domain:cafeamericainmag.com
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
"Our enemies are simultaneously too strong and too weak" is frequently described as a common trademark of fascism
The damage done by that Umberto Eco essay is up there with the xkcd "showing you the door" comic.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4d ago
If a person is breaking the rules (or is close enough to it) they should get dinged no matter what their past history is.
There is just not enough moderator time in the day for that. If someone's comment doesn't get reported, it is very unlikely to get moderated (that would require one of us to just happen across the comment). Of the comments that do get reported, probably a majority of them are plausibly rule breaking, but I'd be shocked if we actually moderated even one of those in ten. I cannot tell you how many times I've thought, "Yeah, I agree that's a bit low effort/antagonistic/whatever, but it's six replies deep and seems approximately within community norms and the metamoderation is low-certainty and it's not part of a pattern of bad behavior, it's not worth the effort." Or--"Oh, this is also a pretty bad comment, but I just moderated this user for the same thing in a different thread, do I need to say more here? Nah, I'll catch them next time."
And yeah--"oh, this is a super quality poster, I'm just gonna let it slide this time" is definitely on the list of time saving excuses. But never fear! We have in the past banned quality posters eventually. It's just a much more protracted and painful process.
It is certainly possible for a comment to be sufficiently bad that I will ban a user on sight, first offense, no questions asked, no matter how many AAQCs they have. But barring those egregious violations of the rules, we are actually almost always moderating with an eye toward patterns of behavior more than we are moderating for precise adherence to the rules in specific cases. Indeed, the rules themselves are only in service of the foundation. This is not a sport where we are calling balls and strikes based on high-precision measurements; this is the messy work of curating a community dedicated to the practice of disagreement!
So when you say--
Right now it strains credulity to see a leftist get dinged for...
--and then you provide a direct quote, you've already missed the mark. That user is getting dinged, not for any particular statement, but for an increasingly established pattern of behavior.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts
I wonder if this is a universal human narrative: "Our enemies are simultaneously too strong and too weak" is frequently described as a common trademark of fascism, but honestly I see everyone in politics playing it these days, like your observation here.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4d ago
Okay, but we're right here, right now, and last I checked we're a long, long way from being separated into different human sub-species. We interbreed without real issue, genetic distance is pretty close compared to, say, our former cousins the neanderthals or whatnot, and we don't really inhabit different ecological niches or anything either. Sure, we have a few random health quirks like disease resistance, predisposition to certain conditions, etc. but these are pretty minor overall.
What do you call the child of a Dane and a Yoruba? Why do we call a black Brazilian Hispanic? What about someone with more indigenous heritage from Chiapas in Mexico? Or half Inuit? What about Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian and African-American parents? Do we still care about English vs Irish vs German vs Slavic vs French heritage differences within the "White" category? What about Palestinians vs Persians vs Turks vs Afghans? How close are they? Are they Asian? MENA? Something else, or are more specifics needed? The problems go on.
The fact of the matter is that particularly in America, where intermarriage rates are rising for almost every category, the underlying categories will increasingly be revealed as fundamentally flawed. The fact of the matter is that modern racism grew up partly out of the Transatlantic slave trade, but also out of the Enlightenment-era emergence of early forms of modern nationalism. The people and society who began to spread what we now would label racism (we're talking ~1700s) hadn't even figured out evolution yet, and wouldn't for over a century, so they hardly were working from scientific principles to begin with! Yet for some reason a lot of people seem to be so fixated on perpetuating those same thought patterns despite their obviously poisoned and low-quality origins. Now given, there's still some debate, but by and large the evidence and scholarly (by actual scholars not the performant ones) suggests that most people do indeed think about race differently today than they used to, and it's mostly driven by a white vs black paradigm and its influence on Western thought.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4d ago
Happy birthday! Over the past several years you definitely sound like you've found a more solid footing in life, and I'm really happy for you. Any big plans to celebrate?
Tree
4d ago
They‘re not working, are they? More dakka, I want you drooling. And try shrooms and more illegal psychedelic drugs like the doctor ordered.
daguerrean
4d ago
Racism is really the entire point of TheMotte. This is literally the reason we were forced to split off from the SSC subreddit. If you are looking for a racism-free space, this ain't it.
HereAndGone
4d ago
I haven't seen this show, but all the praise being lavished on it makes me go "Really? Do none of you remember the likes of St. Elsewhere, for example, which also trod this path of 'slice of life reality in a hospital serving lower economic area'?"
St. Elsewhere is an American medical drama television series created by Joshua Brand and John Falsey that originally ran on NBC from October 26, 1982, to May 25, 1988. The series stars Ed Flanders, Norman Lloyd, and William Daniels as teaching doctors at an aging, run-down Boston hospital who give interns a promising future in making critical medical and life decisions. The series was produced by MTM Enterprises, which had success with a similar NBC series, the police drama Hill Street Blues, during that same time. The series were often compared to each other for their use of ensemble casts and overlapping serialized storylines (an original ad for St. Elsewhere quoted a critic that called the series "Hill Street Blues in a hospital").
Recognized for its gritty, realistic drama, St. Elsewhere gained a small yet loyal following (the series never ranked higher than 47th place in the yearly Nielsen ratings) over its six-season, 137-episode run; however, the series also found a strong audience in Nielsen's 18–49 age demographic, a demo later known as a young, affluent audience that TV advertisers were eager to reach. The series also earned critical acclaim during its run, earning 13 Emmy Awards for its writing, acting, and directing and is widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Might have been, I just know it wasn't a factor in 2003
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
At least in the Anglosphere, the public support State funding of political parties (which is the alternative) even less. In the past, you could probably have reduced the cost of politics by restricting the ability of FCC-regulated broadcast media to accept paid political ads (this is how the UK kept the cost of politics down) but that is increasingly irrelevant in the modern media landscape.
HereAndGone
4d ago
he seems to think that the Right is full of people who haven't done such work and fail to see just how awful it is
No, he doesn't. He doesn't mention "I worked such jobs/older family members worked such jobs, I know how shitty they are", he just goes on about "fetishing" working with your hands and makes little to no mention of the left fetishing the trash culture of people of colour or the like. And if he did talk about "black trash culture" there are plenty who would hop on him for that.
I wish, once and for all, Alexander would give a clear statement of his exact position, because all I'm left with is the impression overall that "ugh, poor people, how disgusting; they have too many babies as it is, they should all be contracepted and aborted into extinction so aspiring strivers like myself can ascend to our proper place on the socio-economic class ladder and not be confused with the mudblood milieu out of which we unfortunately arose; those damn pro-lifers are getting in the way of exterminating the eugenically unfit".
Lizzardspawn
4d ago
Those who have been left behind by the media are not going to be easy to convince that modern TV shows are now worth watching.
They devour everything that Tylor Sheridan shits out. Btw - one has to wonder why he is rarely praised as a feminist, when he has the best written and not annoying female characters around.
thejdizzler
4d ago
You ever flip a coin to help you make a decision and end up figuring out the choice you wanted to make independent of the outcome? Tarot is basically like that. It helps me figure out what I'm subconsciously thinking about a certain problem.
KMC
4d ago
The last time a republican served on that district JFK was still alive, but not President. White liberals sent her to Congress, but African Muslims sent her to the general election.
I don't think your debunk is worth anything. It's too lazy to take seriously, and you've already been corrected once.
a lot of what the anti-immigrant Right habitually blames on immigrants is actually done by white liberals.
The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.
Totalitarianit
4d ago
The medical accuracy and fast-paced intensity of the show are really good. After watching a good portion of this season, I ended up going back to the old ER from the 1990s and 2000s and watched several seasons. There's a lot of nostalgia and good accuracy with series as well, which I enjoyed, but I noticed the same sort of progressive lecturing in the 1990s ER episodes as I did in the The Pitt. I've come to realize over recent years that social lecturing is heavily baked into a lot of these mainstream shows. It's incredibly powerful and influential.
The side effect of this realization it is that I am quick to dismiss any new series or movies wherein I catch a whiff of this sort of presentist lecturing. Even though I recognize the moral framework and lecturing of older 1980s and 90s shows and movies, it aligns more with how I view the world so I can tolerate a certain amount of it. I find the current progressive ideological force-feeding in entertainment to be insufferable though. I understand that society moves on and changes, and that some of my frustration is just a natural reaction to entertainment no longer appealing to my age group, but I also think this era of film entertainment is objectively terrible when it comes to the hit:miss ratio.
Big budget film companies adhere to certain formulas that will turn a profit, while the only real social risks taken in big films is the left-leaning. The latter isn't new but the type of leftwing ideology being pushed is. To add insult to injury, these large production companies churn out something like 6 superhero/comic book films per year at about $200m per film, along with a biopic or two that are well done, but not really worthy of the praise they typically get. Smaller studios like A24 are promising, but they too are unfortunately captured by the same progressive ideology that has consumed every Western institution on the planet. There are still some diamonds in the rough (Top Gun: Maverick), but it is mind-numbing how widespread and pervasive this sort of progressive lecturing has become.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
US demands to know what allies would do in event of war over Taiwan
Express grave concern? Maybe even issue a strongly-worded letter of condemnation.
HereAndGone
4d ago
Right now, yes, but the price of meat is rising and who can forecast what things will be like in ten to twenty years time?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
In this case I don't doubt that Epstein was molesting children, but the supposed intelligence connections could be embarrassing for rather unrelated reasons ("reveals methods").
Sources and methods is a very obvious issue. It would be embarrassing to admit that the NSA had tapped Prince Andrew's phone, and compromising to say how they did it. It would be even more embarrassing to admit that the CIA and Mossad are spying on each other like they are in MAD magazine.
HereAndGone
4d ago
It's not that he's biased against 'the right', it's that he has a demonstrable animus against those he considers lower-class, and that includes people who would work for a living (see his snobby remarks about manual labour).
That's anywhere from 30-46% of the American population, depending on definition and self-identification as such. That includes people who do the kinds of things that support Alexander in his lifestyle as Elite Human Capital:
The majority of working-class workers work in services. 78 percent of the working class works in services, with 12.8 percent working in construction, 8.3 percent working in manufacturing, and less than 1 percent working in agriculture.
Alexander may well think Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous but what are you going to do, when you dismiss 30% of your working population as beneath notice or dignity? The AI serfbots are not quite here just yet. Have you any right to be surprised then, when the people you have mocked vote for a demagogue and a populist? Will you take any responsibility for driving people away?
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Israeli-linked ringleaders and elements arrested in southwestern Iran, says Iran's news agency
Through vigilant efforts, Iranian security and judicial authorities have identified and arrested several individuals connected to opposition groups who were operating in line with the enemies’ aims, Vahid Mousavian said.
Quite clear those have zero to do with Israel, just local dissidents rounded up. They can't even bring themselves to claim those actually are Israeli agents, just "operating in line with aims", which is pretty much any opposition to the current regime.
thejdizzler
4d ago
I'm quite partial to the Rider-Waite deck, but I also got one of my friends an Odyessian Tarot based on Greek mythology that I perhaps like better. He ended up buying the Rider-Waite deck as well, so maybe not a ringing endorsement.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
4d ago
Happy birthday!
Thanks big guy
At the age of 25, you're at your physical and cognitive peak, and it's all downhill from here. Your mind slows down, though your productivity is kept up by knowledge/wisdom compensating for decreased fluid intelligence. Your body slows down, becomes weaker and frailer, but this can be temporarily alleviated with exercise and a fastidious attitude towards your health.
Temporary alleviation is alright though, you do decline but its not as much or in all areas. Jonathan Blow is 52 and is as youthful and as productive as ever. Human life is a fight with entropy and a journey towards union with the divine, everyday I get to do both and I will be okayish till 30, 35-40 does feel different.
Don't worry, it doesn't become obvious until about a decade later. The initial slope of the decline is gentle, you can make a good picnic on that plateau.
Yep, and man's not meant to grow old while the sun shines on his back. I have a decade left, and I look forward to becoming the man I am supposed to be. It's good to be alive and healthy, I feel grateful in a non-phoney sense. You live only once. Everything ends, best enjoy it whilst it lasts.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
If making a statement about a group that could be considered negative is mean then you can never have any discussions about anything.
I broadly agree with this sentiment and think the rule should be relaxed a bit in general. But under the current status quo, if the moderators of this forum insist it should have a bad rule no matter what, it should at least be enforced consistently.
I think Sloot's post is closest to being at the same level of badness as Turok's post.
The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits
vs
conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities
Your statement here:
You can challenge this statement. Is Sloot wrong? It could be implied sloot thinks the modal chick is dumb but sloot doesn't actually make that statement.
Can be applied symmetrically to Turok's post. You could challenge Turok's post through a discussion on education polarization if you wanted to. You could have anecdotes pointing in one direction, but the data consistently points in another, at least for now: the higher your education, the more likely you are to vote Democratic.
But correctness of these points isn't really the issue. The issue is that it's framed in a somewhat antagonistic light for both of these posts. A right-wing poster might see Turok's post and assume he thinks Republicans are all retards who support stupid things because they're stupid, while a left-wing poster would probably be closer to saying "he's just making a neutral point about which side tends to go to college more".
SkoomaDentist
4d ago
Back in the reddit times, the only truly consistent thing was that a large majority of The Motte user base was anti-woke.
Those cases were ridiculous and even when there was the briefest glimmer of treating the incel like a human being and McKay being way too high on her own supply, nope, immediately back to her sanctimonious attitude being what was clearly intended as right.
Frustrating show, in that way. Did like the bit about the old man who worked with Mr. Rogers.
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