domain:nytimes.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
It is very kind of you to believe that Count isn't being disingenuous. Donning saintly levels of forbearance and patience:
We're less concerned with what's in a user's heart of hearts and more with the mess they make on the floor. The relevant question for us isn't "Does he believe it?" but "Is he posting in order to start a fire?" This is where you get the "sincere troll." This is the user who may genuinely hold an opinion, but chooses to express it in the most inflammatory, condescending, and insulting way possible, because the hostile reaction is a core part of what they want. The outrage is the point, not a byproduct.
Let's grant that Count sincerely believes the UK's legal system is superior. The sincerity of that belief doesn't make phrases like "steaming pile of shit" or telling an entire country to "apply for readmission to the human race" anything other than deliberate, high-octane provocation. He knows it's inflammatory. He chooses those words precisely because they're inflammatory. That's baiting. You can already see the fish biting in this thread.
Sincerity isn't a defense for deliberately "waging the culture war," which is explicitly against the rules. He's not just expressing an odious opinion; he's lobbing a grenade wrapped in an opinion, and he does it over and over again. Whether he's a nihilist who believes nothing or a zealot who believes everything, the result for the thread is the same: heat, not light.
We don't moderate beliefs (or at least we try not to), we moderate behavior. And his behavior is consistently that of someone trying to start a fight, and then scream about police brutality.
Since I have your attention, I must remind you that you're on thin ice yourself. Your posts are popular, you've got AAQCs, but you're flying too close to the sun. Do yourself a favor, and take extra care to couch your language in a manner that minimizes opportunities for it to be misunderstood. This is for our sake too, I do not look forward to the shitstorm in the comments that will ensue if we have to bite the bullet. Don't make us, please.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4hr ago
If he expressed his Great Replacement desires in more formal language, perhaps referring to genetic groups instead of "mayos", would his posts be under less scrutiny?
I'm not a Burdensome Count sympathizer, but I am under the impression that this forum is one where you can express any idea, as long as it's done civilly. The civility requirements do seem to be more stringent on the left than the right, probably because when someone insults the Left there's not a lot of push back.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
I didn't. Smollett's story had more red flags than the Chinese Parliament. This one at least has the chance of being a series of bureaucratic fuckups -- those are a lot more common on the ground than MAGA fans of Empire who carry around bleach and a noose in a Chicago winter.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
Guatemala denies that Chilean green-card holder was deported from the United States
The Guatemalan Migration Institute said in a statement that it coordinates with ICE on all deportations from the United States and that no one matched Leon’s name, age or citizenship.
ETA: The reporting in this story is horrendous.
As far as I can tell, it's possible ALL the info comes from this "Nataly". Nobody reporting on this had anyone check on Mr. Leon in Guatemala City. The story about Leon being handcuffed and his wife left for 10 hours in the immigration comes from unspecified "family", NOT from the wife. Sure, she doesn't speak English... you don't have a single Spanish-speaking reporter? This isn't a Khoisan click language, it's common!
FoundViaTwitter
4hr ago
I'm getting a "you barged into our secret club" kind of vibe. That's fair! I didn't mean to disturb whatever exactly this place is.
I'll go back to my internet space. I'm nobody, so this feels a bit silly, but this will be my final comment. Apologies for the intrusion.
yofuckreddit
4hr ago
- I also keep an internal picture of everyone in my head.
- It's cheating since your picture is on your substack, but my internal vision was fairly accurate
- If you're not exhausted, I'll echo the clamor for "do me!"
Arnaud
4hr ago
Can't speak for the cane sugar, but the gluten sensitivity thing is real from my experience.
Cut out gluten in a desperate attempt to sort out some digestive issues years ago and it helped a lot.
If I eat gluten in moderate quantities nowadays it results, like clockwork, in a headache, brain fog and later indigestion.
So yeah, sample size of one but I'm sold.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design..."
Which is to say there's a pattern here. Sure, sometimes things happen by accident. But when the "accidents" all point in the same direction, and aren't corrected either before the fact or after the fact even when warning or complaint is given, there's good reason to believe they're not accidents.
WhiningCoil
4hr ago
I thought trolling was definitionally disingenuous? As in, he's saying all that shit to fuck with us, but didn't actually believe any of it. Probably isn't even who he says he is? That's what makes trolls so odious, there is no there there. They don't actually believe anything. Mere stubbornness to concede a point does not qualify one as a troll. A person can have odious but sincerely held beliefs, but that doesn't make them a troll.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4hr ago
No, but police officers do demonstrably lie and frame people sometimes.
In this case it's also relevant that all of this was publicized while BLM was protesting, but largely this case was ignored. There is probably a good effort post on the (lack of) interactions between civil libertarians and "defund the police" types.
yofuckreddit
4hr ago
The music in Frozen 2 is better, but the plot is barely comprehensible, and I hate the characters. The tendrils of wokeness are too obvious: Anna treats Kristoff like shit, Elsa is selfish and navel-gazing, and surprise-surprise, the old whites murdering the native magical browns are why everything sucks.
It's obvious Frozen 1 was rushed out and had serious story thrash but at least it's earnest. My kids barely watch the sequel but will see 1 any time.
iprayiam3
4hr ago
It's just left-wing and not right-wing.
The immediate admission that you don't know BC's posting history, demonstrates that you're offbase with that categorization.
BC, and Alexander Turok, have both in recent days been defended against bans as 'left wing' being punished. But neither is remotely a leftwing poster.
You're not banned yet! You can totally keep it that way.
I genuinely can't. I get that the mod consensus is that I know exactly what I'm doing, and it's all on purpose, and I delight in thumbing my nose at the rules and skirting by with just enough plausibility to avoid punishment. But I honestly try. I really do. It's just that all my life experience is so utterly divorced from your realities, that my heartfelt best behavior effort post like this gets met with sneering dismissal by one of the people who decides when my next ban (which I've been informed will be permanent) happens. Like I said, I wrote and rewrote that post 3 or 4 times, feeling deep in my bones that no matter how I phrased it, while still saying what I needed to say, I'd probably eat that last permanent ban for it for some errant turn of phrase I enjoyed, or being inflammatory, or having "more heat that light" whatever that's supposed to mean anymore. Every post I make I make like it's my last, because I honestly don't know what the fuck I'm doing wrong. It just comes down to our lived realities are too different, and to preserve yours, I'm going to get shuffled out the door at some point.
Edit: I want to elaborate further. I ended my effort post with "So it goes to be conquered." I agonized over that last sentence. I loved it. It was the thesis of the entire post. It was the most important sentence. When I was in school writing essays I always told "Tell em what you're gonna say, say it, then tell em what you said." I must include that sentence. But it's also the most dangerous sentence. Instead of seeing an effort post, someone might just see inflammatory rhetoric, bullshit anecdotes, more inflammatory rhetoric. Permaban. But if I don't include that sentence, there is no point to any of the rest that I wrote. Probably makes them even worse as it's just a series of inflammatory anecdotes with no reason to state them at all.
I can't control how you people read that. Even when I try to include context, half the time the context just gets ignored and a single sentence, or sentence fragment, or single word gets plucked out as being ban worthy. Sometimes large portions of my post are skipped, rewrote or concatenated together out of context to achieve the perception of greater offense than a plain read of the entire post would have produced! There is no fixing this.
Arnaud
4hr ago
The kid is sleeping like a log
Sleeping through bombardment, a veteran already.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
https://www.themotte.org/post/2269/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348537?context=8#context
I did write a longer explanation, so you don't have to just take my word for it!
Fair question. The line between a passionate, strongly-worded argument and trolling can be blurry, and if this post existed in a vacuum, without any knowledge of Count's antics, it would have been unobjectionable. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The problem isn't the topic: it is the user, the pattern, and the presentation.
To put it plainly, trolling isn't just about what you say, but why and how you say it. The goal of this forum is to "optimize for light over heat." Trolling optimizes for heat, exclusively. Count does occasionally provide light too, but in the same manner that lighting your house on fire helps find the keys during a blackout.
Breaking down this specific post:
-
Performative, Over-the-Top Language: The post isn't structured for discussion. It's a screed. Phrases like "total emptiness of its own fundamental depravity," "steaming pile of shit," and "apply for readmission to the human race" are pure flamebait. They're designed to provoke outrage, not invite reasoned disagreement.
-
Deliberate, Gratuitous Antagonism: The constant, almost comically exaggerated praise for the UK system versus the condemnation of the US isn't a good-faith comparison. It's tribal button-pushing. "august by American standards, by our standards there is terraced housing within 5 minutes walk of me that is older" is a perfect example. It adds zero substance and exists only to be condescending and get a rise out of American readers. It's a classic "Boo outgroup!" move.
Now, the crucial part: context.
BurdensomeCount has a long, long history of this exact behavior, for which he has been repeatedly warned and banned. His schtick is to take a kernel of a real argument and wrap it in layers of aristocratic, elitist, and often racialist provocation. You can see it all over his comment history (make sure to sort by negative votes):
- His entire "dissolve the people and elect another" argument where he calls for replacing "low human capital natives" with "elects" (migrants).
- His frequent use of terms like "low tier people," "mayos," and "proles" while positioning himself as a superior "elite human capital" finance professional.
- His open admission that he wants to "punish" Europe by flooding it with migrants to watch "progressive modernity" collapse, and that he does this with "glee."
He isn't arguing to understand; he's arguing to provoke, to feel superior, and to watch the fireworks. He knows exactly which buttons to press. This latest post is just his standard formula applied to a new news story: find a legitimate grievance, crank the rhetoric to 11, lard it with condescending UK-vs-US bait, and serve it up to see who bites. And people will bite, they will get mad, while Count laughs away or engages in performative denialism.
In short, he's not engaging with the culture war; he's waging it, which is explicitly against the rules of the thread. He's a "masterful" troll in that he's very good at it, but that doesn't earn him an indefinite pass.
I like Count. He amuses me, like a monkey that is very good at flinging shit. He also annoys me and tars other migrants by association, coming off as immensely entitled, ungrateful, and willing to bite the hand that feeds. But that is a personal stance, and not what he's being modded for.
His mistake is to assume that the Motte runs like an actual court of law. While this particular comment wouldn't sway a judge, Lady Justice might be blind but I'm not. We know Count.
AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic
Happy to be here! Goal is to post the most exclamation points.
4hr ago
Long ago I would similarly devour Agatha Christie books, my favorite was Lord Edgeware Dies. Since I read them when I younger, I wonder how much of the social situations went over my head and how enjoyable it would be to reread them now.
FoundViaTwitter
4hr ago
Ok. I won't ask any more questions or make any comments at all for some time, if that's how you feel.
yofuckreddit
4hr ago
I can tell the difference in Sodas. But it's hard to discern how much of that is the aluminum/lining vs glass as opposed to the sugar approach.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
4hr ago
You're right! I had to refresh my own memory on this some more and the additional detail that my brain was fuzzy on in the intervening years is the whole disaccharide vs. monosaccharide bit, meaning that because regular sugar is a disaccharide, the bond between glucose and fructose has to be broken, whereas HFCS contains free monosaccharides. I kinda remembered that sucrose took a bit more work by the body to digest, but I was misattributing that to the balance of sugars, which as you're pointing out, isn't really much different than regular table sugar. So to be clear, it's not the amount of glucose vs. fructose itself, the idea is that the free monosaccharides of fructose in HFCS are uniquely taxing to the liver in a way that regular sugar is not because the bonds on sucrose have to be broken before the fructose in regular sugar can be processed by the liver. That's... even more hair-splitting than I remembered it to be!
FoundViaTwitter
5hr ago
Fair enough. Thank you.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5hr ago
What exactly is objectionable about his post?
Primarily, it's "boo outgroup."
Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
BC's post does not even pretend to do the very patient work of contextualizing or steel-manning the position. Rather, the substance of the post is "damn, America sucks, and Americans suck for not revolting." This is also tinged with an edge of consensus building or recruiting for a cause, albeit in a nonspecific way. The parting sentence is particularly inflammatory:
Perhaps after the end of Trump, the USA will be in a position where it can apply for readmission to the human race...
I decided against modding it because I don't think it's a significant enough violation of the rules to warrant a permaban, and BC's moderation history has reached the point where other moderators are saying "we should probably permaban next time." But self_made_human decided to go ahead and just add another tempban (proportioned to BC's post history), which seems like a good call to me.
it doesn't seem very different in style and tone from other things I've read over the last week. It's just left-wing and not right-wing.
Assuming you are actually new, I'm going to invite you to not make this a hobby horse. We ban right wing posters for the same sorts of tonal problems, as you and I have discussed. To be blunt, you do not have enough of a reputation here in the community to be credibly assessing its norms. You'd be well served to stay out of the meta, at least initially.
iprayiam3
5hr ago
I do not see how it is possible to read this and go anything other than "Shame on you" at ... the American populace for acquiescing to this. ... This is not the behaviour I would expect of a mature world power like the USA...
Why is it concern of American citizens to live up to the 'expected behaviors' of a 3rd world immigrant to the UK, who is absolutely giddy at the idea of population replacement and takes ample opportunity to say so? You've cashed that card in here too much to try to pull 'shame on you, be better' arguments at anti-immigration anything.
That aside, ok, this story taken at face value sounds awful, and whoever said he had died, should face criminal consequences. Going beyond the scope of the story itself, what is the so what, I'm supposed to be morally shamed into?
...Therefore accept all immigration uncritically, become a 'US is an economic zone globalist', and get on board the program of population replacement? Again this is what you've generally argued for over several years at least across the pond, so if this isn't your main point, you can see how it seems suspicious?
If the alternative moral is, look how bad and sloppy this is!, yes! I agree! It's horrible that we've come to this situation, but it's obviously a consequence of that bad actions of the other side that's created the mess, and the obstructionism against cleaning it up. This is the song and dance that keeps playing out:
The one side that doesn't agree with cleaning up the mess, wants to continue creating it, and obstructing the cleanup, but then use the difficulty of cleaning around this as an argument that the cleanup is being done wrong. It's diningenuous. Grab a broom, admit you're part of the mess, or shut up. Standing in the corner criticizing is seen for what it is at this point.
This is the exact same playbook that played out across any conservative issue on any topic. 'Creating a Dialogue' became a trope when it came to the final LGBT push against religious holdouts. The same side encouraging and creating the dissonance uses the dissonance as an insincere argument of process objection, when its really an object level disagreement. It's sabatage, and the US population is tired of it, especially from foreign globalists.
People can either read this as another unimpressive attempt by a left-leaning individual to fixate on a single tree despite there being an entire forest, or they can look at it as unintentional satire, which is what it really is. Lecturing Americans about immigration policy as if the last decade(s) of UK immigration disasters simply didn't exist is actually funny.
Your legal framework and its habit of prioritizing everyone but its natural citizens has landed the UK exactly where it is now. You brag about these laws that, while intended to protect individual rights, have led to a system where every single removal attempt is open to countless appeals and human rights claims. The UK and whatever it once was is basically done for. It's so bad that to say that it has an identity crisis is to assume that the is still has any identity left at all. This has been the UK's "infinite wisdom" which, ironically, will prove to be not-so-infinite.
So while people like you brag about the process, people like me look at the results, and the results of the process you're defending are undeniable.
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