Goodguy
1d ago
I've been temporarily banned here before for going on rants against my political opponents and so on. When I chilled out and let the matter settle, I always realized that the mods had been right to ban me. "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" is a key rule that helps to prevent this place from turning into a largely useless cesspit of outrage bait and insanity, like Reddit or X. AlexanderTurok certainly broke that rule many times, but he is not the only one. I've broken it before. I think you've broken it before. It happens. We're emotional beings, after all. I'm about as pro free speech as it gets, but of course in order to keep this forum from turning into chimpanzee shit-flinging, some rules have to be enforced. I think that the ideal of "try to bring light instead of heat" is a good one. No matter what the content of your opinion is, there are more and less inflammatory ways to state it. And again, I say this as someone who is very pro free speech. But the pragmatic reality is that this forum would go down the tubes very quickly if the rule against being inflammatory was not enforced.
Goodguy
1d ago
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right... here I am, stuck in the middle with you...
I think that a month is much too much, given how many right-wingers here get away regularly with breaking the rules and the ethos of trying to bring light instead of heat. Which I'm not blaming the mods for, given how much content there is to mod, but it's a matter of proportionality. I think a week would be fair. Giving him a month just feeds into the narrative that critics of the right are being persecuted here for being critics of the right, instead of just being modded when they are snarky and so on.
I like Amadan's comment a lot, I think it's one of the best mod comments I've ever read on any forum and is very fair, but I think that "Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy." is not really a good reason to mod people, since people really shouldn't be blamed for writing things that are "so against the grain here that it drives people crazy", which can apply to all sorts of good comments. You can mod him for being repetitively unnecessarily inflammatory, same as various right-wingers are modded for that. If you ban AlexanderTurok for writing things that drive people crazy, you should also give WhiningCoil another ban for the same reason.
I think that most people who care about the Epstein matter, me included, care mainly because of the political implications, not out of empathy for the girls. I abstractly empathize with the girls, but I don't know them, so their woes don't really emotionally affect me any more than it emotionally affects me if I hear that, say, 3000 people died in a flood in Bangladesh. Which is to say, very little. Same with the Rotherham scandal. I abstractly care about the victims, but I don't really feel much emotion about it.
The point of the Epstein business is that I want to see rich, powerful people who seem like predators brought down from their high places, thrown into the mud, and trampled on. That's why I care more about the Epstein matter than about the Rotherham scandal. Because it seems to afford more opportunity to damage rich, powerful scumbags. Now that's something I do feel emotion about. Glee and a zestful desire to see mighty amoral people brought low. It's a very primal, atavistic, selfish emotion, to be clear, not some clean moral imperative that looks pretty on paper. No, it's like the glee that a villager feels when he sees that a lion that has been prowling around the outside of the village for days get shot through the heart with an arrow. I don't feel the glee because yesterday the lion ate some guy on the other side of the village whom I didn't know. I didn't know that guy so I felt little emotion when I heard that he got eaten. But that lion felt like a looming threat to me, prowling out there, powerful, enjoying his lion life in a very annoying way, enjoying it so much, sitting around licking his fangs out there with not a care in the world while I spend the day working, that lion clearly not giving a single shit about my desire to not get eaten or the fact that I have to work for a living. So when the lion went down, I celebrated in the same sort of ecstasy that communists might feel when they see that the rich people are fleeing the city. Will the rich people fleeing the city actually make my life better in the long run? Probably not, intellectually one understands that if the populists come to power they'll probably just make things much worse. But in the moment, one feels an atavistic glee.
It depends on the context.
"I hate black people. Black people suck! We should get rid of them!" would be an obvious violation of the site's ethos of aiming to bring light instead of heat.
"I hate black people. However, I realize that this is an emotional reflex and if I analyze things more objectively, I realize that not all black people fit the stereotype that I have of them." would not be a violation, since it would bring more light than heat.
WhiningCoil's comment is, to me, pretty clearly more like my first example than like the second. But as Amadan pointed out above, WhiningCoil has not been exempt from mod action, so it seems to me that the system is working decently.
Goodguy
2d ago
There is a woman sitting in the Federal Correctional Institution, Tallahassee right now who could clear up so many of these mysteries. If only she could be convinced to speak, and could be trusted to tell the truth. Alas...
Goodguy
2d ago
Socrates was a smart guy by all accounts, but I don't think that his kinds of methods were the basis of all intelligent thought. It is telling that in many of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates' opponents are essentially straw-men, written by Plato to serve as a foil for Socrates. Surely Socrates' actual real-life debates were not like this. How much do we know about how Socrates actually spoke and debated?
The Greeks also gave us several other methods for intelligent thought that are very different from Socrates'.
One such is the mathematical method of proof.
Another is the Aristotelian essay. Aristotle used a very different kind of rhetorical approach than the Socrates of Plato's works.
So did Thucydides, whose arguments in the History of the Peloponnesian War are very different from Socrates' style.
Goodguy
2d ago
Not sure if you would consider this anti-MAGA, but it's certainly anti-Trump: https://www.themotte.org/post/2240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/345537?context=8#context
This one is me criticizing Trump's tariffs: https://www.themotte.org/post/1812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/315024?context=8#context
Me being concerned about Trump's authoritarian impulses: https://www.themotte.org/post/1681/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/298689?context=8#context
Me criticizing Trump's desire to increase the military budget: https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/316103?context=8#context
Goodguy
3d ago
For the record, I do not upvote or downvote people on here, and I would support getting rid of the upvote/downvote system here entirely. It gives me a nice pleasant dopamine hit to see a comment of mine upvoted, and I enjoy that very much, but overall, I feel that upvote/downvote systems make political discussion forums worse, not better. For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience. Not exactly something that inspires intelligent thought.
That said, I disagree with your notion that any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted. Sure, sometimes I write something that does not fit the average Motte writer's political opinions and I get downvoted a lot, and I can clearly infer that it is because the downvoters disagree with me. But given that I often write things that go against the local average and still get upvoted a lot, clearly it is more complicated than that.
Goodguy
3d ago
I found WhiningCoil's comment to be unpleasant, but that doesn't invalidate the site for me. My opinions about black people are much much more sympathetic than that WhiningCoil comment and they often get a decent amount of upvotes too. Sure, there are many racists here. I mean actual racists, not race realists (I don't think there is anything bad about being a race realist). So what? If you don't like those comments just skip them. This site gets enough posts per day that the mods are simply not capable of policing all content that breaks rules such as "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument", which WhiningCoil's comment certainly does. I think the mods do a decent job given how few of them there are.
A note on the "so who was actually in charge?" question:
The deception that Biden's posse engaged in rankles me, but I think that Biden's level of competence didn't really matter much when it came to the well-being of the US. The global US/Western order can run itself just fine on autopilot for years. The President and the Sec Def could both be literal pieces of wood and nothing particularly bad would happen to the US. The US doesn't face any significant foreign threats that need any kind of quick, decisive thinking. The US is so powerful that to even have a foreign policy is largely a luxury for it, not a need. There are some urgent things that need deciding occasionally, like should the US bomb Iran to stop it from getting nuclear weapons or not, but all that stuff can also run on autopilot or be farmed out to foreign protectorates like Israel. Note that no US Presidential administration for many decades now has pursued a fundamentally different foreign policy from any of the other ones, Trump's included - the foreign policy differences between GWB, Obama, Biden, and Trump are minor in the grand scheme of things. There is a well-established foreign policy consensus that requires only very minimal executive steering. The only actual threat that the US faces from overseas is getting nuked, but the mechanisms by which the US prevents hostile minor countries from obtaining nukes is, I think, pretty well-greased at this point and can largely run itself.
A note on Bernie:
Bernie winning the first three primaries in 2020 was an artifact of the particular order that the primaries are done in. Even after he won those first three primaries, I thought that he would get destroyed in the South and on Super Tuesday. He has just never been popular enough to win the Democratic nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together.
Not sure if you're being serious but if you are, it's kind of funny to see a Jewish person like you advocate in favor of just the sort of anti-meritocratic policies that would have locked many of your European ancestors out of social advancement 200 years ago.
To be fair, I think that "I got mine, now it's time to pull the ladder up" is a perfectly sensible strategy from the individual point of view, and I'm not criticizing you for it if you do have such a strategy. It's just not a strategy that extends well to a global imperative for all society, for obvious reasons.
Goodguy
4d ago
There is a small but substantial fraction of Trump voters who are willing to break with him on foreign interventions and military support of foreign countries.
There is also a small but substantial fraction of Trump voters who are willing to break with him about carve-outs for immigration enforcement.
There is also a small but substantial fraction of Trump voters who are not into his approach on tariffs.
So it's not just conspiracy theories.
Goodguy
4d ago
I think that most men who are in about the top 80% of male attractiveness could find a girlfriend or wife if sufficiently motivated, even without changing their income or physical appearance. I agree with @2rafa. Much of this is about motivation. Many guys are just content to do things other than seeking out women. Also, some men are holding out for the most desirable women instead of being willing to lower their standards. I think a third factor is that women are no longer as much expected socially as they probably were in the past to have the kind of men-pleasing, friendly, docile personalities that a large fraction of men find sexually desirable, which explains part of men's motivation problem. The more fun and personable that a man finds the average woman, the more motivated he will feel to go out and interact with women, as opposed to sitting at home. I'm sure that this goes both ways, and many women find themselves far from impressed with the average man's personality.
Goodguy
4d ago
Let's take one popular example of a society that practiced a more old-school approach to dating: Europe up until about 100 years ago. Far from being stable, this society regularly engaged in revolutions and warfare. If you plotted every battle location from the years 1000-1918 on a map of Europe, it would be so covered you'd hardly be able to see any other geographical features. There were numerous peasant revolts, usually brutally suppressed. There were massive wars like the Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and WWI. There were bloody revolutions like the French Revolution. There were assassinations, feuds, political plots. Personal crime wasn't low, either. It's hard to estimate the homicide rate from hundreds of years ago, but it was high enough that most people seemed to be fine with using brutal public executions to address it. It wasn't a politically stable society, either. This was the society that invented liberalism, communism, and the modern concept of women's rights to begin with.
Of course technological changes account for much of this. My point is that what to me is the most obvious example of the kind of society you're talking about was, in fact, not actually stable.
Goodguy
7d ago
Ever since the assassination attempt happened, I've felt that the most likely explanation is the lone wolf theory. The reason is, I figure that if it was a conspiracy by shady powerful groups, they would have made sure to find a gunman who wouldn't miss from that range. That said, I don't know much about guns, so this might be poor thinking on my part. Not sure.
Goodguy
7d ago
Revisionist theories are not much worth engaging with unless they offer an explanation of what happened to Eastern Europe's Jews. For example, the 1926 USSR census records about 2.6 million Jews. The 1931 Polish census records about 3.1 million Jews. What happened to these populations? The current European population of Jews is estimated to be about 1 million total. Is there evidence for a post-war migration of such a large number of Jews to America, Israel, and so on? As far as I know, there is not. There was substantial migration, but from what I understand, not enough to explain the collapse of Europe's Jewish population size. Revisionists, to be taken seriously, should not just pick holes in mainstream theories - they should present an alternative theory that accounts for the evidence. If the European Jewish population collapsed through emigration rather than killing, let's see evidence of the emigration in quantities enough to account for the population changes. Disease, famine, and so on are not good explanations, because they do not explain why the Jewish population collapsed so much more than the populations of other affected ethnic groups.
Goodguy
7d ago
Then, once in power, if it turns out there are reasons to not release that information, just do a 180 with no explanation and brazen out the short term consequences because they don’t matter in the long run.
He's not even doing this, though. A few days ago, he got really testy with a reporter who asked him about Epstein, and earlier today he went online and wrote a whole paragraph rant about Epstein totally unprompted. He could just lay low and let the whole thing blow over, but for some reason he keeps getting openly emotional about it.
I understand that argument, and I think that there is a lot of sense to it. I would have said something very similar yesterday, probably. But I'm just bewildered at Trump repeatedly getting emotionally heated about this issue, out of left field, with nothing really compelling him to do it. It seems like a deep emotional reaction. It's starting to seem to me that something really bugs Trump about the Epstein matter on a personal level, beyond just journalists annoying him about it. I don't necessarily think that where there's smoke, there's always fire. But I am seeing a weird amount of smoke coming out of Trump about this lately. He's acting defensive about it beyond his usual level of getting annoyed when attacked. He's bringing it up un-prompted. Those are very common behaviors that people engage in when they are trying to hide that they did something.
I am not convinced that Epstein was part of some deeply shady business that the public is not yet privy to. I try to be reasonable and keep an open mind about what might have happened. I appreciate your nuanced analysis. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to discuss Trump's recent reaction, because I find it fascinating:
What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files. No matter how much success we have had, securing the Border, deporting Criminals, fixing the Economy, Energy Dominance, a Safer World where Iran will not have Nuclear Weapons, it’s never enough for some people. We are about to achieve more in 6 months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years, and we have so much more to do. We are saving our Country and, MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which will continue to be our complete PRIORITY. The Left is imploding! Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 — That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more. One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
My attempts to objectively evaluate the probabilities of what might have happened are being altered in real-time by watching Trump act like a dog who just snatched a piece of meat off the table and is then sitting in the corner of the room with guilty eyes.
This is kind of hilarious to me. Trump is openly doing the complete opposite of what someone would do if he actually wanted to get over the whole Epstein business, and if he didn't actually know more than he lets on.
Goodguy
8d ago
Tattoos are, but head-to-toe tattoos are not. Tattoos on the neck and/or head are still very rare.
Goodguy
8d ago
Head-to-toe tattoos and piercings signal massive nonconformity with social norms and a willingness to lose out on a large number of job prospects for the sake of personal expression, which naturally gets people's guards up because if someone does not conform to social norms to that extent, you have to evaluate them closely instead of just treating them as a generic person, before figuring out if they are trustworthy or not. It activates a basic "possible danger" heuristic. Massive nonconformity to social norms straddles two ends of the bell curve - it can be a sign of courage and genius, in some cases, but in probably even more cases it is a sign of things like mental illness, antisociality, narcissism, and so on. Sometimes it's both of those ends of the bell curve at the same time (I know that stretches the metaphor really far, but you know what I mean). If you meet some random person covered head-to-toe in tattoos, it is probably more likely that they are a potentially dangerous weirdo than that they are a misunderstood artist.
That said, I find some of the signalling from the right on tattoos to be very funny. Not saying that you're a right-winger, it's just that your post gives me an opportunity to mention this. About 30% of Americans have at least one tattoo. Tattoos are completely mainstream now, what isn't mainstream is full body tattoos or facial tattoos. I often see right-wingers online virtue signalling about women with tattoos. They'll see a photo of a hot woman who has tattoos and start posting stuff like "eww disgusting" or "why did she ruin her body with that". I am convinced that 99% of these guys would fuck the hot woman without any hesitation if they had a chance, tattoos or not. It's just a big virtue signalling LARP to pretend to other guys that they care more about tattoos than they actually do.
Virtue signalling on the right is an under-discussed topic, in my opinion. Highly online right-wingers virtue signal every bit as much as highly online left-wingers do.
"Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument."
It's a good rule, whatever your political opinions are. If it is violated often enough, this place will just become another cesspit like Reddit or X, where most of the political discourse is just attention bait and emotional venting.
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