. The problem with the Nazis wasn't simply that their leaders were evil, psychotic men. They were, but the main problem, I think, was the leader principle.
MCCOY: What he's saying, Spock, is that a man who holds that much power, even with the best intentions, just can't resist the urge to play God.
SPOCK: Thank you, Doctor. I was able to gather the meaning.
MCCOY: It also proves another Earth saying. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Darn clever, these Earthmen, wouldn't you say?
SPOCK: Yes. Earthmen like Ramses, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lee Kuan. Your whole Earth history is made up of men seeking absolute power.
MCCOY: Spock, you obviously don't understand.
SPOCK: Obviously, Doctor, you fail to accept.
KIRK: Gentlemen. Gentlemen, we've just been through one civil war. Let's not start another.
jake
9hr ago
The others are right, chess at its highest level doesn't feed into anything but itself. If your daughter had that rare acumen and you wanted to support her and she made WGM, chess would be her work and her life. I think you might wonder if this would be so bad. WFM Anna Cramling is the daughter of WGM Pia Cramling and GM Juan Manuel Bellón López. There's this video of her watching as her mother plays an amateur at a chess bar in Paris, and it's idyllic. Titled chess players also generally come from moneyed families; there are worse people to fall into crowd with.
But there are examples of highly successful non-career chess players who were good at it, namely Stanley Kubrick and Peter Thiel. I'm not attributing, obviously it's that the traits that made Kubrick a superb filmmaker as an adult, saw him interested and successful in chess as an adolescent, same with Thiel. Maybe chess is the nascent flame of something much brighter in her future, why not encourage it?
If you want to brush up yourself, IM Jeremy Silman wrote the best general book: How to Reassess Your Chess
pigeonburger
9hr ago
Honestly, Japan, India and Australia are pretty much the only ones whose answer matters, having a navy in the general area.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
9hr ago
Spectating, voyeurism is bad, robs you of life, time.
The only thing worse than a bare-link is no link at all. Which is uh.. Now that I think about it, an empty comment. You're right, I'll retract that claim, in my defense I wrote it at 5 am.
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