domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
If you want to understand the position of HBD enjoys better, you are perfectly allowed to lay out your current understanding of the HBD viewpoint and then ask about the parts that you think don't make sense.
Instead you post: Acktually, if HBDers really believed what they say, they "would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race."
I disagree with you guys and don't identify as part of your political tribe.
Who is "you guys" and who is "your political tribe???"
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
No Alex, as I have told you over and over and over and over and over and over again, what people want is to argue against your perspective. Not defend against your strawman of their perspective. Certainly not defend against your strawman of what Richard Hanania told you is the perspective of people they are aligned with on one issue. When you aren't writing sentence long sneers you constantly structure your posts like a smack down - but for Twitter arguments, not anything said on the motte. But nobody gives a shit what you saw someone say on twitter. Go argue that shit on twitter already.
Sunshine
1hr ago
What you actually said:
This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans.
YE_GUILTY
24m ago
When you moderated a forum, what did you do about posters who threatened to leave and take their valuable perspectives with them if they didn't get their way?
(I promise that thought came to mind before I realized it would come off as accusing you of doing so. I can say I hope you're not.)
You see, moderators do not have the power to keep members in a community: they can only ban/punish or not. Members have their right to decide to stay or go. And here, many left-wing posters have left not with a permaban but with a flounce: a public door-slam denouncing the moderators, and/or the posters, and/or whomever, for tolerating the wrong kinds of people too much and the right kinds of people not enough.
Or they just didn't make the jumps: there are still plenty of well-known left-wing posters from the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Roundup days still seeming to post their same views under the new "no culture war" regime. (Speaking of which, it occurs to me this community has twice been sent off into exile, both times on account of outside demands/threats over too much right-wing activity.)
But what do you do about flouncers? The most obvious solution is to give them what they want: give them special treatment, "affirmative action for left-wingers," as Scott did on SlateStarCodex. You can do that, but, in this case, affirmative action doesn't prove effective at healing underlying divisions. The majority ends up rankled and chilly towards the officially-favored minority, it seems.
Offhand, I don't have any other policy proposal options based on the history of the Scott-sphere. Now, I thought about asking about your experience handling intractable disagreements, not as a forum moderator, but as an Israeli, but that seems like it could get really pessimistic really quickly, so maybe we shouldn't get into that.
hydroacetylene
39m ago
Elite human capital is pretty clearly code for Bush era democrats with moderately libertarian economics. They're very concerned about increasing religious right influence(lol, LMAO even), and think constantly sounding the bugle on it is a necessity. They support gays but not trans, may have some skepticism of- but mostly a vague idea about- US foreign policy. They're very pro-abortion, very concerned about conspiracy theories. Compared to current day progressives they don't seem to care much about drugs or criminal justice much, they might even be (moderately)conservative on the issue, it's hard to tell.
Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
I am not aware of any banned person who was trying to have an actual conversation with actual disagreement. People mainly get banned for being obvious bad faith trolls who are just here to deliver drive-by insults and then vanish without making any arguments for their position.
Sure, there are some people who do that and don't get banned, but that's not quite the same thing, is it? I don't think it's so terrible to err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt. There are few enough posts here that tolerating a few more won't take away attention from anyone more deserving.
And for the record, I would be willing to bet that >75% of this forum is non-antisemetic (is there a word for that?) and a commanding majority support Israel over its various Muslim rivals. There are a few antisemites lurking about darkly Implying Things, but much like the leftists they tend to scurry away when you shine a spotlight on them rather than actually stand and fight.
It is not a consensus opinion that smothers dissent, it's the opposite. It's an embattled minority opinion that no one is willing to stand up and openly defend. You don't have to tiptoe around anything.
Here, watch: I think antisemetism is stupid. Much like a primitive savage who thinks thunder is caused by an angry god, antisemites anthropomorphize the impersonal forces of politics and economics. When confronted with a phenomenon they don't understand, they assume it must be caused by a cabal of scheming humans. They do this because they're superstitious idiots. They're also poo-poo heads.
I've called you out, antisemites of the Motte! I've called you all poo-poo heads! Show me how fearsome and numerous you are! Dogpile me into oblivion!
Bartender_Venator
49m ago
This is why the whole Elite Human Capital thing has already flashed in the pan and gone as a memetic trend. There's no register used by its proponents other than shallow antagonism towards broad swathes of (usually caricatured) outgroupers. Beyond Hanania's mild advocacy of orthodox liberal/libertarian economics, it's incredibly rare to find any positive platform whatsoever buried in all the mud-slinging - as shown on this forum by the complete confusion of many posters as to what positive ideas you actually believe. Out of politeness, I'll refrain from speculating on the psychological motives or personality types involved. But I suspect there just isn't any positive platform because, when people are motivated by one, they're usually excited to win others over, to learn how to convert with argument and rhetoric. If that's what you're trying to do, rather than sling insults because they feel good, then I suggest revising your approach.
On the other hand, if you're looking to antagonize people, here is a guide on how to do it while being as polite as possible.
Clementine
1hr ago
I moderated a forum once.
Like many forums it struggled with one of the basic problems of forum moderation — how much niceness do you enforce, which I'll explain by way of some endemic user types in any forum with enough people and anything but the most milquetoast topic.
A: Here's the troll who comes by only to post egregiously offensive "go kill yourself [list of slurs]",
B: Here's the more subtle troll, who keeps toeing the line as much as he can get away with.
C: here's the user who is not a troll. They actually do participate in discussion and are clearly trying to be a part of the community. They're also abrasive and/or obnoxious and/or inflammatory.
D: And then here's the final type of user that's problematic as a mod: They're a sensitive snowflake. Honestly they need to be sub-divided further, because some of them are just born snowflakes that can't handle any opposition to their viewpoint at all, and others are retaliatory snowflakes, because if I got a ban for three days for saying this opinion is dumb then that guy also needs to get a ban for three days for saying this other opinion is dumb.
The forum was one that was trying really hard to be heterogenous in terms of opinions and also to be nice and moderating it was a nightmare, not because of the obvious ban on sight trolls but because inevitably when you want to moderate niceness now 90% of your mod time — and the mod time becomes a balloon that expands to fill all available space — is spent on dealing with constant playground supervision of the snowflakes. Also you've been slowly but steadily banning your type C members when they eventually accrue enough complains from the type Ds, and because they're really annoying you initially don't miss them until you realize that conversation in your forum is drying up a bit and also some of the valuable forum members who were friends with type Cs also got pissed off and left and also mixed into the type Cs and their friends were, inevitably, some of the more useful members of the forum who knew a lot (and hence got into arguments that annoyed snowflakes).
Also it turns out snowflakes are basically never satisfied as long and are just a self eating death spiral of a forum culture.
After my experience moderating that forum and swearing off moderating ever again, I ended up lurking the notorious kiwifarms. It was full of people who engaged in what would definitely be termed elsewhere as hate speech against me. Now, I never actually made an account there, and I also stopped visiting a few years back so idk if things have changed, but at the time I remember being struck by how much less of a threat I felt reading kiwifarms, because yeah slurs were being thrown around but users were actually arguing, you didn't just have someone with the viewpoint that was the forum consensus and then everyone else against that consensus gets to tiptoe around what they can say or get banned. Everyone shared their most idiotic opinions and had other people arguing with them no holds barred, the forum also had reaction emojis so you could freely post your insane conspiracy theory but wou would get 50 "lol look at this insane conspiracy theory" reactions.
I remember a few years ago people were still making fun of t*kt*kers and how they would asterisk everything or use idiotic word substitution like "krill myself" because otherwise they'd get blackholed by the TikTok algorithm.
Meanwhile I took a long long break from reddit and only recently returned, to a forum dedicated to a game I play, and discovered that in the interim reddit has added some kind of probably AI based site-wide moderation against violent language (or actual human beings are being this dumb idk) and it's impossible to talk like a normal person there anymore, because if you say, in a joking and friendly fashion perfectly understood by you and the person you are talking to to be friendly, "you said my build was bad, I'm gonna have to shove you off a cliff" (this example is not great because I forget the actual exchange, but whatever, fill in something more normal) then you get banned from all of Reddit and the poor guy you were talking with gets to post your exit speech from the discord you're both in as well. It does appear to be a strike system where first you get warned, since I got my first warning for telling someone who posted about a pedophile moving into their neighborhood that hopefully the pedophile would die suddenly.
It's hard not to turn this into some kind of doompost about how the internet is turning into a horrible little hellhole where no one has a normal argument anymore just constant barricading themselves into their own opinions lest they be offended by the not niceness of having to hear someone else's opinions, each little forum and its own narrow band of acceptable ideology, all while the biggest social media sites are enforcing the most transparently fake bullshit kindergarten language upon us all. It brings out the free speech absolutist instincts in me, it really does.
But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?
Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.
Let's by analogy discuss locker room culture. I don't actually know if locker room culture is a real thing irl so I'm going to discuss hypothetical locker room culture.
It's a group of like fifteen guys in a guy's only space. They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug. Sometimes rapey Kenneth makes a joke about how some girl in the school really needs to be fucked into her proper place in society and Doug will make some follow up joke and everyone else is maybe thinking "c'mon man can we not do this" if it's been like too many times that day but usually you're just trying to finish getting dressed and maybe John also is like "that's not cool man" and pushes back. But like, the rest of the time the atmosphere is just a comfy men's only space plus the occasional rape joke or comment about how women suck or are all gold-diggers or are responsible for everything wrong with society.
Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.
Because there's just the microculture of what kinds of things are ok to say there and what aren't, and sometimes what's ok to say is anything negative about group A and what's not ok to say is anything negative about group B, and it's not really about an active policy one way or another it's just this is the overall culture of the social group, read the room and get out.
This is, unfortunately, the part where I admit that I've spent weeks now debating if I should just quietly show myself the door. I didn't mean to enter themotte under false premises, I just decided my first post wouldn't be some "here's all my labels and opinions" and would be an actual post about a controversial topic I wanted to talk about. And then before I had the chance to like, casually drop the relevant information about me and get it over with (I despise sharing personally identifiable information online, but it was nonetheless something that needed to happen eventually if I wanted to talk about any number of topics I wanted to discuss), my government did a surprise attack on Iran. I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).
And in the meantime I got to have the uncomfortable sensation of listening in on conversations I felt were very obviously not meant to include me. For several days now I've been debating doing a rip the band-aid off kind of post (how? What framing?) to get it over with and be able to discuss things again or to just... Leave.
Because of course the alternative is to figure out the correct, respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government/assassinated Kennedy, since we aren't doing kiwifarms style dialogue where someone talks about the kikes ruining everything and someone else responds by calling him a retarded autist, you've got to politely request sources and carefully have respectful mutually productive dialogue.
Or to just like ignore that the conversation is even happening? Stick to discussion of feminism and essentially continue faking being a normal non-Jewish mottizen...
Polite respectful mutual dialogue.
But only for some opinions, because others are an "immense pain in the ass".
Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave. Because it is actually really annoying, if I need to play nice with the neonazis and have polite and measured conversations — I am willing to do this, even though conversations with people who are (only theoretically!) interested in me and my family being dead are a "pain in the ass" to conduct civilly — and to then see someone else express some opinion that is more objectionable to the baseline motte culture, but expressed according to all the rules of the site, and get banned (temporarily) for it. Because it just means setting the lines around what kinds of people are in the locker room, which is pretending to be a co-ed discussion space, but isn't. And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards. I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
Fixed the link.
It's this one.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NDWKRFSZlCM&t=64
This scene in the Mario Movie has NO REASON TO EXIST, they don't resolve anything, it lasts less than 2 minutes, there's no real danger, and they just solve the problem without even thinking about it, and get back to the storyline. Literally the next scene leads into the final showdown.
The whole movie feels like this.
What did you mean when you said "This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. "
Who would have to conclude that? Under what suppositions?
Maybe the problem here is you reading things that aren't there, not my writing.
Don't insult my intelligence. I know exactly what you're trying to insinuate. You're quite straightforwardly saying "If you assume X, then Y is a logical conclusion. Since X-supporters don't believe in Y, they must be either idiots or are lying." Of course you're wrong about that, but that's besides the point because you just go "tee hee that's not what I meant XP" instead of defending your position.
ulyssessword
just now
Let's try a concrete example. Excerpted from here:
The o1 model identified the exact or very close diagnosis (Bond scores of 4-5) in 65.8% of cases during the initial ER Triage, 69.6% during the ER physician encounter, and 79.7% at the ICU
65.8% accuracy isn't that great, but buddy, have you seen humans?
—surpassing the two physicians (54.4%, 60.8%, 75.9% for Physician 1; 48.1%, 50.6%, 68.4% for Physician 2) at each stage.
The state of the art for generating accurate medical diagnoses doesn't involve gathering the brightest highschoolers, giving them another decade(-ish) of formal education, then more clinical experience before asking for their opinions. It involves training an LLM.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
3m ago
You did not say "no", as such i find it disingenuous of you to suddenly back-pedal and claim to care about reliability after the the fact.
Buddy, have you seen humans?
Humans are unreliable. You are a human are you not? You have not given any indication that you care about accuracy or reliability and instead (by chosing to use the trick calculator over doing the math yourself) have strongly implied that you do not care about such things.
Now if you feel that I've been unfairly dismissive, antagonistic, or uncharitable in my response towards you then perhapse then you might begin to grasp why i hate the whole "bUt HuMaNs ArE FaLaBlE ToO UwU" argument with such a passion. Im not claiming that LLMs are unreliable because they are "less than perfect" i am claiming that they are unreliable because they are not only unreliable, but unreliable by design.
Lorian_Aristedes
4m ago
I would be very interested to read that if you ever do a write up.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
Maybe a new rule should be "be as polite as possible without being insincere.
Although that is not an official rule, that is encouraged, yes.
As for you, I'm not going to argue with yet another person who comes back from a ban to complain about how unfair their ban was. You know what you're doing.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
It was putting words in the mouths of a large, vaguely defined political movement which you associated those you disagree with on the forum with.
I wouldn't have banned you for it- although if I made all the mod decisions you probably would have been banned at the time you posted it for one of the personal attacks you got a slap on the wrist for- but it wasn't the post we'd like to see more of. I think you could have written a better version of that post; goodness knows we have enough discussion on native white men and the economy.
We have conservative posters who whine about the mods oppressing them, too. I generally say the same thing to them.
Gaashk
1hr ago
I agree with this take.
In my experience, the people who are really worried about decaying former company towns are also worried about places like Detroit, which used to have a higher proportion of functional, employed black men with families (they say, I'd be open to an argument that this is a myth I suppose).
The people who are really worried about good New York schools crowding out white and Asian kids in favor of racial quotas because of disparate impact are different people, much more likely to go on about "HBD," but they're probably just as upset about being yelled at on the subway by black, white, or hispanic druggies. I think these are the ones who are tired of trying to solve the druggies' problems for them, and would like them to be locked up or denied expensive, repeated medical care, and would be completely unsurprised at the stats about their average demographics.
I don't think the extra context actually does change the meaning at all. I'll apply some simplification to distill the meaning of the full paragraph:
This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories.
Summary: The "narrative" (as you put it) conflicts with HBD because...
Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans.
Summary: HBD would require you to see whites as an inferior race...
They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1]
Summary: They (here now referring to believers in your "narrative" rather than believers in HBD) see whites as a weaker and nobler race, much like the Noble Savage myth portrays American Indians...
But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites
Summary: But American whites aren't American Indians so the comparison is weak (then why did you make it?)
It seems clear to me that this is actually two statements without much connection between them.
Statement 1: If you take HBD seriously then you should see whites as an inferior race.
Statement 2: "Narrative" believers see American whites like Noble Savage-fans see American Indians.
To be clear, I never thought you were claiming that white people are racially inferior to Guatemalans. You say so in the very first sentence of the quoted section - this is what you believe to be the logical conclusion of HBD, not what you believe yourself. The context is there.
Everyone has understood this from the beginning, including the person you responded to. We know what you meant, and what you meant is precisely what we're objecting to.
faceh
25m ago
Thats the one addition I simply cannot defend. If he can tuck his head behind the suit and be instantly bulletproof (regardless of the weapons being used against him) then whats the risk?
plural
33m ago
They used to rewrite movies until the execs thought they were good. Maybe they didn't have to do that to make money and that's why they stopped or maybe the execs that did that were replaced and the newer execs don't because they don't care or it's become harder to do something like rewriting a movie four or five times until you get something that you think is right like Gladiator. But it used to be a pretty common thing, Tom Stoppard would punch up all the dialogue in The Last Crusade or Aaron Sorkin for the Rock/Enemy of the State but I don't here about script doctors anymore and not really about things like Gladiator where they just couldn't stop rewriting it. I don't hear about studio meddling anymore, do you?
I look at things like Smile today (many days ago, I guess) and I can see that the execs knew they had a hit there with the idea alone. They got a really fancy production team on board, they got Cristobal Tapia De Veer for the music, They got decent to good actors, they marketed the shit out of it but they didn't try to fix the CW-level plot that existed in the middle for some reason. Maybe the execs that were artists themselves and could see what made something good or not are gone and now we're left with people who can only see what makes money because the two things are so far apart now. There's nobody like Roger Corman looking at your movie and telling you its shit because it doesn't have enough explosions and then shrugging and giving you carte blanche to go out and shoot the movie again with more explosions. But everyone's an auteur. There's some kind of allegory or symbolism. Can you imagine someone trying to fix the extra hour that exists in the Substance for some reason nowadays? They'd get quiet cancelled or something like that like that for "being a piece of shit."
But I suspect the main reason is that it makes no difference. Maybe it did at one point but there's no reason to try to fix Love and Thunder when it will probably piss Taika off and all the people who have to come for reshoots and you won't make any more money. Who'd want to take charge of something like that anyway? Joss Whedon was basically cancelled for dealing with the people on the Justice League reshoot and trying to get a black person to say lines in the script.
Though it's also clear that there are many major executive decisions at studios to not make things good. You can look at Amazon or Netflix, they didn't try to get good writers or even lovers of the material they were making for The Witcher or Wheel of Time. Why would Disney continue to employ Russel T. Davies to take a massive shit on Doctor Who again? Maybe its cheaper but Russel T. Davies is probably more expensive than the CW also-rans that seem to be able to get their hands on best-selling book franchises, so I expect there's a lot of cronyism or simply just lack of any understanding or care about the things they're making because known IPs don't have to be good they just have to exist so give The Witcher to that girl that wrote a few episodes of Riverdale or let's reboot Buffy with someone that wrote an episode of Poker Face. If it fails who cares we made some money and we can just reboot it again later.
Gaashk
1hr ago
I didn't report it and have mixed feelings about the ban, but it wasn't a good top level post.
In my experience, when I believe I have been misinterpreted, it is much more conducive to understanding to rephrase my claim to attempt to address the misunderstanding than just to direct others to reread.
While the fault may be theirs, it may also not be, and even if one is sure it's on them, grace and magnanimity (in extending others a hand even if you think they don't deserve it) goes a long way.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1hr ago
It's just... forgettable.
The title doesn't describe what the movie is about, the MC is ugly (chimp face, permanent black purple eye) and [if the critics are to be believed, was if not still is] fag-coded, and the aliens' appearance doesn't suggest any interesting personality traits.
So yeah, "I'd let my kid watch it on Netflix, but I wouldn't pay 60 dollars to see it" is a pretty apt observation.
eye patch on a kid character
Eye patches are only appropriate on kid characters if they make him/her look like a pirate for obvious reasons.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2hr ago
On the sidebar it says "This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases." In this thread, it is claimed "the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here."
After my ban for this comment, it's hard to take that seriously. It did not include personal attacks, name-calling, strawmanning, or attempting to enforce ideological conformity. It "spoke plainly" and provided evidence. Yet the mods banned me for it, saying I was being an "immense pain in the ass."
I think the mods, and most people here, believe that they want this to be an open discussion forum with people of many different viewpoints, but when they're actually confronted with it, they feel it's an "immense pain in the ass." They called me an "obnoxious trolling shitstirrer." Yes, I am a shitstirrer in the sense that I say things that go against the dominant ideological viewpoint here, and I know in advance that hostility is likely to result. But isn't that what you want here, rather than another online echo chamber? I'm sure many of you have experience being "shitstirrers" in online spaces where you're in the ideological minority, now the shoe's on the other foot.
The mods accused me of "snarling" at my enemies, which gets to the meat of the issue: do you want an ideologically diverse forum or not? I freely admit I have a contempt for forms of conservatism and white nationalism I see as third-worldist. (Anti-vax, raw milk, conspiratorial, superstitious, fetishizing low-skilled manual labor, etc.) That's why I disagree with you guys and don't identify as part of your political tribe. If you think I'm a "leftist," try talking to a real one, the kind who uses terms like "patriarchy" or "heteronormativity" non-ironically. They do NOT like you. They see you as a malignant, cancerous influence on America. If you don't want to have a discussion forum with people who dislike you, change your rules to state that they aren't welcome. If, on the other hand, you want people from other tribes to be in this "jury," then you've got to accept them as they are rather than the imagined versions who disagree with you but like and respect you and never come around to actually posting here.
It seems to me that what some people here want is a forum with "left-wing" equivalents of David French. For the unfamiliar, David French is an allegedly "conservative" columnist for the NYT whose articles are just one after another telling liberals they're right and that conservatives are gross and mean and only ever making "we need 50 Stalins" criticisms of the Left. Thing is, French doesn't play this role for free. And you should be glad you don't have David French's, as I suspect that they have had a detrimental impact on the Left's electoral fortunes. If your only exposure to "conservatives" is people like David French, you're going to get a warped view of American politics that will lead to bad election strategy.
None of this is to say you should get rid of your rules against shaming, strawmanning, name-calling, etc. Maybe a new rule should be "be as polite as possible without being insincere." I admit that this is a tough balance to strike, I just think that right now the Motte is too far toward forced politeness leading to ideological conformity.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2hr ago
Exactly. Watching Dr Grant see a sauropod for the first time is infinitely more impactful than any moment in any of the more recent films despite the much worse CGI in the original precisely because it's actually a superbly made film that understands setup and payoff.
I did not find your original post to be plainly spoken. Actually, I'd like to get into it.
You talk about your evidence, and you did provide some, but it was all in support of the things that didn't need supporting. I would be willing to take your word for it that blacks are more likely to die of opioids than whites, or that most men have jobs. These aren't exactly extreme claims in need of reams of supporting evidence. I would be willing to accept them for the sake of parsing the rest of your argument even if they weren't true.
Here's an example of a part of your post I would have liked to see some supporting evidence for:
The new narrative according to whom? Since when? This is a rather extreme claim, made right at the start, and the structure of the post is essentially arguing that this narrative is hypocritical. And yet you advanced this argument yourself. You aren't arguing against someone else making a coherent argument, you're assuming someone believes this thing and arguing against what you think they must think. So, the part of your post I would most need to see evidence for is that this "narrative" is actually a widespread belief, and you provide none.
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