banned
2D3D
15hr ago
When my galpals whine about not finding men to stick with them, I ask them to consider women. Apparently this is autistic to verbalize, because for all their claims that sexuality is a spectrum most insist on liking cock, preferably attached to a 6/6/6 who can 'banter'.
This of course happens because my friends are older women who are comfortable explicating their preferences to Wrongthink William, and when younger these women gaslit themselves on what they actually wanted. Having wasted years of their lives hating themselves for fucking Chad and then displacing their self hate onto Chad, who then rightfully concludes these women aren't serious, the rapidly diminishing physical value these women command has turned the deluge into a shower. At least in the deluge there was the chance of finding a gem in the flow, but in this state they find their pickings increasingly unsatisfying.
The funniest thing is that for the women that do say 'sure lets see what the carpetmuncher crowd is like', its STILL full of dudes! Shitloads of creeps just say they are women or nonbinary and put their full 100% shitty male profile picture and details there. One girl claims she had her account banned for transphobic abuse when she matched with one of these fakers to berate him for abusing the system. I mock them all for the chickens coming home to roost for them, but I still feel for them and wish they can find happiness. Alas the cat-per-woman average is reaching 2 for these girls, and I think thats tipping point but I dont' know why I think that.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
21hr ago
Then don't engage.
In the short time since you spun up this alt, you've posted nothing but crappy comments and antagonism. That plus deleting a lot of your comments makes it pretty clear you aren't here to contribute anything but turds in the punch bowl.
Banned for three days. Decide whether you actually have anything to say.
Folamh3
1d ago
I don't really see the inverse of this, there isn't a large contingent of men bashing on femcels.
Hard disagree, just think of all the subreddits dedicated to making fun of fat people which got banned over the years.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
I'm not a good man.
Well, this certainly isn't a good comment. Banned for a day.
An interesting parallel with the Russian Revolution, which started out being sexually liberatory, until it was decided that sexuality outside of marriage was "uncommunist" and "bourgeois decadence" (for the non-nomenklatura).
As Orwell discusses in Nineteen-Eighty Four, there is a tension between totalising ideologies and sex, because if you're thinking about the latter, you're not thinking about the revolution, and it forms loyalties that are transient, chaotic, personal, and potentially conflicting with loyalty to the ideology's preferred authority. And Dionysus unleashed really IS dangerous.
I think another factor is Mrs. Grundy. When Christian conservativism is the norm (at least when she is growing up) her prudishness will take a Christian conservative form. However, when progressive liberalism is the norm, it will take a progressive liberal form. I remember noticing this with the Feminist Society at university 15 years ago, who literally dressed like puritans (modest all-black clothing) and would almost literally march on stage to give their pre-agreed speeches at student meetings, like a set of militant evangelicals, to explain why "Pimp My ..." marketing or "Lads' Mags" should be banned from campus.
2D3D
1d ago
There are plenty of people who hate literally every job out there, but like Stuff. Depending on how expensive the Stuff you want is, you compromise more of yourself. Women don't like selling themselves, but if they didn't like Stuff so much they could just pick up a shift at the macs I literally see 'Now Hiring' every macs in every country I go to.
Pop feminisms influence on the concept of selling sex is adequately examined by others in this thread, but given my own (relatively extensive by this boards standardsl) experience with hookers, there is extremely little evidence of them lacking agency or awareness. Barring the women exploitated by Moroccans/Turk johnnys in Amsterdam/Denmark and the weird shit for western slavs, most working girls seem to by exercising an excessive amount of agency. At least here in Asia they have large freedom in changing managers, are literally on a high-take commission structure, and are freely able to reject clients (Indians are effectively banned from Singaporean brothels, for example, and no one gives a shit about the racism).
The dark side of the focus on OF parasites and escorts is that the real threat of female sexual exploitation is relatively unnoticed. Girls in debt and forced into prostitution are rarely streetwalkers, they are children whose shitty parents pimp them out in their private shitholes and bring in johns via darknet meetups (strictly speaking the girl is not the one in debt, but their shithead family instead).
This is a real vector of abuse that is extant and is being addressed, but I strongly suspect that the invective against sex work while hailing it as simultaneously feminist is simply due to it being another tool in the 'MEN BAD' bag. Pedos are already castigated and hunted, so theres no value in propping up the plight of these kids.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Texas and Oklahoma banned abortion before Dobbs, and were probably going to be joined by another dozen or so states even without it.
And, to my point- abortion rights as a top priority is more of a wealthy woman thing than a poor woman thing. This is because avoiding unwanted pregnancies is A) kind of the default anyways B) already a good idea and C) obviates any desire for abortion. Poor women have actual problems to worry about, ones not the result of their own bad decisions. The PMC feminist obsession with abortion rights is mostly feminist signaling.
FiveHourMarathon
c’è aria di frociaggine
3d ago
I watched the full Extended Editions of LoTR in the theater over weekend. It was the first time in years that I have watched them all the way through, and my wife's first time seeing them, ever. We popped edibles in the parking lot and smuggled in a full dinner in her purse for the FOUR HOURS we were in that chair each night three nights in a row. Random disorganized thoughts:
-- This is the first time I've been in a movie theater this year. Last year I attended three movies: I took my dad to a showing of American Graffiti for its fiftieth anniversary, I took my wife to see Barbie and to the Eras Tour movie. Halfway through 2024, I've also seen three movies: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. So in the past eighteen months, they've convinced me to go to the movies six times, and in that time I've only seen a single new movie (Barbie), plus an "event" film in the Eras Tour. The movie theater business is dying, at a rapid clip, and the cause of its death isn't cost it is competition. Competition from the past. My dad, as many boomers, is under the impression that the problem is that movies cost too much, when he was a kid they were a dollar! Well, from 1960 to today a dollar is $10.59, meaning the difference in price compared to this weekend is $2.41. My wife and I got through the whole trilogy for $78 in tickets, and I ordered a large diet Dr. Pepper (felt like about a liter) for another $21 total, for a total of around $100 on the weekend. Essentially nothing for us, a fancy dinner. No, the problem is that the new movies that come out just aren't compelling enough. The streaming product is that we start a movie, often a movie from some list of "the best [genre] of [decade]" and if we don't like it (like when Elizabethtown was recommended by so many people as a great RomCom, only for me to find it totally unwatchable because Orlando Bloom couldn't do an American accent to save his life) we can stop halfway and try a different one. The only things that pull me into the theater anymore are movies I know I like (LoTR, American Graffiti) or movies that are so important culturally that one ought to see them out of paraseitin (Eras, Barbie). Unless the film industry can figure out how to produce a lot of culturally important events in a hurry, they're dead. Movie theaters are going to look more like amusement parks in density within a decade or two.
-- Going with my lovely wife really felt like an event. It was the same people each night, of course, mostly in the same seats, it felt like clocking in for a shift. It really felt like a moment, I enjoyed that a lot.
-- Comparing the female leads and their plots, Eowyn aged much better than Arwen. Eowyn's story is handled perfectly, Hall of Fame Not Like the Other Girls. She doesn't hulk out, she's not as strong as the lads, she struggles and barely hangs on, her triumph is based on a mix of luck, courage, and legalistic interpretations of prophecy. Just perfectly handled. Arwen, on the other hand, fell flat for me. Victim of her own success: while Tolkien pretty much originated most of the modern system of "races" in every fantasy universe, he was a stoic proper Catholic and viewed human-elf relations as something that might happen a couple times an Age; his hornier progeny have basically agreed that if we can make halves with anything, we will, all the time. So the Human-Elf romance thing just didn't hit that hard for me, though watching it again I did think about how Elrond had seen his brother go down that path. I wonder to what extent it's how common it all is in fantasy, and to what extent this just maps onto interracial marriages in our reality. In Tolkien's day they were mostly pretty rare, and a big deal. Today, it just isn't enough to carry a plot, interracial relationship plots are actually on my "banned plots" list next to "WWII resistance" and "Ivy League NYC Jew/WASP drowns in ennui" which I refuse to read a book about.
-- It's interesting to me how GRRM's argument with Tolkien stays stuck in my head, seeing the film has me thinking those same thoughts:
Tolkien, of all the authors I mentioned earlier, had an impact on me, but Tolkien is right up there at the top. I yield to no one in my admiration for The Lord of the Rings – I re-read it every few years. It’s one of the great books of the 20th century, but that doesn’t mean that I think it’s perfect. I keep wanting to argue with Professor Tolkien through the years about certain aspects of it.
He did what he wanted to do very brilliantly, I’ve said this before, but… I look at the end and it says Aragorn is the king and he says, ‘And Aragorn ruled wisely and well for 100 years’ or something. It’s easy to write that sentence. But I want to know what was his tax policy, and what did he do when famine struck the land? And what did he do with all those Orcs? A lot of Orcs left over. They weren’t all killed, they ran away into the mountains. Sauron fell down, but you see all the Orcs running away. Did Aragorn carry out a policy of systematic Orc genocide? Did he send his knights out into the hills to kill all the Orcs? Even the little baby Orcs? Or was there Orc rehabilitation going on. Trying to teach the Orcs to be good citizens. And if the Orcs were the result of Elves… could Orcs and Elves intermarry?”
GRRM has stated that a lot of the inspiration for ASOIAF/AGOT was an attempt to correct or explore Tolkien. What happens the day after the true king takes the throne? What does Aragorn's Tax Policy look like? AGOT opens post RoTK: Ned Stark and Bobbie Baratheon were the heroic kids who overthrew the wicked king, and then what happens? At his best, ASOIAF does provide interesting views and answers and insight into those questions. Characters like Rob Stark and Tyrion Lannister are fantastic explorations of fantasy tropes. But his ultimate failure is simple: he can't land the plane. He can't write the last book. Until he manages to bring the whole thing home, he loses by default.
But watching all three films, in three nights, I kept asking myself the same questions. Why were the tactics practiced in Gondor so uniformly AWFUL? What was the idea when they launched a cavalry charge at a fortification? How exactly were the Orcs kept out of the Shire? Where was Denethor getting all those tomatoes? What do trade routes look like, there are lots of ports but it isn't clear what's on the other side? What did existing power-centers in Gondor do with Aragorn, who has little administrative experience at a city scale? I get it, GRRM, I get it.
-- I vibed with Theoden a lot more in my 30s, and Faramir a lot less. At 12, idk Faramir just made sense to me, I recognized the under-appreciated son immediately. This time, I thought Faramir was kinda whiny and annoying, remaining under Denethor's command even as he's sent to cavalry charge a wall was...just too stupid for me to respect him as a character. How was there no Gondorian alternative government or opposition? Theoden, I got. I didn't really appreciate reading or watching as a teen, the way guilt must feel on him, knowing he let Rohan fall into destruction, and the redemption he finds in Pellenor Fields.
-- The Uruk Hai are overrated Tomato Cans, they can't win a war to save their lives. We see Uruks get killed by everyone who steps to them. In general the film's violence is perfectly choreographed, I loved watching it, but it felt like every cut showed either Bad Guys Killing Good Guys or Good Guys Killing Bad Guys, rarely or never both at the same time. I didn't count, but it felt like 90% of the scenes in Helm's Deep or outside Minas Tirith one side is clearly winning locally. This was overdone aggressively in the Ride of the Rohirrim, it felt like I watched more of them die than they said they had on hand.
-- Fanghorn is FDR, Eomer is De Gaulle, Osgiliath is Verdun and Denethor is Petain, Saruman is a Quisling, the ringbearers trip to Valinor is soldiers accepting their PTSD scarred alcoholic buddies fading into irrelevance. Tolkien rejected Allegory, which is why it's so easy and appealing to map allegories to his work.
-- We loved this movie in the boy scouts, and watching it now it's so obvious that it's a movie about going hiking with your friends. The core key element is Frodo and Sam hiking the distance of the Appalachian Trail. Frodo and Sam were just so fucking good at walking! It makes me think of how, reading War and Peace I thought about Napoleon, and his famous forced marches, and how up until relatively recently, walking really fast (especially as a group) was a top tier military skill. Only since WWI and WWII has walking really fast been rendered pretty much irrelevant. The film constantly features people running when they should be walking, sprinting when they should be jogging, to give the impression of pace. But the reality of traveling that far, carrying weapons, would have been more like A Walk in the Woods than anything else, just trying to keep moving over absurd distances. Makes me want to listen to an audiobook of LoTR while I walk every night for a year or however long it would take.
-- It's sad to me that the media made since the trilogy has been so bad I don't even want to watch it. I might get around to finding somewhere to stream the 2hr cut of all three Hobbit movies. But my wife commented: if they want to make this diverse, why not just make the people from different places be different races? Rohan calls for aid and people turn up from all over, make some of them Arabs or whatever. Make a TV show out of the Blue Wizards that we know piss-all about and how they kept the Chinese out of the war. There's so many stories to tell! Why fuck up the ones we actually got?
-- This has to be the number one fantasy film of all time, collectively, right? Nothing else comes close in my mind. They did such a good job on the adaptation, there are so many Easter Eggs in the acting and the dialogue that people who read the Silmarillion will pick up on, but for the most part none of it gets in the way of someone like my wife enjoying the show.
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
3d ago
It seems like the push finally came to shove for Alex Jones, as he will have to liquidate pretty much almost everything he has to pay the $1.5 billion dollar settlement after the Sandy Hook defamation lawsuit went the plaintiffs way. Via AssociatedPress:
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is seeking court permission to convert his personal bankruptcy reorganization to a liquidation, which would lead to a sell-off of a large portion of his assets to help pay some of the $1.5 billion he owes relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Jones and his media company, Free Speech Systems, both filed for bankruptcy reorganization after the Sandy Hook families won lawsuits against him for his repeatedly calling the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, a hoax on his Infowars programs...
...Liquidation could mean that Jones would have to sell most of what he owns, including his company and its assets, but could keep his home and other personal belongings that are exempt from bankruptcy liquidation. Proceeds would go to his creditors, including the Sandy Hook families.
If Free Speech Systems’ case is withdrawn, the company would return to the same position it was in after the $1.5 billion was awarded in the lawsuits and it would send efforts to collect the damages back to the state courts in Texas and Connecticut where the verdicts were reached.
Jones already has moved to sell some of his personal assets to pay creditors, including his Texas ranch worth around $2.8 million.
But a liquidation of Jones’ and his company’s assets would raise only a fraction of what he owes the Sandy Hook families.
According to the most recent financial statements filed in the bankruptcy court, Jones personally has about $9 million in assets, including his $2.6 million Austin-area home in Texas and other real estate. He listed his living expenses at about $69,000 for April alone, including about $16,500 for expenses on his home, including maintenance, housekeeping and insurance.
Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, which employs 44 people, had nearly $4 million in cash on-hand at the end of April. The business made nearly $3.2 million in April, including from selling the dietary supplements, clothing and other items that Jones promotes on his show, while listing $1.9 million in expenses.
Considering $9 million is more than 100 times less than what he owes, I don't see any other way for this to end in his completely left in the dust, with no business media, no career in journalism (at least as a self-owned publication, though I doubt anyone wants to hire him, and I don't think him having a Rumble channel with no structure to back him is going to bring him that much money). His only hope involves a Hail Mary crowfunding moneybomb from his supporters and people annoyed by the veredict a la Trump, but even if he raises as much as Trump, he's still owing hundreds of millions left, and I doubt he could even reach that point; not only we're talking about somebody not as popular, but the specifics of the case do touch sensitive spots (nobody likes someone stating falsehoods about dead children)
The $1.5 billion settlement for claiming an event didn’t happen the way it is popularly believed to have happened was always absurd and had nothing at all do to with justice delivered to the families who lost their kids in Sandy Hook and everything to do with silencing a voice long a thorn in the side of the establishment, which the lawyer essentially concedes in the above quote about the ruling not just being about money — lawfare waged via a weaponized legal system I wrote about in detail when the ruling came down from on high last year.
Please miss me with comments about how Alex Jones is an unhinged pseudo-evangelical lunatic with a drinking problem or whatever. The vast majority of Alex Jones haters, in fact, have never listened to a single hour of his broadcast. Their negative impression of him comes entirely secondhand from ten-second clips and the non-stop, orchestrated bleating of hostile corporate media — a consensus-forming propaganda campaign of, arguably, unprecedented scale targeted at a single individual in the 21st century.
But anyway, I’m not here to do apologia for Alex Jones or to sell him to anyone; I am aware of his flaws, as I am aware of my own. We all live in glass houses...
...The Alex Jones censorship sage is not about Alex Jones.
When Jones was universally banned overnight from all major social media platforms in 2018 in what was clearly an orchestrated move among the Big Tech giants, that was an allusion to things to come.
It was only two years later, if that, that the mass censorship regime came for all dissident media, including me when I got the banhammer from multiple platforms in 2020 for “COVID misinformation” and other alleged crimes of wrongthink.
It’s InfoWars today and the rest of us tomorrow.
Two things that come to my mind:
First, from what I understand, the final payment number came from Alex Jones not being willing to disclose his net worth, which allowed to the plaintiffs to imagine an infinite net worth if they wanted to. But once the books are finally displayed, does that make sense? And even if he hadn't, why isn't the level of damage caused to the plaintiffs part of equation to lower the number? Isn't this institutionalized debt slavery as punishment for what is at the end of the day an civil case? Don't get me wrong, as a libertarian I certainly don't oppose debt slavery for a sort of tort system where crimes are punished with payments; but it has to be equivalent to the crime and the criminal's means; $1.5 billion would be too much of a punishment for Adam Lanza, the actual sicko who murdered the children in Sandy Hook, let alone for the guy who espoused things that weren't true about the shooting. Is he even going to able to ever pay for it entirely?
Secondly, isn't this simply a completely disproportionate answer to Jones sins? Yes, he went on for too long with this charade and should had never started it in the first place, not to mention that his claims didn't went against the NWO or the globalist elites that he despises, but against parents of dead children, claiming that the most emotionally painful thing that had ever befallen them was something they were lying about on TV. However, is he responsible at all for the fact that his followers went too far and harassed those people? Are CNN or MSNBC liable for defamation since they broadcasted Jones making those same claims? Do we know that if the people that harassed the victims parents actually got their information directly from Jones himself?
It seems to me that defamation law is a two edged sword...a society that doesn't have it allows misinformation to be used to harm people, but a society that doesn't have it on a tight leash allows to weaponize claims of misinformation with far worse repercussions.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
Manga like everything else is on tablets and phones these days. I remember the handful of times as a kid that I actually owned a comic book (they were banned as time wasting in my house). I would marvel at the art and could stare at a page for minutes at a time The way people flip so quickly through the panels these days really mystifies me. Especially the sex scenes, I mean I'm trying to be discreet looking over your shoulder, man, give me a second to focus my eyes.
What do you think the point of leaving the Watchtower with you was about?
Not with me, at my doorstep. So my parents pick it up, and they do something with it, which everyone is aware almost noone ever does.
Even granting your portrayal of what they do, it pales in comparison to the sheer magnitude of the effort the rainbow industry puts into converting other people's kids. Though it must be said I do not grant your portrayal, since if they were as stubborn as you said, I would have been at the receiving end of it at some point, given my exposure. They don't even do door-to-door anymore from what I can tell. I only ever see them at subway / train stations, standing around with signs, and not approaching anyone, they're just waiting until they are approached.
That isn't the truce though. We have accepted it is ok to try and convert other people to our belief systems. Do conservatives try to stay away from say regulating abortion for other people, and persuading them it is wrong?
??? We are currently in a situation where trans activists are persuading people to their belief system (using a lot of underhanded tactics that my side is not, by the way) and regulating in their favor, and my side is doing the same. Curiously you only complain about me, and never the trans activists, but ok. Anyway, I'm offering that we both stop - a truce. You say that's not a truce because... there's another active war on a completely different issue I have nothing to do with?
And if the trans advocates have managed to convince the judges then that too should be reflected in the outcomes
Right. And if the non-trans activists have managed to convince them that GAC should be banned, and GAC-doctors should be prosecuted, the same applies. What "double standard" were you even arguing against then?
I am fine with making getting testosterone easier for men sure, seems entirely reasonable.
Fine is not good enough. If you're going to go after me for proposing that I ban it for little girls, you better show me receipts for going after the current system for making it so hard to get for men. If not, you're the one with the double standard.
I accept the medical system in many countries is way too restrictive in allowing people access to drugs/treatments. But let's build on this victory not try to roll it back!
You said we shouldn't limit access to GAC because it would violate some sort of truce. I'm telling you no such truce exists, we violate self-determination routinely, for adults, so you cannot call upon it against my proposal to limit access to radical therapies for children. Now you're trying to use the first-person plural to portray it as some sort of victory for me? Why don't you just answer the point rather than trying to convince me this is something I asked for?
This can be a template for how to persuade the medical community.
Yeah, here's the thing. You might convince me if the deal is we abolish the "medical community" as it's seen today. That was what you were implying in your argument - self-determination trumping scientific validity. If the medical community becomes just a bunch of service providers anyone can pick and choose, I might take it. I'm not interested in haggling over what the medical community allows the rest of us.
Why nerf trans people's ability to get the treatment they want rather than buff everyone else's?
Because if we have a system where authorities are deciding who is allowed to use which medicine for what ailment, I want these authorities to prevent usage of very potent medicine in a way that is not scientifically valid, against an ailment that doesn't even have a proper definition, and cannot be reliably detected beyond a self-report.
If you want to give your son testosterone and they want it too, I'd suggest you find a doctor who can try to do it as safely as possible, but sure give it a whirl.
I wish you'd address my arguments the way I actually present them, rather than constantly changing them to your liking. If anything we were talking about giving testosterone to aging me, when I'm starting to run short on it. And I just told you you're far more likely to find a doctor that will prescribe it to a little girl, than to an aging man.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
5d ago
You should want the "deep state." Because you need experts in charge, not the ignorant masses.
And if those experts were neutral and ideologically uncommitted, that would be fine. Instead, we get 2020 where "pandemic except if you're rioting in ways we approve of" and "20% inflation over 4 years matching the amount the money supply grew". 100% expert caused. They overreacted, and their having listened to people they shouldn't have listened to is a strong indication that they aren't immune to partisan pressure.
The average Republican voter wants fascism.
So does the average expert, apparently; they even have their own brownshirts (or... black hoods, I guess).
Why would one where there are "various safeguards and provisions to ensure that the “will of the people” would not get out of hand" and the political spectrum is confined to "a narrowly defined spectrum of acceptable opinion" set by elites, with parties and politicians outside that narrow range banned, be any less "legitimate" or "democratic" than one where democracy is less managed?
You misunderstand: liberalism is designed to be a safeguard against "when your neighbor gets it wrong". By extension, that is also designed to protect you from expert overreach, which again, if you want to see evidence of that all you need to do is look out the window.
But just because the government hears that voice, doesn't mean they have to listen, that they have to treat it as in any way binding upon them.
Yeah, I remember when Louis XVI and Charles I said that too. They actually kind of do need to treat it that way sometimes, because if they don't and shit gets bad enough as a consequence, that government tends to get replaced by other means (as politics is violence by other means, and power comes out of gun barrels).
because we agree that such is the only legitimate form of government, and that our government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
[The above describes what happens when that legitimacy is withdrawn; it isn't generally perfectly geographically distributed.]
I've seen arguments rethinking "corrupt" machine politics of the "bad old days" like this for at least a decade now (it's pretty much the standard position of the Good Ol' Boyz podcast, for one). Some point out that ethnic machines did better at integrating and assimilating immigrant minorities like the Irish than the subsequent "neutral" civil service. I remember once reading an academic paper by a non-westerner pointing out that many different things get subsumed under the label of "corruption" by modern first-worlders; things which are not equally bad, and some of which — particularly paying officials to expedite an approval that would otherwise be long-delayed — can be beneficial at least in developing countries. I remember a Chinese-American individual (iirc, originally in the context of an Avatar the Last Airbender fanfic) talking about a similar distinction in Chinese culture between expected "skimming off the top" to mostly spread around greasing the creaky wheels of the bureaucracy (while keeping some for yourself, of course) versus taking so much it gets in the way of the job getting done. I recall another Asian author arguing similarly about "cronyism," and the difference about hiring through personal connections someone you know can do the job — in particular, because of those personal connections — and giving a job to an incompetent relative or such. Some point out how, with the proliferation of NGOs, QUANGOs, non-profits, consultants, et cetera (the "NGOcracy") even more money disappears into the pockets of various people whose contributions to the processes of getting things done are opaque, if not outright dubious — it's just done lawfully now.
I recall many times seeing people argue that our current system, while all legal and above-board, spends more money and gets less done for the average voter. What I've seen argued in reply only a few times, but sticks deeply into my memory, is that this is the whole point of civil service reform — government doing less is not a bug but a feature. The illegality of the machine system was bad, sure, but the real problem with it was that it delivered for the electorate too often.
Debates about the role of meritocracy aside, Civil Service reform went a long way towards eliminating the middle ranks of the machines, those on whom men like Plunkitt relied.
Hiring on connections means you can hire too wide a variety of people — variety in ability to do the job, but more importantly, variety in social class. Switching to hiring on credentials — particularly with academic capture — could possibly get you more competent people, but it definitely gets you more of the right sort of people, the right social class.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, one is half-tempted to ask: do you want the deep state? Because this is how you get the deep state.
The answer, in this view, is yes. You should want the "deep state." Because you need experts in charge, not the ignorant masses. Too many voters are ignorant, deplorable, bitterly clinging to their superstitions and bigotries, unable or unwilling to recognize progress, on the wrong side of the long-but-inevitable arc of history. The average Republican voter wants fascism.
In the process of enshrining their ideals in law, the professional-managerial class of the day created the legal basis for entrenched bureaucracies to pursue their collective interests even in the face of opposition from the nominal chief executive.
Again, the chief executive has to be nominal, and the entrenched bureaucracies able to act in opposition to him, because he's too beholden to the electorate. An important part of "defensive" democracy — perhaps the most important part — is defending said democracy from it's electorate. You can't let them, or their representatives, have much real power — that was proven once and for all by Weimar Germany. As H.L. Mencken put it:
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
We are a democracy, because we agree that such is the only legitimate form of government, and that our government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. But "consent" in this context means something rather different from most others — very different indeed from the consent of "consenting adults" or "affirmative consent." It is through the great civic ritual of elections that this consent is collectively expressed and renewed, and our collective identity as a country reaffirmed. Hence, refusal to let parts of the citizenry participate is contrary to our commitment to equality. Hence the historical expansions of the franchise, the current movements to stop the disenfranchisement of felons, and even the work by some to extend the franchise to non-citizen residents.
But precisely as we allow more of the population to participate in elections, the less sway upon government said elections can be allowed. Democratic legitimacy requires that the people — the whole of the people — be free to make their collective voice, their collective opinion, heard. But just because the government hears that voice, doesn't mean they have to listen, that they have to treat it as in any way binding upon them. "Willie hears ya, Willie don't care."
Mencken also defined "democracy" as "the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." But, the argument goes, nowadays we know that a country don't deserve something so awful, and thus, democracy is when society is ruled by a technocratic bureaucracy, led by an intellectual vanguard elite who know what is best for society, and which does that regardless of what the common people think about it.
The "liberal" in liberal democracy already means the options available to the voters are limited; people have inalienable rights, and choices that would violate them are "off the table" no matter how much a majority of voters would want that. So, given such limits exist, it then leaves only to negotiate how wide or narrow they can be. Why would one where there are "various safeguards and provisions to ensure that the “will of the people” would not get out of hand" and the political spectrum is confined to "a narrowly defined spectrum of acceptable opinion" set by elites, with parties and politicians outside that narrow range banned, be any less "legitimate" or "democratic" than one where democracy is less managed? You can get your Model T in any color you want, so long as you want it in black.
In short, the argument is that the "populist" reasons for which the common voter might have preferred the old machine politics are exactly the reasons it had to be destroyed. We need managed, defensive democracy and a deep state to save our democracy from a dangerous excess of democracy.
Edit: I'd also like to add here a quote from Mary Harrington's recent UnHerd piece:
Does this mean everyone is now better represented than before? Perhaps not. For at the very moment the universal franchise was granted in the early 20th century, extra-democratic bodies such as NGOs and international regulatory entities began professionalising and proliferating, and in the process draining ever more power into pre-political fields closed to the democratic process. It’s possible that this was a coincidence, of course. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps the patrician preference for keeping popular opinion at arm’s length never really went away, meaning that the arrival of the popular voice in the halls of power necessitated new mechanisms for routing around that voice where necessary.
Certainly, it was striking to see this lordly attitude at full volume, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, as the Remainer great and good united in defence of their beloved, extra-democratic, supranational technocracy. And I’m sure you remember, as I do, every well-connected such individual insisting the referendum should be struck down because people didn’t know what they were voting for, and had been duped by the side of a bus.
Since then, though, I’ve started to wonder whether the technocrats were at least partly right. Given that a great many Tory MPs still don’t seem to understand EU regulatory mechanisms, it’s is at least plausible that no one else did either. Hence, the Remainers may have been, like Cromwell in 1066 and All That, “Right but Repulsive”.
They do not. They attempt to convert them. They even take their own kids along to help
I regret to inform you that you landed on a topic I have considerable personal familiarity with. Every single time I opened the door for them as a kid, they asked if there is an adult in the house, and did an about-face when the answer was negative. The most they'd dare to do is leave their copies of the Watchtower at the door. I knew 3 Jehovah's Witness kids throughout the different schools I went to. Literally none of them ever tried to convert anyone. Not even with a "come over to my house, me and my special friends are having a party" type of thing. If anything they were at constant risk of being converted away from their parents' faith.
We have established processes for how to deal with potential harm to kids where their parents are behind/ in agreement with it. We can just use those as necessary.
If you go through my arguments on the subject, you'll find that precisely none of them are about parents transing their own kids.
If GAC is harmful then sure ban it, but then I want to be able to be taking a good look at all the other harmful things we allow parents to do, because there is no reason the trans issue should be the only one.
I am not in favor of treating GAC in a special way and you haven't shown any way in which my approach would be special pleading. You or singularly focused on likelihood of harm, which I consider irrelevant, and very strange from someone who started the conversation with "thats because most people are not hard consequentialists".
I also don't agree that opting into a treatment or out of one in this context is relevant. We allow parents to make many choices for their kids some of which increase harm by doing something
Among the things we do not allow them to do, is buying whatever medicine fits their fancy. It's completely normal for medicines that are completely mundane by comparison to hormones or blockers (let alone surgeries) to be regulated, and their distribution be limited. Like I said, if you want to move to a system where anyone can buy whatever medicine for whatever purpose they see fit, I have my objections, but I can hear you out. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You want to allow GAC on self-determination grounds, but are not prepared to turn our medical system upside down. I'm saying if you want one, you must do the other. Self-determination means self-determination for all, not just the magical category of "trans".
We give parents very broad autonomy to indoctrinate their children into what ever oddball belief system they like, but this is the one all of a sudden where we draw the line? It looks like blatant special pleading.
Where, in my entire history of posting long-ass posts on the subject here, have I ever objected to parents indoctrinating their own children into gender ideology?
I just dislike it when people are inconsistent about how much other people's kids belong to them
That's fair, but go ahead and show me an inconsistency I actually have, rather than getting angry at something you imagined.
Separately, if specific doctors are not explaining the procedures and potential outcomes such that patients/parents cannot give informed consent then those doctors should be subject to whatever local disciplinary measures they have.
This is exactly what I want. Subject GAC to the same standards of scientific rigor we apply to other forms of medicine, and subject the doctors practicing it to the same ethical standards that other doctors are subject to. This is currently not the case, so to make it happen I have to convince people that scientific / ethical standards are not being applied by means of public debate, and lobbying for regulation, just like we do for every other aspect of our society.
This is not some new thing we just came up with. We already had this conversation as a society and decided the answer was, your kids, your choices, until you are literally about to kill them, then maybe we will stop you. Let's not open that can of worms because that truce is there for a reason.
Two things here. A truce where progressive parents get to trans their own kids, but they, and the doctors, stay the hell away from more conservative parents in any medical and/or cultural way, is acceptable to me.
But I do not concede that any such truce, in the broad way you defined it, is in effect. We do not let parents order a doctor to remove their kids' appendix for shits and giggles, female circumcision is completely banned in Europe, you'd probably end up in a ton of trouble for off-label use of prescription medicine on your children. You say GAC must be legal, or else we should look at all the other harmful things we let parents do. I say it's the opposite, there's nothing wrong with regulating it, or else we must abolish every single instance of the government standing in the way of self-determination. Right now testosterone is considered so dangerous that an aging low-T man must jump through considerable hoops to convince his doctor to allow him to have some, but an adolescent girl can get it in a 15 minute appointment. If we're regulating adult's access to hormones, we sure as hell can regulate children's access.
So you agree that with informed consent then trans people should generally be allowed to have surgeries and we should only step in, in the most unusual situations? I'm confused by your position here.
Well, the confusion seems to be that you're taking my point about not imposing a medical treatment on someone unwilling, and applying it to turning medicine into a free-for-all where anyone who asks for a particular treatment should get it. The former is how modern medicine is supposed to work in the West, and the latter very much is not. Otherwise we wouldn't have tons upon tons of regulations, licences, and various limits on who is allowed to do what in that field.
While I'm a bit anxious about turning medicine into a free-for-all, I'm not against it on principle. Even in cases like the trans issue, it would be a marked improvement over the status quo, where currently specialists lie to parents about the accuracy of diagnosis, negative effects of lack of treatment, the reversibility of the treatment, and where alternative treatments are sometimes banned as "conversion therapy".
Your own post pointed out the people writing WPATH were concerned about making sure their patients were aware of the risks and potential outcomes
In private. In public they work very hard to minimize the perception of those risks. Compare the videos I linked to, to the article from (WPATH member) Jack Turban, for example.
Given that, then by your own logic above why are you worried about this at all? If the patient gives informed consent then no-one is imposing a medical procedure.
Other than what I mentioned above, that the concept is supposed to prevent unwanted treatment, rather than open the doors to any wanted treatment, the problem is that there is no informed consent, as admitted by WPATH itself.
Given that you completely dropped the argument about "good intentions" justifying different treatment of ideologies, and are now changing the subject, I take it you concede it?
VinoVeritas
6d ago
I think this is also the mistake I see time and again in the political off-by-1 error: if your desired governance has the power to mass sterilize the "genetically undesirable," well surely you've already made abortion and all birth control illegal; abolished welfare and no-fault divorce and so practically ended alimony and child support; revoked the CRA and all of its subsequents; ended the universal franchise; made it generally impossible for women to be educated after high school unless they're becoming nurses; and, I don't know, banned most social media. If casual sex risks pregnancy and there is nothing to stop it and if for many women it would be financially ruinous to have a child if they don't have the father tied down, shouldn't wanton reproduction fall off a cliff?
Yes to everything but the weird aspersion toward women's education. As immortalized by Danny Trejo in Anchorman "times are changing, ladies can do stuff now." Everybody responds to incentives, and if properly aligned, the women who would be happier as careerwomen will go to school and those who would be happier as homemakers will do that.
And, there is also some irreversible amount of seeking your MRS degree from an already-sorted pool of your best peers
Is there a case in the last 15 years where police had the opportunity to suppress a manifesto, but released it anyway? If the option to suppress it is there, then it seems like this is becoming more standard. Most manifestos that make it into the public get directly uploaded somewhere, posted to 4chan, mailed to a newspaper if you're a 20th century terrorist, and so on. Seems like poor form to forget to post your deranged manifesto publicly before committing a heinous act. ** Also, her diary seem less like a philosophical statement, or call to action, than they are the weird doodles and thoughts of a mentally ill individual.
As for the police, Nashville PD, and most police departments, probably don't contain many cops that are too interested in protecting trans ideology. I can buy FBI involvement or pressure decreases the likelihood of a single cop leaking it as it pertains to trans-y ideas versus white nationalist ones. As a counter example, Brenton Tarrant and his manifesto was heavily suppressed in New Zealand and elsewhere following the Christchurch shooting. His manifesto was banned on lots of sites places if I recall. New Zealand also suppressed his name, face, and manifesto, albeit not very effectively.
For media coverage, yes I think it's fair to say there's a bias here. Googling Audrey Hale gets me this which includes a few right wing rags and the Post which may or may not qualify as one. On the flip side, here's one NPR article on Dylann Roof's manifesto. Dylann had his manifesto read out loud in court, but the NPR article predates that. If this was instead white nationalist rage manifesto, then yes it's fair to say there would be American media all over this shouting at the roof tops. Crazy trans radical kills children just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Is there a good argument for police to release every crazy's manifesto? Is there a good argument for media to cover the contents and proliferate the ideas in every manifesto?
Offering free national publicity for each person that gets the bright idea to impose their bullshit on others by killing kids creates a perverse incentive. If the options are coordinate a memory hole or offer them an free publicity-- one seems better than the other. A media ecosystem that could effectively coordinate this would be pretty scary though, wouldn't it?
jkf
6d ago
Again the Luger mechanism is a bit quirky and I'm not super-familiar since they got banned for barrel length in Canada -- but if you are getting light strikes it will be that the firing pin area (under the bolt) is either dirty or has a broken spring.
To be clear, you did experience hangfire as in click . . . . . . bang? I've never heard of this being caused by anything but bad ammo; not firing at all otoh is probably firing pin related. What do the primers look like on the failed rounds? A light/zero indentation is clearly a problem with the gun.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
7d ago
What the hell, dude?
By itself, this post is just bad enough to get a warning. Avoid sarcasm, avoid being an insufferably snide rageposter, avoid personal digs like this.
However, you have a long record of being an unsufferably snide rageposter. (Those links are like half of your record.)
Banned for a week. Get your rage under control or you won't be posting anymore.
Do you think that Jews ought to compromise themselves at all in regards to Jewish identity politics that can be anti christian and anti european? Or is it only on the other side to be tolerant?
For example, they should oppose laws that enforce a story of Jews as oppressed and European Christians as oppressors, and in fact support institutions promoting a narrative that does include some criticism of Jews for their contributions to far left extremism, and antiwhite movement.
It isn't really a complicated issue. There are Jews who are an asset to the right like Stephen Miller who tend to have an identity that encompasess more than the Jewish one. And Jews who do have resentment towards right wingers and Europeans and strong Jewish identity, do exist aplenty, and are not caused by insufficient appeasement, since there is ever abudance of the appeasing right.
Only a minority of Jews are such in their ideology and behavior that it would be wise to accept them. Neocons for example are a subversive force on the right. However, this can theoretically change.
Ironically, Jews would have assimiliated more, if organizations like ADL, WJC, etc, etc were banned. And in fact, Jewish support of multiculturalism and anti-european identity politics and intersectionality is in part related to the more radical Jews wanting the Jews not to assimiliate to whiteness.
Anyway, both Jews as a pattern and non Jewish pro Jewish types, are not even handed people only opposing antisemitism, but are highly biased to an extend that could be described as Jewish supremacist. And paint as antisemitism things through that lense. It would be both moral in general from a more unviersalist point of view, but also good in regards to the right and European-Jewish relations, and more friendship, for Jews and those promoting pro jewish narratives, to water down their wine. To compromise. To accept their own sins, instead of doing the narcisist manifesto.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
Avoiding the narcisist manifesto, does not make them self hating.
When Amy Wax claimed that her father was unduly too critical towards Christians, that wasn't self hateful.
And on much of the right they will find people who are going to accomodate them and aren't going to be promoting some demand of maximalist self hating dogma. The Jews who enjoy a positive reputation among the kind of right that doesn't like Shaprio aren't just Unz, but plenty of non self hating Jews but who have compromised on level of seperate jewish identity politics and do see the interests of europeans as legitimate and identify with a broader category rather than seeing them as a hostile other.
Of course, the issue is that laws currently promoted are Jewish supremacist in nature. And those who support that.
Another issue, is that if you got some hateful Jewish supremacists pushing their agenda, that is going to inflame the passions and anger on the other side. Just like Jews who have compromised and are more moderate and friendly towarsd the right incentivize a more positive reactions.
One's ideology in regards to nativism, immigration, AA and such issues is of course fundamental. And whether a Jew in a european country identifies as being part of that group and sees them as his people.
Jews claiming to be right wing who still retain sufficiently strong liberal views on such issues and are motivated by seperate ethnic identity are going to be treated with more suspicion. And even if their liberal views are somehow unrelated to their Jewish identity, they are a problem. Like I said, neocons should be reasonably excluded because of having sufficiently different and hostile ideology, and have a history of cancelling actual right wingers and conservatives for being insuficiently liberal on racial, and other issues. And more so especially for being insufficiently subservient to Jews and making any criticisms.
Sailer also wrote a short post after the issue discussed critical of the Israel lobby that the uncomrpomising Jewish identitarians wouldn't have promoted. So I wouldn't consider him the same as those types. More of a positive force than a negative. https://www.unz.com/isteve/not-getting-the-joke-2/
Which doesn't make this good article https://keithwoods.pub/p/protestantism-jews-and-wokeness arguing against his thesis a bad thing. Even those who are sufficiently a positive force to not gatekeep them out can promote bad ideas, which would be good to debate and counter.
Anyway, excessive compromise in pro female, pro jewish, pro black, etc direction is a key part of our current situation. This isn't to say purity spiralling in the opposite direction is correct, but appeasement is the wrong move and having those who are excessive pro jewish, pro female, etc, etc compromise is correct in general, but especially for the right. The right will become indistinquishable with the left in fundamental issues, if it listens to women and Jews and LGBT Republicans and pro migration types and pro black types arguing for more appeasement. More compromise. Laws giving their favorite groups preferential treatment. And there is a connection with appeasement to one, leading to appeasement to all and the same intersectional story. While painting anything but that as antisemitic, misogynistic, anti black, racist, etc, etc.
The right has compromised too much in these directions, is losing its own identity as a right and moving too far to the left in the process and needs to fix this overreach and not increase it.
Jews wanting to be a part of the right have an even bigger moral obligation than Jews in general to water down their wine, and compromise from the more extreme positions typical in Jewish community that are part of a progressive Jewish nationalist narrative of Jews as always oppressed, always in the right against especially a European Christian historical, present, and possibly future oppressor. Some level of admitting fault is not only accurate but necessary because if Jews are progressive as a pattern, and as Prager says "the conscience of humanity" why oppose the ADL, and the activities of those Jews who do see with hostility european christian civilization? Since Jews didn't do nothing wrong, then they were correct to be leftists under this perspective and only reacting to "antisemitism" under this false narrative. So why oppose the current leftist trajectory? That compromise I mentioned towards a more moderate position and having a stronger broader identity that sees European rightists as your people would also make it justifiable for European rightists to accept such Jews.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8d ago
I will say this: it is frustrating to get downvotes without replies. I'm not exactly a super-controversial poster - I think it's like 1% of my posts are net-downvoted and close to 50% have no downvotes at all - but it does grate every time I see a post get a bunch of downvotes without an explanation, and because they're anonymous I can't just go and interrogate the downvoters for what they think is bad.
Obviously, this is why my flair is what it is, but it hasn't really helped much. I'm half suspecting that a decent chunk of the voters are nonposting lurkers.
This is not a question of "I don't like the information"; it's that it teases information without actually giving the actionable details to me. And sure, the interface allows a manual downvote insofar as one can make a post saying "you suck", but those are banned here and TTBOMK not just because "the downvote button exists".
jake
8d ago
100 years ago people in most countries, especially the west, were significantly poorer than today. In 1900, 20% of American households had 7 or more children, as of 2020 it's .1%. Those people were far more ignorant and compared to today unbelievably destitute but they marched on and raised civilization to new heights. What would you say changed? If it's the kind of people having so many children, then is poverty the real issue?
The online right talks a lot about genetics as destiny. Putting aside their moral failure to understand if the thing they say is true, and I think it probably is mostly true, it is damnable and must be fixed. I wonder how they square their purview with the most successful, the most attractive, and the most effective people being so uniformly leftist. Alan Ritchson sneeding about Trump stung his Reacher fans for many reasons and I'd think a not trivial one is because 6'3 Aryan chad is attacking them.
Of course the behavior of such people is very easy to explain: going with the flow, kompromat, general evil, apathy, idiocy, but when a discussion starts in such highly reductive territory as "Poor people are clearly the problem, sterilize them" you invite opponents to bring the proportionate reductiveness of something like /r/beholdthemasterrace. It's not a productive discourse. I think there is something to be argued about the impacts of specific policies, one such negative impact of welfare is that certain people dependent on welfare in turn create more people dependent on welfare, and as a great deal of political power is effectively bought from these people, the incentive structure is perverse. But do we blame the impoverished or the exploiting politicians? "Genetics as destiny" wouldn't find blame in sheep, they're sheep.
I think this is also the mistake I see time and again in the political off-by-1 error: if your desired governance has the power to mass sterilize the "genetically undesirable," well surely you've already made abortion and all birth control illegal; abolished welfare and no-fault divorce and so practically ended alimony and child support; revoked the CRA and all of its subsequents; ended the universal franchise; made it generally impossible for women to be educated after high school unless they're becoming nurses; and, I don't know, banned most social media. If casual sex risks pregnancy and there is nothing to stop it and if for many women it would be financially ruinous to have a child if they don't have the father tied down, shouldn't wanton reproduction fall off a cliff?
All that aside, I've written here before how I think hard population control is an inevitability, but I think between us it's for every reason different. It's not healthy to live around more people than names and faces you can remember, the evidence for that piles by the year. Yeah we'll be able to provide for their physical needs, in that Malthus will be forever wrong, but we can't provide for their social needs and a failure to address that will end in total civilizational collapse. Not because of laziness, not some economic issue, just the opposite. Boredom. If tens of millions of young men find no purpose in virtual lives, if they have no real work and not even a prospect for productive labor because AGI is doing all the work the top 10% can't handle, if all they have to do is nothing, they'll get bored, and bored young men have quite the knack for finding a reason to burn everything down.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
There was a community of people who called themselves "rationalists", centered on a website called "LessWrong". They were trying to figure out how to be less wrong, how to overcome bias and get at the truth. The community coalesced around a couple of prolific bloggers, one of whom was Scott Alexander. Scott was quite an excellent writer and had his own blog, Slate Star Codex, which went moderately viral during the 2014-2015 Social Justice brew-up online. He wrote a string of quite excellent essays attempting to analyze, critique or occasionally defend Social Justice ideas, and built up a thriving community of commenters interested in the subject. He attempted to keep culture war discussion contained to weekly threads created for the topic, and thus the culture war thread was born.
His popularity got high enough that his commenters started a subreddit, /r/slatestarcodex, but as the debate around Social Justice ideology got more and more acrimonious, Scott started getting more and more pushback from SJ proponents for his free speech stance. Eventually, he stopped hosting culture war discussion, and told everyone to take it to the subreddit. This did not succeed in insulating him from SJ disapproval, and he suffered a pretty serious harassment campaign targeting his career and personal life. The mods on the subreddit quickly decided that they didn't want the heat either, and likewise banned discussion of the culture war outside SJ orthodoxy, so the thread moved to /r/themotte. SJ disapproval of the Motte's existence succeeded in drawing attention from the Reddit admins, who made it clear through their actions that they would not allow the thread to operate according to its established principles, so we took the leap and moved off-site to hear. Along the way we've had other communities split off as well, but this remains the most active descendent community by a fair margin.
This place is not supposed to have an ideological stance, other than free speech and good communication. The goal is to facilitate and encourage meaningful communication between people with very different values and points of view, and the rules are designed and enforced with this purpose in mind. Moderation is for tone, not for content; we aim to not care what anyone says, only how they say it. The community leans pretty strongly anti-social justice, as many of the pro-social-justice posters the community had got frustrated and left one way or the other over the succession of moves.
Any other questions?
In that post, you and Yassine are certainly not arguing that your views are in any sense reconcilable with inegalitarian/particularist views. The central argument there is that your specific set of values are the objectively and inarguably correct set of values, given everything that’s true about the world we live in. Nowhere in there is a suggestion that there’s any practical way for anyone to persuade you out of those values; quite the opposite. You’re saying that the only way someone with inegalitarian values could have any leg to stand on morally is if there were massive, fundamental structural/technological changes in the way our civilization is organized; barring that - something which will not happen in our lifetimes - your values are correct, and mine are not even worth discussing because they’re in the dustbin of (current) history. Not exactly an invitation to “reconciliation”.
I read all of the replies to that post, and I can identify not a single one that I would consider an unmoderated personal attack devoid of substantive argument. Perhaps you’re referring to replies to other posts not linked to.
First off, you’re totally misinterpreting his use of the word “rats” in that post. He is using it as a shortening of “rationalists” - a group with which he himself identified at the time, and presumably still does. It was a very common term of self-identification at the time; there was an entire constellation of Tumblr users, for example, who proudly called themselves “Rat Tumblr” (or Rattumb for short), meaning just “Rationalist Tumblr”.
In that post, Ilforte is accusing you of aping the shibboleths of that subculture while working directly and intentionally to sabotage its aims and core values. In the segments of your post that he quotes, you very clearly do appear to be advocating using social shame to rigidly enforce speech taboos around certain topics - to not only ridicule and socially bully racialists, but to actually actively ruin their lives in a professional sense, or at least to celebrate those who do so. This is, indeed, a very serious violation of one of the core values of that subculture at the time, which was strongly opposed to that type of social shaming and speech tabooing.
I’m also unsure what you mean by accusing him of “ban evading”. That post is in /r/CultureWarRoundup, a totally separate splinter subreddit from /r/TheMotte, and not a sub from which I believe Ilforte was ever banned at any point. If you mean he’s ban evading by cross-posting a post of yours from The Motte and criticizing it… that’s not what ban evading is.
I’m sure that in some cases this is probably true! However, again, many of us racialists once shared your liberal priors, instincts, and aesthetics. Yet this was not enough to stop us from eventually adopting these views. Why do you think that is? Clearly in that case it can’t just be due to some ineffable, inarticulable, subconscious psychological difference between us and you, right? If I was progressive once, I must contain the capability to inhabit the brain states compatible with progressivism. And yet obviously I also simultaneously contain the capacity to inhabit the brain states compatible with rightism. Are you so certain that you lack that capacity?
That would be difficult, simply given the lack of any effective search function in this site’s design. I have been meaning to put together a master spreadsheet of links to some of my more successful/important posts, such that I would be able to supply those links when prompted, but I have not gotten around to doing so. I don’t have time to pull those right now, but I’ll see what I can do at some point in the future. However, I would caution that I’m not confident the posts alone will be persuasive to you, since they will not be in combination with the specific and non-transferable life experiences I’ve had which caused me to be more sympathetic to these ideas than I likely would have otherwise.
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