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Amadan

"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"

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joined 2022 September 05 00:23:21 UTC
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User ID: 297

Amadan

"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"

5 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 00:23:21 UTC

					

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User ID: 297

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I don't know why you reply to my comments when I do. I also don't know why people here rail against their outgroup when most of them are not here. Yet that's been happening forever... A strange observation.

You were clearly directing your comment at other people here. I think you understand the distinction and the point of my observation.

I don't feel the need to earmark a 6 year old with missing legs as anything in particular to feel revolted by the suffering on display. Are things different for you?

No, I'd actually have a different impression of you if I believed you were genuinely distressed by the suffering of 6-year-olds regardless of where in the world they are and who caused it.

Anyways look at the results and ask yourself the question about your rules bringing you to this -- what good did this ban do the forum?

We always ask that question. This is not the first time a well-liked and generally positive contributor has been (temporarily) banned. This is also not the first time that @JTarrou, specifically, has been banned. At one point he even wrote a long post about how he expected to get permabanned, no hard feelings, because he just couldn't comply with the rules about not shitting on his outgroup.

I realize there is a substantial contingent here who would like people to be allowed to post freely about how women are hypergamous bots, blacks are low IQ crime-monsters, Jews are invidious parasites, libtards should all be given helicopter rides, etc. etc. If that is the forum you would like, advocate for that but be clear about it. Maybe if that's what everyone wants, we will change our moderation and let the shit fly. But until now, the consensus has been that that is not what (most) people want, and hence that's why we mod people who cannot keep their seething hatred in check when posting. It's not like you aren't allowed to talk about women, blacks, Jews, liberals, etc., in a negative fashion. @JTarrou wasn't confused or caught unawares at crossing some invisible line he didn't understand. He knew what he was doing because he's done it (and been warned about it) before. So have 90% of our regulars who get rapped for breaking the rules, no matter how much they complain about it.

That said, sometimes there are phases where the mods all happen to be moderating more strictly or less strictly for a while. It's usually not an intentional or coordinated thing (we have not had a "reign of terror" recently, and no plans to do so). Remember those? When the forum would get so heated and antagonistic that we had to start issuing bans even for small infractions to get people to chill out? Some people thought that was necessary and some people hated it. Usually the people who hated it were the ones who wanted to shit on others. If you think we've been stricter lately, maybe it's because people have been shittier lately.

I don't think our moderation has changed, I know our rules haven't, and clearly it is not just Nazis who are able to write effortful posts without catching bans.

We've been hearing "You guys are ruining this place with your nannying speech patterns" since before we left reddit.

I don't know why you keep dunking on rationalists when most people here are not rationalists and don't claim to be. But I don't think even rationalists would claim that "the side that suffers more" automatically carries greater moral legitimacy.

We have a few people in a very similar spot here. To them 'jews and Israel > The rest'. But getting to that point would break their own perception of themselves so we get to play this game of words instead.

A strange observation. I can see who you think you're talking about, but I cannot see the actual arguments you are describing. I do find it ironic that you speak of "transparent intentions," given that you speak with shuddering horror of Palestinians crushed beneath rubble and yet, I must admit I find myself having a very hard time believing that you really care overly much about Palestinian lives per se.

Do you think @JTarrou should not have been banned?

If you think the modding was correct, then what is your complaint?

If you think the modding was incorrect, then explain why.

In reality, yes. But the comparison is frequently made (because all "indigenous" folks are the same), to the extent that some leftists on Twitter have said things along the lines of "Actually, Native Americans would totally be justified if they started suicide bombing white people."

No one says this immediately today. The question is what is the statute of limitations on historical land grievances? We discourage conquest and colonization today, but we cannot roll back or atone for every conquest that ever happened.

(This is why I find the Israelis' argument that Israel was "theirs" 2000 years ago to be completely irrelevant.)

I don't know of anyone claiming Israel is deescalating. Obviously they aren't.

And personally, I'd be fine with the US reducing its support for Israel. But that isn't what you were asking.

This is a boo-outgroup generalization that needs a lot more behind it than you dropping it as a sneer.

Most of the Jewish population of Israel would find its bearings in the West very quickly

Maybe, but why should they accept being turned out of their country to become refugees somewhere else? In what world would a people who won every war waged against them surrender to their defeated enemies and abandon what is now their homeland? What other descendants of colonists are ever asked to do this? Even Americans are told we should make reparations to Native Americans, not all pack up and move back to Europe. This just seems like a very non-serious proposal.

And this is just taking your premise at face value, that anti-semitism in the West is basically over and 4 million Jews would quickly be assimilated and their new hosts would be happy to have them. I'm sure our Joo-posters here would have some things to say about that.

In more realistic and less edgy terms, I think that radically redrawing the borders of Israel and Palestine for a two-state solution that hurts both of them, perhaps surrendering half of Jerusalem and everything to the south of a line linking Gaza to it to a Palestinian state in return for everything north of it, performing full population transfer and deploying international troops enforcing the border (and possibly also a temporary "colonial regime" to "dehamasify" the Palestinian state, run not by the Israelis but by some far-removed and suitably ruthless third party like the Chinese, or even the Saudis), would in fact be achievable and likely solve the problem.

Again, this is the sort of solution that works if you are King of the World and can wave a wand and make it happen. It's not something that can happen in the real world where Israelis actually have something to say about this. At some point you need to accept reality on the ground: Israel has enough power that telling them "You've won every war ever fought against you, but you should do the right thing and hand over your power to people who hate you" is just not a serious proposal.

The "easing up" looked like thousands of Palestinians being killed in retaliation for a single-digit number of Israelis killed every few years.

The "disproportionate response" argument has never seemed very relevant to me. There is no Rule of War that you're only "allowed" to kill a similar number of people in response to some of your people being killed. Palestinians only kill fewer Israelis because they have fewer weapons - you can bet if Hamas could level Tel Aviv they would. It's not "deescalation" when they simply don't have the capability to kill as many Israelis as they would like.

Of course thousands of civilian deaths is bad, but if you accept that Israel and Hamas are at war, wars always kill a lot of noncombatants. What is Israel's alternative win condition? Other than your fanciful idea that they should, essentially, surrender?

Yet this is somehow being painted into an emotional picture of the Israelis trying to make peace, as the Palestinians escalate and push for war.

I think this picture is largely accurate. Not universally - certainly some Israelis really don't want peace, and some Palestinians do, but if you look at history, it's mostly been Israelis saying "How can we make a deal?" and Palestinians saying "Fuck you."

It is very hard to avoid the temptation to interpret this reframing as stemming from an underlying feeling that in terms of weregeld an Israeli is worth about a thousand Palestinians.

Palestinians seem to think so, since they typically demand hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian prisoners be released for each Israeli (a price Israel has paid in the past). If that's the price you set, unfortunately you set yourself up for the same equation in war.

I've been reading a lot about this conflict, and the history of Israel and Palestine. I've read books by Israeli historians and by Palestinian historians and by American historians and journalists. I've followed pro-Israeli channels and pro-Palestinian channels. I've also spoken to no small number of Arabs (since I am studying Arabic).

It's messy and complicated all around. What strikes me in every narrative is that most of them tell a more-or-less accurate version of known historical events, but always leaving out a few bits that make their side look less noble and less like the victim. The Israelis talk endlessly about how five Arab nations declared war on them the day after they declared independence, and they offered full citizenship rights to those Palestinians who stayed instead of fleeing (in the expectation that the Jews would soon be exterminated and they could return home). They don't talk about how there were explicit plans to remove even peaceful Palestinians and some of those expulsions were performed under presumed military necessity and with the full foreknowledge that they were uprooting locals from their land. They don't talk about some of the outright terrorist actions of their predecessors, and some of the atrocities that Israelis committed. (It was war, the Israeli army mostly conducted itself in a modern, disciplined fashion, but there were some civilian massacres, and other war crimes. The Israelis will retort that the Arabs did far more and far worse, which is probably true but doesn't make what they did not happen.)

The Palestinians talk endlessly about the Nakba and how 750,000 Palestinians were forced off their land. They don't talk about the fact that yes, many of them did explicitly leave so the Arab armies could exterminate the Jews, and thus they obtained the fate of a people who lost a war they started.

Dig into that event, and then you have to dig deeper - why did the Jews arrive in the first place, who was behind it, did they acquire land legally or did they forcefully occupy it? (They mostly acquired the land legally by purchase, prior to 1948, but Palestinians will then retort, accurately, that the Jews often bought the land from wealthy absentee Turkish (former Ottoman) landlords and then expelled the villagers who'd been living on that land for generations.) Was the Zionist movement an organic Jewish nationalist movement or was it a "Colonialist-Settler project" by Europeans whose motivation was essentially to get Jews out of Europe? (Answer: a little of all this and more.)

"It's complicated." People who want a clear right-and-wrong narrative hate that phrase, but it is. Move forward into all the many failed peace processes; Israelis claim Palestinians have been handed opportunities for peace over and over and rejected them. Palestinians claim all those peace offers were either made in bad faith or were very bad deals for the Palestinians. Who's right? A little of both. Palestinians have turned down deals that would have been objectively far better for them than what they have now, or have ever had. These agreements have also always been, at best, offers of divided rump territories with very little chance to ever develop into real countries. Many Palestinians feel that the offers themselves are fundamentally illegitimate because Palestine was stolen from them and only full restoration can make things right again. Regardless of whether you think this is a morally correct argument, it unfortunately carries the logical conclusion that there is literally no peace agreement they will accept that allows Israel to continue to exist. No matter how convincingly you argue that your people and your ancestors were screwed over and robbed and are entitled to reparations, if it ends with "... and therefore Israel must cease to exist," it's just a non-starter. But Palestinians (and many of their supporters), either out of stubbornness, or a belief that somehow either Hamas and Iran will actually succeed in destroying Israel, or else Israelis will somehow all be persuaded that they must dissolve the nation-state of Israel, persist.

You basically have three options: one state, two state, no state. The latter ("no state") is basically one side exterminates the other. Israelis are being accused of trying to do this now. I don't really think that's true, but certainly some elements of Israeli society and the government would not mind literally wiping out the Palestinians if they thought they could get away with it. Hamas is pretty explicit about wanting to eradicate Israel. Some of their more savvy apologists will say no, they just don't want Israel to exist "in its current form." Usually, if you pin them down, what they propose is something like the "one state" solution, where "From the river to the sea," the entire country becomes a multi-ethnic non-Jewish state with Jews and Arabs having full equal citizenship rights. Essentially, merge Israel and Palestine into one country. In theory, doesn't sound like a terrible idea (as long as you're not a Jew who is invested in a Jewish nation state), but it just sort of assumes that at that point, all the Palestinian Arabs (who outnumber the Jews considerably), who for generations have been openly calling for the literal extermination of all Israelis and claiming that every last Israeli is living on stolen land that must be given back, will say "Okay, we're cool now, you can live here with us. Let's all build a progressive multicultural society together." Let's just say I cannot blame the Israelis for considering that a non-starter.

That leaves the two state solution, which was fraught and unlikely before October 7 and pretty much impossible now, at least for a generation or two. The various schemes to apportion land to a new Palestinian nation have always struggled with Palestine being divided between Gaza and the West Bank - obviously not much of a country if you're divided between two regions with a historically hostile neighbor controlling all the land and travel between them. Also there's the problem of whether the Palestinian nation gets to have its own military, and build whatever they want in the way of weapons. Israelis have pretty good reasons to say hell no to that, at least until maybe we have a generation or two of peace convincing them that any new Palestinian army will not promptly start lobbing rockets and artillery shells at them. So the Palestinians argue (with some justification) that every offer they've been given has been for a fragment of a country that will still for all practical purposes be a protectorate under the military control of Israel, and the Israelis argue (with some justification) that the Palestinians have to prove they aren't going to keep trying to kill Israelis before they can have more.

Bringing us to today. Most people in the West are more sympathetic to the overall perspective of the Israelis, because we can see that yes, historically the Arabs really have been trying to kill them for decades now, and the Israelis have made at least some attempts to ease up on the Palestinians and let them try to build a society, and every such easing up has resulted in more suicide bombings or October 7. Leftists say, well, the Palestinians are an oppressed people, they are entitled to armed resistance. I always try to get them to say the unspoken part, to reveal their power level (just like I do with our friend @SecureSignals): okay, what is the end goal? Tell me what you really, really want to happen if you "win"? Most leftists won't come out and say "I want Israel to be destroyed." Some of them will give some sort of pie-in-the-sky one state answer, like above. But the reality is that the literal destruction of Israel is the only real "win condition" for them.

For those people like you (@4bpp) who I assume does not actually want the destruction of Israel, what do you see as a solution? Besides just "Stop the bombing now," which I can sympathize with, but let's say Israel stops the war in Gaza today and withdraws, and promptly allows unlimited international support in to rebuild. What happens next? What I think happens next is that Hamas grabs as much of that as they can and plans the next October 7, which will happen sooner rather than later. As much as I would like to see Gazan civilians not being bombed (and I do not care if "80% of them support Hamas," which is a frequent justification for why, essentially, we should not feel bad about them being slaughtered), I can understand why Israelis are not willing to accept a stopping point that just returns to the status quo and another October 7.

The more peaceful leftists will then say "They should cease fire now and then negotiate a real peace that gives Palestinians a real state so there is no need for Hamas etc etc etc." Okay, great idea. Everyone's been trying to do that for decades. See above.

So, simply saying "The Palestinians have a clear moral case," even if you're right, does not solve the current problem. Unless you are willing to bite the bullet and say "Yes, actually, I think Israel needs to cease to exist." Followed by either how you think peaceful coexistence between former Israelis and Palestinians will be accomplished, or your plan for forcibly resettling all the Israelis to another continent. Some would at this point show their power level and say "Yeah, actually, just let them slaughter all the Jews, they have it coming." But that would make the Palestinians' clear moral case a little less clear.

White identity is ideologically-crafted, as opposed to, say, Jewish identity? All identity is ideologically-crafted, and identity is always weaponized against political and cultural opposition.

Well, no, not always. If you identify as French, that does not require you to be hostile to non-French people as an inherent part of your identity (even if some French people might lead you to believe otherwise). Religious identities, while often in opposition for obvious reasons, are not inherently and inevitably hostile to all non-believers. It's only the specific White identity you are trying to craft which essentially defines itself as existentially at war with other identities.

Do Jews weaponize Jewish identity against white people? The answer to that question is obviously- yes, they do. So you accept the reality of this situation, but you think it's justified because of the "gas chambers" or something.

Incorrect. I do not accept your premise. "Gas chambers or something" is the answer to an entirely different question, but the theory you are advancing here - that I know Jews are acting against me but I accept it because I feel guilty over the Holocaust - is simply not true. So the answer to your question is obviously yes to you, because you see everything Jews do as being hostile action against white people. This is not obvious to me or other white people who don't share your enmity towards Jews.

Jewish identity is highly exclusionary. I am not Jewish, I am a gentile or goy. They even have special words to denote me as part of the outgroup.

Every religion and most languages have "special words" for the outgroup, some more derogatory than others. This isn't unique to Jews at all.

So there's nothing wrong with a Jew telling me I am not one of them, but it's wrong for me to tell a Jew he is not one of us?

Define "us." It's obviously not wrong for a Jew to tell you you are not one of them because you're not Jewish. If you're a Christian, it obviously wouldn't be wrong to tell a Jew he's not one of you. But it would be wrong to tell a Jew he's not an American, or a German, or an Englishman, assuming he is one of those things. As for whether you can tell him he's not "White," that depends entirely on how you define "White" and we've been over this before. Why would the average Jew of European descent who looks as white as you or me be "not white" because you say so?

My own view on the matter is that European Jews are white, or at least they can become white by forgoing their Jewish identity to the same extent that white people have let go of their former European national allegiances.

So a Jew can only be "white" if he stops being Jewish? Both culturally and religiously? When you say "to the same extent that white people" - okay, so the typical Irish-American who only remembers he's Irish on St. Paddy's Day (to party) is white, but an Irish-American who considers his Irish identity to be very important to him is not white? So a Jew who's vaguely aware he's ethnically Jewish but is completely secular and isn't a member of any "Jewish" organizations can be considered white, but a Jew who celebrates Passover cannot?

But for many others they insist on retaining a Jewish identity and special ethnic regard, which they often hold above regard for white people. Forgive me for identifying them as part of my outgroup in no more salacious a manner than they also regard me as part of their outgroup.

This is the presumption you keep making. That Jews not only identify as Jews but specifically hate you and regard you as an enemy. How many Jews, as a fraction of the entire Jewish population, do you believe actually think that way? You say "no more salacious," but that seems unlikely, since while you've never been open (and I don't expect you to be) about what actual plans you and your fellow DRs might have for the Jews if you ever actually got your way, I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that those plans are far more negative for Jews than anything I've ever heard Jews in any way intimate that they want to do to me.

This is all dependent on the Venn Diagram that constitutes "White People" being what you say it is, and not what other people (including Jews) say it is.

You want White People to identify as a single group - Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, Iberians, Gauls, Germanics, Caucasuses, etc. However, Jews who might occupy or overlap with any of those circles should definitely not be considered part of them. So yes, it's not surprising that when you say "Jews can identify as Jews, and Germans can identify as Germans but also as White, but Jews definitely should not identify as either German or White (because they are the enemy and we hate them)," Jews treat your ideologically-crafted category as a weapon to be used against them, because that's exactly what it is.

"Why, oh why, do the Jews so strongly resist us trying to form an identity movement specifically dedicated to making war against The Jew?" asks the identify movement specifically dedicated to making war against The Jew.

How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

This was an unnecessarily antagonistic comment in an otherwise fine post.

Yes. It's not because we hate humor. It's because threads full of people saying "Lol" and "This" are annoying, so we discourage it.

You are still in the new user filter, which means your posts have to be manually approved by a mod. After you've been posting for a while, this will stop happening.

You've already gotten a response from two mods, but let me add mine:

  1. We don't claim to be "neutral." We claim to (attempt to) be fair. Not the same thing.

  2. You are bitching about a post not being modded when in fact it was modded. As we have told people many times (and you're not new here), we sometimes don't get to posts right away. Sometimes we want to see what another mod thinks, sometimes we don't want to deal with a borderline low-effort shitty post because we're not feeling in the mood to deal with annoying anklebiters and we're hoping some other mod will shin up. Sometimes we're all busy and no one has gone through the queue in a day or two. If a post is less than 24 hours old and hasn't been modded yet, it's premature to start hollering about how the mods are totally biased.

Don't do this.

You aren't that funny. Or clever.

Don't do this.

That's enough.

You've filled the mod queue with these low-effort comments. Many people are reporting you with some variation of "Does he need help?"

You either do indeed need help or else you're trolling. If this is a bid for sympathy, you are in the wrong place. If you just came here to spew nihilistic doomerism, you are also in the wrong place.

You've earned multiple warnings and your posting has not improved. I'm banning you for a week and next time will move straight to a permaban if you repeat the pattern.

This is very low effort. If you take issue with what someone has said, actually make an argument, or at least a direct statement like "I think that's wrong, do you have any evidence?" Dropping "Really dude?" is like "I can't even." We don't want or need performative outrage one-liners here.

You should stop acting as if you are a mod for a reddit sub and trying to enforce left wing ideology on everyone

Practice what you preach. You report anyone who expresses a left-wing opinion you disagree with. People making arguments you don't like are not "enforcing ideology," they are making arguments you don't like. Stop publicly attacking people for making arguments you don't like. Attack the arguments, not the person.

It is actually the case that white women are more attractive than black women. Less obese too. So it can't be applied to white women which aren't seen as unattractive.

Opinions about who is more attractive, especially when dropped as flaming bombs on your outgroup for CW purposes, are not objective statements of fact but statements about preferences (in this case, yours). "Black women tend to be rated as less attractive than others." while somewhat weak and vague, is fine as an assertion - "It is actually the case that" is not.

You've been told repeatedly to dial down your personal antagonism, and you seem unable to engage with anyone who holds an opinion that outrages you (which seems to be essentially any opinion you don't agree with) without turning vitriolic.

It's been a few months since your last ban, but I have noticed you ramping up the bad behavior again recently, so take three days to cool off and decide if you can/are willing to engage with other people here like a grown adult.

Okay. Your belief is, in my opinion, insane, but I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. That said, as @netstack told you, if you want to make broad inflammatory claims like "All women want to castrate us," you'll need to do better than pointing at the SCUM manifesto. This is just a general rule here - you want to say "Group X has a terrible malign purpose and they are all evil," your receipts need to be more than a few members of Group X saying crazy things.

This sounds like a very unhappy and mentally unhealthy way to negotiate life with half the human race, believing unironically that they all hate and want to castrate you. If you are being serious and literal. (Which I doubt.)

I used to play amateur poker. I was good enough that I could see myself becoming a winning player if I really wanted to grind at it, but I was playing for fun and didn't want to turn into a grinder (any pro player will tell you that playing the 1/2 tables at a casino is worse than a minimum wage job, and moving up to the higher tables requires serious study).

For learning poker math (which is crucial to being a decent player), I recommend David Slanksy. Dan Harrington is pretty good at covering theory and strategy. If you plan to play for money at a casino, just playing basic mathematically sound ABC poker will make you a winner at most lower tables, but there are a ton of books and apps for trying to improve your marginal win rate. Personally, if you just want to play for fun, I'd recommend a bar poker league.