banned
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10mo ago
If I didn't capitalize the word "black" in my sentence, there could be people here who would demand I capitalize it.
Welcome to theMotte! For the record, there are effectively no such people here. SJ's tolerated here, but trying to impose SJ on others would get a dogpile and possibly even moderator action - as there's a little moderator action here against people demanding you stop using SJ terms.
Basically, the moderation here is quite neutral but the commentariat leans heavily to the "right" of politics - there are quite a few libertarians (like me) as well as a lot of full-blown conservatives, but very few true SJers. My going theory for the lion's share of this disparity is that because a lot of the big places on the 'Net don't allow opinions contradicting SJ (though this is less true than it used to be since Elon Musk bought Twitter), and people only generally put in enough effort to find one place where they can talk politics and then stop, SJers don't generally need to bother with a niche forum like this while anti-SJers do (I, for instance, came here after it became obvious to me that continuing to talk politics on Sufficient Velocity or SpaceBattles would get me permabanned for blasphemy against SJ).
celluloid_dream
10mo ago
It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.
This doesn't match my model of most street crime.
I'll see a drugged out fentanyl addict (when they're not bent over like this) careen into the supermarket I'm shopping at, wearing about 3 layers too many and know instantly, this guy is going to steal some shit. I make eye contact with the security guard, do a little head nod as if to indicate, "hey, you see that guy? He's going to steal some shit". The guard gives a tired sigh as if to reply, "I fucking know, dude. What do you want me to do about it?", and I shrug and go back to shopping. Couple minutes later, I see the guard following the junkie - now with hoodie pockets stuffed full of batteries - out the door. I guess that's protocol. Junkie shambles off around the corner to the alley and probably sells his whole haul to another drug addict for $10 and moves on to smashing car windows to steal cans out of the cupholders or something. That's the street crime I see.
We have gangs. It's just that they're off in another part of the city shooting each other, and playing cops & robbers with the anti-gang police task force. I'm sure their crime is connected to the druggie stealing Duracells somewhere, but it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's different in your city.
I understand them well enough, now. You can just call me stupid and not be passive aggressive about it, I'm an adult.
I would have no problem with him being banned if the person that instigated the events were even just warned but they weren't in this case or in the others. The rules are different for each poster. Wildcard rule, whatever. I disagree that this is a good way to do things but I stand by the fact that it's simply unfair for seemingly no reason other than accumulation. In most situations the instigator is held to a higher standard than the responder. But not here. It's fair and right that there should be consequences and even if you had given steve a permanent ban but had given the original instigation a warning I would have thought it was a better response than just ignoring someone basically calling anyone who makes a certain argument a pedophile and not even getting an informal warning.
What are some good ideas, as an individual, for decreasing street crime in highly Democratic-leaning cities, other than just moving away? Recently I have been getting more and more fed up with the failure of my local government to provide basic safety - which is, after all, reasonably speaking the most important purpose of government. I want to apologize to @2rafa for having yelled at her about this kind of stuff a year or two back. Perhaps she was simply more aware of the problem than I was at the time. At this point I am reaching near Bukele levels of willingness to crack down hard on the problem.
I am a techie, I do software. I've recently thought that well, given my concerns, maybe I should go work in law enforcement. I think that at this point I am probably too old to become a cop, but I could probably provide useful services in other ways. What stops me is that I quite simply disagree with the laws against recreational drugs on a very fundamental level. I am sure that I am not the only one. I cannot in good conscience side with the cops who enforce such fundamentally illiberal laws. On the other hand, if one has to choose the lesser of two evils, then I do, despite all my disagreements with the justice system, see the cops as being a lesser evil than street criminals, even despite the fact that they enforce the anti-drug laws that I view as fundamentally wrong. This is not something that should be seen as me praising cops, it is just that street criminals are such scum that even cops are vastly better.
My problem with the drug war is not just rooted in my libertarian-esque attitudes about the proper bounds of government. It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.
Other than complaining on social media, which raises awareness but does not necessarily accomplish that much, what can one do in cities which are failing to provide basic safety? What are some actionable ideas, things that might actually help, whether it is some sort of viable plan for forming a vigilante militia or a plan for influencing local elections? I am open to suggestions. I know that statistics say that street crime is down a lot from the 1980s and early 90s, but that is small comfort for me because I have little memory of those years. What I know is that I subjectively feel that the level of street crime now is too high compared to what I would wish it to be, and I would like to do something about it. If moving away from the failed cities is the only reasonable course of action, fair enough. But is it, or can something actually be done to fight back against the problem?
By the way, given that this is The Motte, I know that people will likely read a racial angle into the issue. Which is fair, given the crime statistics that most of us are aware of. But anecdotally speaking, out of the five or so times that I have been attacked by street criminals of various sorts over the course of my life, four of the five times were a case of white men doing the attacking. So while I totally understand that statistically speaking, there is a racial discrepancy in this sort of thing, at the same time it is clear to me that we do not just have a problem with non-white people. We also have a pretty significant issue with street scum whites who act in these kinds of ways. There is a general problem with territorial idiots, drug dealer gangsters, violent insane homeless, etc...
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
I'll have to take your word for it as it's all I have, but, like a certain New York City rental bike situation, I know that you and I see the world in different colors.
No you don't, and no we don't.
Anyway, if you want users to not post in a certain way then warning them privately is a pretty bad way of getting other users to know what's okay to post.
Who said anything about warning them privately? We rarely communicate with people via DMs. Warnings and bans are public. "Stop posting like this or you will be banned" is a very common thing we tell people, and even if we don't say it explicitly, if you get banned for a day, then do the same thing and get banned for week, then do it again and get banned for two weeks, you should be able to do the math.
anti_dan
10mo ago
Perhaps at the degenerate schools. At the schools where most mid-high achieving students will attend there is vigorous policing. Anti-bullying investigations by schools are expansive and go off campus. Recreation is heavily policed with things like dodgeball, football, etc banned during recess and PE.
07mk
10mo ago
Heck, I remember learning as a kid that nunchucks and butterfly knives were illegal in England not just to own but even to show in movies, which explained some bizarre censorship in some movies (IIRC the Mel Gibson movie Payback had a non-violent, non-combat scene cut where someone was showing off a butterfly knife). So it wouldn't be surprising if telescoping polearms were banned as soon as they became commonly used.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10mo ago
Because he was very consistent.
He has been warned. Banned once, to no apparent effect. This is all public record.
So when I check the queue and see exhibits A, B, C, I don’t think there’s been a mistake. Dude just really hates his political enemies. If he can’t keep that in check when he’s posting, then I’m going to ban him.
It is disappointing, because he’s obviously a smart guy who asks reasonable questions. He just also does this.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
10mo ago
· Edited 10mo ago
But I suppose they just have paper over that because as makers of the ad are 'sex-positive' as you say (which includes porn) that just have to pretend like these guys wouldn't be consuming porn.
No, the idea is they are consuming porn (because the sex-positive left doesn't believe anyone can abstain from porn) but are hypocritically talking about how porn needs to be banned because they can't control their urge to use porn. That they're the stereotypical consumers of porn is precisely the point -- the idea is that the only people who want porn to be banned are hypocritical, insane deviants who want daddy government to control their sexuality because they can't. It's the "Republicans are the real perverts" attack.
It's an... damnit I feel bad using the work 'weird' now, lets go with 'unusual'... idea, I agree. It inverts things that ought not be inverted, and uses right-wing attacks against the right. But again, it works with the sex-positive left's view that everyone is a beautiful sexual butterfly and if you keep your sexuality bottled up it explodes in an orgiastic frenzy of uncontrolled sexuality, like a pressure vessel that has not been allowed to vent gas. Gentlemen watch porn in private, like a normal person, and so don't need it to be banned. They certainly aren't talking about it in public, even to say it should be banned. "It's, like, weird bro that you're so obsessed with porn, sure you're not using it?"
plural
10mo ago
I'll have to take your word for it as it's all I have, but, like a certain New York City rental bike situation, I know that you and I see the world in different colors.
Anyway, if you want users to not post in a certain way then warning them privately is a pretty bad way of getting other users to know what's okay to post. I've never gotten a private warning but I've read many posts from SteveKirk in the past weeks and months and I'm sure there are some that got warnings I didn't see but this ban is the only one that points out to others that it's not an okay way to post. "Accumulating a record" that no one can see, and only the person who has the record knows that and only then they get to know only by accumulation doesn't seem transparent at all. Not for others or even the person with the record. Especially because "having a record" is the A.#1 reason why anyone gets banned on this site.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10mo ago
The mod queue being how we decide if someone gets banned is just dumb.
The mod queue is not how "we" decide if someone gets banned. It is one of several things that the mods consider. It is never the sole consideration, but if you have a whole bunch of comments in the mod queue because you're on a rage-posting spree, we are more likely to say "This guy needs a time out." @SteveKirk's post above was bad enough to earn a ban (because of his growing record of tantrums, which incidentally precede this account, because I know exactly which previous permabanned account he used), but the fact that he was posting many comments like this certainly warranted mention.
I check the user/janitor thing every time I'm here and it's like half of the reported comments (which I assume is how they get there) is because someone disagreed with them and they're using the report as an extra downvote.
This is true, unfortunately.
And it's obvious that is skews in one political direction as well, maybe because they're a smaller portion of the people here or maybe it's just their way because it certainly is on places like reddit.
This is absolutely not true. You see the volunteer queue; we see the actual reports and who made them. The majority of reports are indeed from individuals who use the report tool as a super-downvote button or to express their dislike of the poster. (Waves to all my haters.) I can assure you there are plenty of rightists who do this. In fact, I think you have the numbers reversed; leftists are a smaller portion of posters here, hence the majority of reports come from right-leaning people, and rightists are definitely not less prone to reporting posts because someone disagreed with them. There are a number of people who seem to reflexively report anyone arguing with them as "antagonistic." (You know who you are. Yes, we notice.) Most of them are not lefties.
But using that as an excuse is surely just going to end up with people deciding the only way to decide what is acceptable on the site is just mass reporting everything they disagree with.
There are people who do this. We are not stupid and we see the reports.
I still don't understand why the mods here can't ever ban people for the things they do that are bad but instead keep a secret tally of bad things that they don't disclose and then ban them for all those things when they do something less egregious.
Again, untrue. Contra @The_Nybbler's usual ankle-biting (he's been singing this same song for years even though he's been very patiently walked through the errors in his thinking multiple times), it's not an "authority tactic." Our moderation is about as transparent as it can be; we post warnings and bans publicly. Our tally is not "secret" except in the sense that only mods can see your mod log (in which we record all past infractions so that we have them to refer to and know if we've seen this behavior before). We tell you when you are accumulating a record that's likely to result in increased consequences. We usually point to those past infractions when we start applying them.
When someone gets banned for something "less egregious" it's because they've been a persistent bad actor and told to stop doing that. There is such a thing as "the last straw." If you call me a jerk once, you'll probably get a warning. If you've been namecalling for months and getting repeatedly warned and banned for it, then the next time you call me a jerk, you might get a permaban. Anyone who claims this comes as a surprise is not being honest.
We are not secret police collecting dossiers on people we don't like; we tell you what you're doing and why you're being modded (and ask you to stop). Almost always, the people who get permabanned are the people who tell us (implicitly or explicitly) "Fuck you and your rules."
And almost always in a baited argument where the person doing the baiting does not even get a warning.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of moderation occurs in the context of a heated argument, and equally unsurprisingly, the person modded (and his supporters) almost always think the other guy started it. Sometimes we agree and warn both participants; sometimes we don't.
plural
10mo ago
This is just pointless. Why is someone getting banned for doing the exact same thing that a poster did above them but the above poster doesn't even get a warning?
The mod queue being how we decide if someone gets banned is just dumb. I check the user/janitor thing every time I'm here and it's like half of the reported comments (which I assume is how they get there) is because someone disagreed with them and they're using the report as an extra downvote. And it's obvious that is skews in one political direction as well, maybe because they're a smaller portion of the people here or maybe it's just their way because it certainly is on places like reddit. But using that as an excuse is surely just going to end up with people deciding the only way to decide what is acceptable on the site is just mass reporting everything they disagree with.
I still don't understand why the mods here can't ever ban people for the things they do that are bad but instead keep a secret tally of bad things that they don't disclose and then ban them for all those things when they do something less egregious. And almost always in a baited argument where the person doing the baiting does not even get a warning.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10mo ago
To be fair, in the "leave him alone with someone" part of the equation, the team did take pains to "prevent" something like that, though the exact form of that prevention seems unclear (he's at least not in the Olympic village together, though wouldn't that be more safe not less, since it's not usually families AFAIK?) so the argument is really more about optics rather than anything else.
But the Olympics is actually about national pride, not the athletes themselves, if we're being honest. Otherwise it would have a prestige level more on par with the X-Games or something. So in that context presenting a child rapist (I think it's worth noting that he travelled to another country to meet up with this kid knowing full well her age) as the face of your country is patently illogical. But I'd argue that giving the Netherlands shit about it (reputational damage) is more effective than actually trying to get him banned, as a practical matter (especially given that they've assumed responsibility for his behavior during the games).
But yes, at least some of the conversation is definitely about if someone who makes a choice like that can be "reformed" or not. If they can, it's at best inspiring and at worst a non-issue, but if they can't then it's forever a black stain of silence in the face of misbehavior, which people are usually quite sensitive to in the last decade. As I like to say, betrayal is one of the most powerful emotions, and a lot of people feel that Olympic showrunner types are guilty of betrayal and cover-up of sex crimes, so the sensitivity is probably even higher. Recognizing that part of the response is obviously an emotional reaction rather than a strictly logical one is thus helpful.
TIRM
10mo ago
They don't show "a lot" of porn to kids in public schools. But they sometimes show a little. Like in the book Gender Queer which has been "banned" from many school libraries. It is, among other things, a book of gay cartoon porn.
I would reframe the wave of book "bans" as a wave of parents realizing that a bit of cartoon porn has slipped into the school library and asking that their tax dollars and public institutions not be used to distribute these materials to children.
Outlaw83
10mo ago
Except they have to work anyway, and would die anyway. The number of men who die on a job who would not be on that specific job if not for child support payments is likely not that high. Unless there's some society with a much lower workplace death rate that has divorce banned I'm unaware of.
They had an election. Officially, Maduro (the socialist encumbrant) won. Unofficially, it's sketchy even by the standards of Venezuelan elections (Jimmy Carter's seal of approval twenty-five years ago!), with a massive swing from recent polling, bans on political candidates, Maduro claiming a massive foreign cyberattack (echoing 2019 claims after that mess), so on. Add in background of the oil stuff and a broad ban on firearms mostly unenforced against Maduro's supporters, and there's a lot of room for things to get Messy.
((In theory, if any irregularities could be proven, it would be a major embarrassment for the Biden administration, since they removed a lot of sanctions on Venezuela's oil exports on the basis of free and fair elections. But I don't think anyone who cares will hear about it, and the [agreement officially had collapsed in April anyway.))
No idea where you live, so can't say on police barricades.
EDIT: some alleged but hilarious return numbers.
EDIT2: the Maduro government is announcing prosecution of said banned political candidate, among others..
Tomato
10mo ago
Any pro-trumpers dismayed over the amount of pro-Kamala content on TikTok need to go get their guy. Full disclosure I also think tiktok is bad and should be banned.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Welcome back! Let's see, you were last temp-banned for low-effort boo-outgroup posting a year ago... but instead of taking three days off, you disappeared for a year. It took you less than a week of posting to get my attention this time.
You're banned for a week, but you can expect that to escalate sharply if you continue posting like this.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Given that you seem to think highly of your own writing ability, I am really tempted to give you some writing advice, but that's not my role here and I doubt you'd appreciate it. That said:
@OliveTapenade seemed quite willing to wade into this petty back and forth with you, but you still have been warned before about being unnecessarily belligerent and engaging in namecalling, and you picked up a few reports, and this post in particular, while trying to hide some of the insults in a wall of text, is definitely full of them.
So let me be perfectly directly: stop doing this or you're going to get banned. If you think this warning is unfair, don't complain to me, I don't care. Ping any of the other mods (or send a modmail) and explain to them why you think my modding is capricious and unreasonable, and if they agree, they will remove the warning and "Ban next time" note I have attached to your log.
And in anticipation to your first objection, no, I am not going to mod @OliveTapenade. I do not judge his comments to be in violation of any rules. If you disagree, ping any of the other mods (or send a modmail) and explain to them why you think my modding is capricious and unreasonable, and if they agree, they will issue a warning to @OliveTapenade.
If you choose to take this opportunity to lash out at me, as you have in the past, be aware that while we usually cut slack to people angry at being modded, you are very low on slack right now.
gattsuru
11mo ago
RPGnet (which famously explicitly banned any support for Trump on its discussion forums)
Or for ICE. Or for Dobbs, or any other abortion restrictions. Or a variety of police-related matters. And that's just the explicit rules! If you have an account with access to Tangency, look at the first and second debate threads -- I highlighted the thread closure on the assassination attempt, but the "A+" behavior thread that has someone I remember from my time highlighting how Trump ("literally"!) wants them shot is a pretty good and very far from unique glimpse into leftist and even some progressive-dominated spaces now. And especially appalling for anyone old enough to remember when Darren MacLennan and co were so very proud of very clear and thick line separate their normal free speech principles from an exception for nazis-and-only-literal-Nazis.
Sorry, for the most part I try to limit my pettiness with the principle of 'don't get your enemies free real estate in your head', but that site is just such a perfect example of the faults in its own philosophy that every time someone mentions it I have to check to see if it's at least stopped getting worse, and I'm always disappointed.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Ugh. /r/boardgames (and boardgamegeek, the largest dedicated hobby site for boardgaming), and the boardgaming hobby in general, are emblematic of my growing disgust with leftist politics. boardgamegeek hasn't quite gone as far as RPGnet (which famously explicitly banned any support for Trump on its discussion forums), but they have moderators who openly declare that their "political" forum is a leftist space. Anything right of AOC has to be expressed in the most tepid terms, and expect to get dogpiled with impunity, while any degree of heat in response will get you banned. Boardgamers are the fucking worst. (I can say this, I'm a boardgamer. Although I'm a dirty hex-and-counter wargamer, and only old white supremacist men play those.)
Anyway, a watermelon has been a Palestinian symbol for a while now, and I'm actually a little surprised that Matteo got this much heat for a relatively innocuous pin, especially given that Israel/Palestine remains a kind of third rail in boardgaming, as in most other liberal spaces, because of the intersection of leftist Palestine supporters and Jewish gamers. It suppose it is because the award is German and Germans are extra-sensitive to anti-semitism complaints.
I am willing to extend someone enough charity to accept that "Pro-Palestine" does not necessarily mean "Anti-Israel" (in the sense of "wants Israel destroyed'), let alone "anti-Semitic." Pro-Palestine right now is basically the BLM movement of 23-24. A lot of leftists' support really doesn't go any deeper than "Israelis are bombing children, this is very sad." That said, you often don't have to peel back a pro-Palestine activist's views very deeply to find a seething hatred of Israel, and possibly of Jews.
confuciuscorndog
11mo ago
I thought that in the pugilistic, culturally-conservative right-wing world, the idea that inter-male violence is a reasonable response to attacks on one's honour was pretty commonplace?
Sure. And if you want to represent that, then represent that fully, openly, and honestly, instead of acting as a defender of modern Reddit conceptions of gentle "civility", "charity", and "kindness" while then also trying to ambush me with your presumed interpretation of what I believe when you think it'll act as a sufficient enough "gotcha". (Of course fights of honor often also end honorably with no fatalities and foes agreeing to cease hostilities upon the satisfaction of said honor, whereas I have no doubt that least 20-50% of the "champions" of modern "civility", not necessarily you, would, with only some half-feigned reluctance, send to the gulags anyone who they see as guilty of "hate speech" or "being a heckin' dick" or whatever if they could.) Don't sneakily change sides based on what benefits your purposes at the moment or assume you can wear another ideology's complex and nuanced beliefs about the relationship between honor and violence as a rhetorical costume to score one cheap point.
Your chastity cage comment was fighting words.
And? So fucking what? Does Scott Siskind even read this place? And if he does, is he going to challenge me to a fight? (Obviously not.) If so, I'd almost certainly kick his ass lmao. (Which means that he wouldn't challenge me to a fight, because that'd just make the insult to his honor worse. His only hope for retaining some would be to try to defuse my words with cleverer ones (also a perfectly valid right-wing masculine strategy for responding to insults to one's honor). What he hopefully would not do is what you're doing, just whining like a baby and lecturing like a schoolmarm, which never earns you points with anyone who matters, generally only with random online moderators occasionally.)
I criticised you for engaging in such provocations - for lighting fires rather than shining lights.
Well, that's dumb then, because fire has traditionally been one of humanity's greatest sources of light. Maybe you need to stop thinking you fell out a coconut tree and are too good for a little old-school lighting.
If you think of a classic fire, maybe Ogg the caveman is hanging near it because he's cold. But maybe Ugg conversely is staying within range of it so he can use its light to find something he's looking for... a particularly sharp rock... so he can beat Ogg to death. So one man's heat can be another man's light. But the light is not always peaceful and the heat is not always violent. And if the heat is violent... maybe Oog intercepts Ugg's murder attempt and throws him into the fire, burning him to death in defense of good ol' innocent (as far as we know in this limited scenario) Ogg. Sounds like the heat was a good thing here.
But you are still optimising for heat, rather than light
Honest question: Why can't people like you just post any sort of a good rebuttal of anything I've said, if you're in such a titter about it, instead of just bitching about how I said it? Even if I were only "optimizing for" (another sign this is an NPC concern: it's constantly phrased by the concerned in the exact same literal thought-terminating cliche slogan form, "optimizing for heat [instead of/rather than] light", even though as I've already demonstrated and will more below it's a mediocre little metaphor in the first place that basically ignores the actual complexities of the concepts it incorporates) heat, which isn't true, heat at least often automatically tends to produce some light (again, going based off of physics here, that is the real world and the actual complexities of the concepts), whereas "civility" policing (at least how you're doing it) literally adds absolutely nothing to the object-level conversation.
I mean, you want to know what really try to optimize for light instead of heat (though you'll often certainly still feel the heat, sometimes unexpectedly, when exposed to one, supporting my central point)? Lasers. Which are very dangerous, more so than many if not most forms of fire in their most optimized form, and are consequently more banned/illegal than most forms of fire in most places (at least in the US). (Probably nobody ever got on a watchlist for owning a flamethrower, but if you buy too many powerful lasers... See "laseranon" from /pol/.) In regards to the object-level conversation that started this dispute (the virtue of retaliation), they say "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" (which is a dumbass saying because it's transparently not true if you think about it literally for 10 seconds), but I think the best optimizations for light instead of heat would do that far more effectively.
Do you really ever actually want anything to "optimize for light"? If you screwed in a lightbulb that truly optimized for light with modern technology, you'd immediately go blind. If your computer or phone optimized for light instead of those wasteful heat-producing computations, you'd have a very bright room indeed, but you wouldn't be posting here. And certainly, for example in the winter, no human can live comfortably without a healthy dose of heat.
Think of all those people who live in Middle Eastern, African, etc. desert environments without AC, who close their houses up during the day and block the windows to try to keep the cool night air trapped in, achieve passive cooling, and avoid the sun's rays. Yet they're still being pounded upon by the sun's heat, without receiving any of its glorious light! Obviously they should open a curtain and stare at it. Optimize for light! Take in as much as possible! (If you feel your retinas tingling painfully, that means you're doing a good job. Note: Future perception of any light after optimizing for light not guaranteed.)
To be clear, am I brashly stretching and torturing what was ultimately originally intended as nothing more than a cutesy little "rule of thumb" metaphor here, putting more literal weight on it than it was ever intended to bear? Am I being a bit silly? Of course. But the fact that such a cutesy little "rule of thumb" has apparently come to be seen by some like you as some sort of iron law at a minimum more than justifies poking at it a bit, and there are real points and considerations to be found in the pokes. My examples show how there's always the possibility of too much of a good thing and how optimizing too heavily in the "good" direction can often cause similar problems as the "bad" direction that one is attempting to avoid. Now pick your brain a bit and ruminate on my extended metaphors in the context of conversation and not literal physics. It could be productive.
you're being a soldier, rather than a scout.
Again, your own metaphors defy the points you're trying to make. Scouts (in a military context, which I'm assuming since you mention soldiers right after) are soldiers (who fight exclusively for one side). And while it's not their primary duty, they're more than willing to fire if necessary. In fact the whole point of their occupation is to allow their side to shoot the other more effectively.
Winning game designer banned from future Spiel des Jahres events for anti-Israel symbol.
Board gaming is a much bigger hobby than it used to be. The Spiel des Jahres award was created in 1978 to highlight family-friendly games, and I played some of the early winners (Rummikub (1980) and Scotland Yard (1983))--but it was 1995's winner, The Settlers of Catan, that really changed the face of board gaming in the United States. As an established presence in the European market, the Spiel des Jahres evolved from a simple trade award to the gold standard for "must have" games. Like most at-home hobbies, board gaming also got a bump from the COVID pandemic--but more broadly, the nerdification of American culture has fed board gaming in much the way it has fed video gaming, comic books, and other IP-adjacent hobbies.
These days there are three "Spiel des Jahres" awards--the children's award, the regular award, and the "complex game" award. This year's "complex" winner was Daybreak, "a cooperative game about stopping climate change." The creator, Matteo Menapace, presumably wrote his own bio, though I don't know that for certain:
...a game designer and educator, former artist in residence at the V&A Museum in London. He designs cooperative board games inspired by social issues, such as food politics, memory loss and the climate crisis. He also teaches people how to make games that encourage collaboration and help people navigate complex conversations.
Anyway, Matteo reportedly wore a pin or sticker or something looking approximately like this onto the award ceremony stage. The announcement describes this as
a symbol ... that Jews will perceive as anti-Semitic ... by pointing out the outlines of a 'Greater Palestine' that denies the existence of the State of Israel.
Predictably, a reddit post in the most popular board game sub refers to it as a "pro-Palestine" sticker rather than an "anti-Israel" sticker. These days the line between those things can seem pretty thin, or so it seems to me. The commentary is predictable enough... I suppose in this case I would say that it seems like the political symbol in question "deliberately skirts the border of comprehensibility." Matteo is clearly an activist, who was doing activist things. The Spiel des Jahres people are clearly on board with the DEI rhetoric, and employ it in this announcement, so this may be one of those "leopards at my face" moments, too. But I don't know what Matteo's nationality is (Google suggests maybe he's an Italian living in the UK?), and Germany has some fairly strict anti-semitism laws for, you know, historical reasons, so there may be a culture gap issue here as well.
BahRamYou
11mo ago
If this was a third-world country with limited state power that might make sense. But NK isn't like that. There is no "separate technical class" or "civilian class." If those devs are useful to the military regime, they'll just be transferred to work on whatever the rulers deem useful. Creating more "civilian" devs just frees up more resources to use for blackhat devs. And if they start to act "philowestern" from exposure to the internet, they can just be imprisoned or executed (as many people are who are caught with contraband material, like banned books or even SK dramas on DVD.
This sort of thinking has been tried. For a good long time now, most notably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Policy. The hope was that giving them free, peaceful aid would make them a more friendly nation. It didn't work, it just gave them enough resources to keep their shitty dictatorship running while they developed nukes and ICBMs. It's astonishing to me that people still think giving them "no strings attached aid" is going to magically change the mind of people who have spent decades running one of the cruelist military dictatorships on Earth.
If someone was stinking up a park with marijuana, and a woman with children asked you to get them to stop, would you have a bad conscience about that? If a street had become notorious for open air dealing and people shooting up and leaving needles around and the police chief told you to make arrests and clean up the street, would you feel bad about that?
AFAICT, urban police in the 2020's are not in the business of arresting people for private use of marijuana in their homes. Their not in the business of jailing people for personal use amounts of marijuana. They police drug problems only when it becomes a major public nuisance.
I think this was always motivated reasoning on the part of left-liberals. They wanted the cause of crime to be something that they opposed anyways, and so such arguments got signal boosted. But in you look at it, Singapore and China don't have a crime problem because of drug prohibition. Loosening up on drug prohibition hasn't reduced crime in the United States. And frankly, the strictness of drug prohibition was always overblown. I recommend this old blog post ( https://devinhelton.com/drug-crimes ) and specifically this excerpt from a news article about policing drug dealing:
The real drug war was never tried. Those dealers should have been getting a half-dozen whacks with a cane then put in a workhouse until they were able to move to gainful employment.
More options
Context Copy link