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DoctorMonarch
♬We're so happy that we live in 1800's Alabama 'cause it's sunny and there is no crime!♬
11hr ago
Could you link specific instances or mention the worst users who are regularly doing this?
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
11hr ago
I've never thought about it that way. Do you have other examples that come to mind?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
11hr ago
wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?
Not in the least. I've heard of worse hobbies.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
11hr ago
Well, I think that's the chief complaint about public school already in these parts? We spend a fortune to try to bring up the low end and mostly leave the above average kids to suffer with boredom and turn into misanthropes.
How do we make them more efficient? Giving up on telling the dumb kids they can be doctors is probably a moral good but I'm not sure it opens up efficiency gains? What do you have in mind?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11hr ago
If they’re coming to opposite conclusions, then I don’t see what makes you say they’re using the same calculus.
SnapDragon
11hr ago
Listen, I did not intentionally trap those Sims in their living room. The placement of the stove was an innocent mistake. That fire could have happened anywhere! A terrible tragedy.
You know, sometimes pools just accidentally lose their exit. Common engineering mishap. My sincere condolences to those affected.
I'm not convinced darwin2500 needed a permaban, but if you want a long-form discussion of why he was a bad poster, I wrote one here (and against some of his AAQCs here). And it's not like that was some all-encompassing list; many of his worst behaviors were well after that summary, and I didn't even include all the bad behaviors before that summary (open question: can Darwin2500 use CTRL+F?). _Viking's "Stop posting like your account is actually run by multiple people who don't talk to each other." kinda sums it up.
There's (unfortunately) a number of posters that you could pick out for each of darwin's individual ticks except from the right here (well, most of them), but there are very few, if any, that manage to combine all or even a sizable section of them all on their own.
Chi_Wara
11hr ago
I don't care how utopian your proposed society would supposedly be. I'm not going to let anyone take away my political rights under any circumstances. I won't be a subaltern or slave
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
Probably indefinitely. Northern European Protestant cultures cannot function in modernity without a Refugia to provide labor that makes up for their own low fertility rates; in the past these were mostly Catholic cultures that provided immigrants(Ireland as the ur-example, but that’s what Mexico was recently. Obviously, neither of these places are going to be exporting masses of young laborers they way they could in 1850 or 1990.), but that’s not an option anymore so the choice is between tolerating weirdos in your midst- provided they have six well behaved and hard working kids- or importing Africans. Germany may rather the latter, now that there’s no youth surplus in its Slavic near abroad, but America will almost certainly rather give the Amish more of the same special carve outs they have now.
If I were thé Hasidim, however, I’d be worried. Antisemitism is slowly becoming normalized on the left and the future right is unlikely to have much patience for groups that won’t even pretend to work.
Corvos
12hr ago
I don’t think it’s the case that, under the near-100% global fluidity you seem to be arguing for, the west will continue to remain ahead. That is, I don’t necessarily see why economic growth should be sticky under conditions of high global fluidity.
At the moment, Britain (say) is in relative decline. Because we once had a very large market and because companies serving that have mostly been staffed by British people for various reasons, that decline has been slow. Say, Toyota sets up a car factory in Sunderland to build cars for the British market; that factory is mostly staffed by British people by virtue of being in Britain and because of various employment laws, meaning that a decent number of British people are earning a decent salary, meaning that the market for Toyota cars in Britain is still decently sized, etc. But the decline is still present because (among other things) Britain is expensive and therefore British workers require global-market-beating salaries to live well.
Under conditions of maximal global liquidity, I would expect to see accelerated growth and decline, with some countries entering into the India/Taiwan/China/Japan role of ‘cheap country where multinationals can get decent work for low prices’ and other countries declining to that point or past that point and waiting for their time to get back in the spotlight.
(Countries might decline past the ‘spotlight point’ because factories etc. benefit from synergy and investment tends to cluster, so even if several countries have favourable economic conditions only one of them might win the prize at any given time.)
In short, to my mind, the maximally fluid world looks like it would accelerate boom and bust for any given country (or its native population) rather than lead to ratchet growth spread globally. I think it would be hard to get public support for that - first world countries wouldn’t want to sign up for accelerated decline from their current position, and third world countries want to be able to protect their economic growth once they have it.
FtttG
12hr ago
So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
12hr ago
I would not be surprised if, within the next ~40 years, there was a push to bring the Amish to heel, most likely with "child (sexual) abuse" as the casus belli.
I'd say odds are high, and I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't happened yet. Look at the flurry of stories from the past few years involving Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a relatively small sect (but larger than the Amish). Washington's recent law removing clergy-penitent privilege specifically referenced them along with Catholics as the reason for needing to remove the privilege.
First off I think there ought to be much more stringent thresholds for people who are part of the conversation vs people who aren't
Great, because if his argument is valid, then it wouldn't be talking about anyone who's part of the conversation, just people like them. So none of what you said applies.
Second off I agree that it's generally bad to put words in peoples' mouths or to think much stronger statements are implied by things people actually did say. There has to be some limitations to this or else any sort of debate is effectively impossible, but Darwin definitely exceeded what could be reasonably claimed by JK Rowling's words.
The issue isn't him putting words in JK Rowling's mouth, people do that all the time as part of completely normal acceptable conversations. If it went like:
- JK Rowling wants to eradicate trans people
- No she doesn't
- Oh... Looks like I was wrong, sorry.
it would have been completely fine. He'd still be putting words in her mouth, but he'd be open to admitting he was wrong, and correcting. Instead we had him making a false claim, denying that he had made it, redirecting to another claim that he thought was more defensible, but was just as false as the first one, and then claiming that any false claims he made don't actually matter because he wanted to talk about something else, even though he's the one that brought each of these claims into the conversation.
It's textbook trolling - luring people into what appears a reasonable conversation, making insane claims to get people riled up, and ducking out after the damage is done.
Third, I cut a little bit of slack for how common a political idea is among a group, even if it's wrong.
Again, him believing Rowling is a transphobe is irrelevant to the conversation, I'm completely fine with people holding that belief.
If someone then claimed that I was taking it far too literally and that it was more about Democrats as a whole, I'd think they're being kind of cheeky but I wouldn't act like Amadan did and start lobbing personal attacks all over the place, nor would I describe it as "dishonest", or "bad faith" or "manipulative".
If you don't think Darwin's behavior objectively crosses the line into dishonest, bad faith, and manipulative, I think it's pretty clear you are just biased in favor of people who go against the grain of this forum. It's fine, I get it, you catch a tonne of shit for disagreeing with the average poster here, so it feels nice to have company, but it's still bias.
Tree
12hr ago
I know guesswho claimed that. Still. You should have asked him if he was ever wrong on the smollett thing to determine his identity. If he said yes, it wasn't him.
07mk
12hr ago
GuessWho quite literally answered a direct question of whether he was the user darwin2500 on Reddit with "Yes, obviously."
It's possible that GuessWho is a lying liar. But I'd say at the very least, the preponderance of evidence points to them being the same person.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
12hr ago
Your first two links are both thoroughly articulated arguments in defense of specific positions. They broke no rules. Every one else is free to marshal arguments against them - as I see that you did, terribly, for the first. The second still got a mod warning. The third one is perhaps more openly insulting (if you fall into the exaggerated position it's attacking), but it has always been the case that statements prefaced with "I think" and the like get a lot more leeway. And oh, there you are downthread, completely missing the point of that comment.
Meanwhile, the routine criticism of Turok is that he never actually stakes a position in the first place, but just engages in borderline incoherent, miserable performance art.
Tenaz
12hr ago
We can basically break suffering into two components: the physical sensation, and the meaning / long-term effects. As bad as getting a leg amputed without anesthesia hurts, the long-term effects will hurt worse, and so the horror of losing a leg permanently may well outweigh the physical pain in the moment.
Conflating these two types of pain is counterproductive. If we turn off physical pain, we might get hurt more. If we turn off negative utility we fundamentally alter ourselves. I'm not sure it's even theoretically possible to turn it off--going from 100 utility to 50 probably feels exactly the same as going from 0 to -50.
I doubt being fed your own genitals is actually all that painful compared to any number of other ways to die. It's just more horrifying. Most elderly people in America probably go through much worse physical pain than anyone in that prison as their bodies linger in agony for months.
Rape might not be physically painful at all but most people would choose to break a bone above being raped. Even if you were guaranteed to never suffer trauma or anything from it, it's still highly undesirable because of fundamental human desires. If you want something (control over your own body, both legs, an ice cream cone, a million dollars, etc.), then not getting it will inherently feel like suffering no matter what it is.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
First off I think there ought to be much more stringent thresholds for people who are part of the conversation vs people who aren't. JK Rowling wasn't actively debating on this website, so things are different for her as a public figure than they'd be for a poster on the Motte responding directly to me.
Second off I agree that it's generally bad to put words in peoples' mouths or to think much stronger statements are implied by things people actually did say. There has to be some limitations to this or else any sort of debate is effectively impossible, but Darwin definitely exceeded what could be reasonably claimed by JK Rowling's words.
Third, I cut a little bit of slack for how common a political idea is among a group, even if it's wrong. This might seem utterly arbitrary, but I think Darwin's statement here is about on par with a Republican claiming "Biden wants to take all our guns away". In one sense, Biden was in favor of further gun control. In another sense, the literal statement of "Biden wants to take ALL our guns away" is clearly wrong since he never advocated for completely taking all guns away. If someone then claimed that I was taking it far too literally and that it was more about Democrats as a whole, I'd think they're being kind of cheeky but I wouldn't act like Amadan did and start lobbing personal attacks all over the place, nor would I describe it as "dishonest", or "bad faith" or "manipulative".
YE_GUILTY
12hr ago
Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.
I do wonder how long they'll be tolerated by the wider culture, though, if it seems like they're growing enough to be more than token weirdos. I would not be surprised if, within the next ~40 years, there was a push to bring the Amish to heel, most likely with "child (sexual) abuse" as the casus belli.
Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell to have voted for the 1986 amnesty earlier in their careers
I did mention the "geriatric forebears"! Three out of these four people are in their 80s. The sole exception is a sprightly 74. These are no longer the people on whose trustworthiness the party's long- or even mid-term trustworthiness depends. They will be dead or in care homes long before they get the chance to recant on any deals made in the 2020s. This is what I meant by "no longer relevant".
Does that mean we can put any discussion of reparation to rest too because there's no such thing as group responsibility for past sins so long as you run the clock long enough?
Well, that doesn't follow. I wasn't talking about holding the son accountable for the sins of the father, but about the pragmatic question of whether the son is or isn't committing the same sins as his father today. The thread was discussing Republicans' ability to trust Democrats as a practical issue - that's not the same thing as granting that Democrats may be sincere today, but refusing to negotiate as punishment for past defections.
All of which said, yes, I do in fact believe there's no such things as group responsibility for the sins of past generations, and that "reparations" are a bad idea. (If some groups today are more disadvantaged than others, they should receive help proportionate to the extent to which they are disadvantaged. But there's no reason the distant descendants of their oppressors should be uniquely responsible for providing that help, and it shouldn't be regarded as something "owed" to the disadvantaged descendants of the oppressed, except insofar as all citizens are collectively responsible for the welfare of all other citizens - which applies just as well to someone whose family was ruined by a freak meteor crash twenty years ago as by slavery or segregation. I really dislike the justice-based/"punitive" framing.)
Tree
12hr ago
You: show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like
Me: His AAQCs
You : sure, he made AAQCs....
ez win.
I'm not convinced guesswho is darwin, because guesswho was treated antagonistically, and constantly accused of being darwin, and if you are to be believed, a 'bad faith' poster.
SnapDragon
12hr ago
There's also the concern of what kind of suffering a post-singularity society can theoretically enable; it might go far, far beyond what anyone on Earth has experienced so far (in the same way that a rocket flying to the moon goes farther than a human jumping). Is a Universe where 99.999% of beings live sublime experiences but the other 0.001% end up in Ultrahell one that morally should exist?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
12hr ago
This seems like a ban based on vibes alone.
Another way of saying vibes" is "tone." Yes, we moderate based on vibes. It's not quite that fuzzy- we try to follow the rubrics we've developed over the years- but yes, when someone is being an obnoxious trolling shitstirrer, and has been posting obnoxious trolling shitstirring threads for a while that so far have been just barely this side of acceptable discourse, eventually we're going to say "Enough, knock it off." @AlexanderTurok has been there for a while, and he's been warned repeatedly. He just got a 1-day slap on the wrist, and so promptly writes a post absolutely dripping with sneering condescension.
Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!
You know what my least favorite category of bitching about modding is?
"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"
Playing this kind of game is never productive. Every one of us mods has explained, many times, that while we try to be more or less consistent, we do indeed mod based on "vibes" to some extent, and a lot of those vibes are "How obnoxious is this particular person being right now?" "How annoying has this particular person been recently?" and "Does this particular person have a long record of AAQCs, or a long record of being warned to knock it off?" There is also a lot of subjectivity in whether a particular word or phrase strikes this mod on this day as being over the line.
(Also worth noting that sometimes someone is filling the mod queue with reports, and he'll eventually get banned for one of them. Unless you're absolutely sure that the person you're complaining about didn't get a ban around the same time for some other post, don't assume that whatever post you're linking to is an example of "Mods thoughts this was okay.")
But then Darwin clarifies what he really meant, and it just came down to butting heads over whether that was reasonable or not
If I start saying things about "people like Ben Garrison", you call it a personal attack, and I'll clarify I didn't mean you, I just meant people like you, will you accept the logic of that statement?
It wasn't a clairifiaction, it was an obvious attempt to avoid accountability for what he said. This is obvious because even as he backed away from the "eradicate trans people" thing, he doubled down on the claims of generic transphobia, which were directly shown to be just as dishonest. Even that wouldn't be so bad, at the end of it all he managed to get something like "shit, I fucked up, you were right" out his throat, but it's something he never does.
If you think otherwise, I urge you to consider that you're irrationally biased in favor of anyone going against the grain of this forum.
Like, yeah, I think Darwin is wrong too, but I certainly wouldn't want to interact with a person who responded like that.
Are you assuming Darwin is an otherwise good faith poster, and deserves to be treated as such despite his long history of posting here. I think it's your turn to give some links proving your point.
Not with that attitude...
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