Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4hr ago
I have had more interaction than most people with non-native English speakers, including as a teacher. There are many second language learners who do in fact achieve native proficiency, often with a greater understanding of grammar and vocabulary than the average native because they have studied it so intensively.
You (and Hlynka) are the only ones who ever referred to him as "white trash." No one else gave a fuck about his background. He had a massive chip on his shoulder about being "not like the rest of you" when we're all just names on a screen here. No one is hearing your diction or your accent and concluding "white trash," nor does being a veteran, working class, or living in a red state make you unique or special.
Your accusation that we only judged his dig at @self_made_human as racist because we're a bunch of latte-sipping Blue tribers who don't know how Real Americans talk is pestiferous bullshit.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7hr ago
Right, the reason for a mirror scene is obvious. It's just become such a cliche at this point, it's like "It was a dark and stormy night."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7hr ago
but from my memory it was mostly your fault.
Your memory is wrong. Not even a little bit wrong, but "the-sun-orbits-the-Earth-and-the-sky-is-orange" wrong. So wrong that you now make me suspect who you are an alt of (I have known you're an alt for a while).
Yes, there were a lot of posters who didn't like Hlynka because of his "style." But this is true of many regulars. No one was "classist" against him. The board, and the mod team, may lean heavily Blue techie, but it's not exclusively that by any means.
Making racist comments will almost always get modded. And Hlynka's comment was not an inoffensive suggestion that @self_made_human might have misunderstood something because "English is his second language" - he knew damn well smh was at least as literate in English as he was. It was a cheap dig because he had a long-standing animus against him.
Hlynka wasn't banned for that comment, he didn't get modded because @2rafa complained about it, and the mods did not react to @2rafa's complaint because we're all dudes defending milady's delicate sensibilities. @2rafa does not do anything "in association" with the mods - she is not part of the mod team, has never petitioned us for anything in particular, and we do not give her opinion more weight than any other long-time (admittedly, well-regarded) poster.
I do recall that Hlynka had a particular dislike of @2rafa, though, so it's very odd that you would be conjuring some conspiracy between us against him....
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
9hr ago
I don’t recall who it was in science fiction, but it might have been Phillip Jose Farmer; someone who had been criticized for their inability to write female characters.
There have been many.
Isaac Asimov did kind of write women as basically alien creatures who exist only as sexual distractions for men (Susan Calvin being a notable exception), but, he was an uber-nerd who got started writing in the 1930s. Women probably were distracting alien creatures to him. And to be honest, I always thought Asimov just sucked at characterization in general. His characters are mostly hooks to hang a plot on.
Heinlein, of course, wrote uber-competent characters of both sexes, but his women were usually sexual libertines, and coincidentally, hot, young, nubile, and inexplicably attracted to potato-shaped older men who might happen to resemble a middle-aged SF author.
Those two archetypes, in various forms, are what you find in most early SF, and that's what grinds most feminist readers' gears: women are, in one form or another, basically male fantasies and sex objects. But most of those early SF writers were writing women in the roles that actually existed for women at the time. Some created women who could be smart and brave and actually do things, many just put women in the "wife/sister/girlfriend" role.
(Edgar Rice Burroughs' women were almost exclusively damsels in distress and/or objects of veneration. Robert E. Howard actually wrote female warriors like Belit and Red Nails. H.P. Lovecraft was probably more scared of women than he was of brown people and Shoggoths.)
Modern feminist critique mostly strikes me as bad faith (they will go through a book, analyzing an assortment of characters, and conclude that an author is misogynistic because his female characters have too much romantic attention put on them, or don't have enough to do, or have to be rescued by a man, or fulfill a "gendered role" or whatever). In some cases the observations are actually correct (yes, all the women are romantic interests and are not the action heroes the men are), but that is not necessarily a bad (or unrealistic) thing unless, well, you're a feminist reader who demands all stories give "equal representation" no matter how it distorts the story. But I can see how it would be kind of annoying to read book after book where men are the interesting characters and heroes who do things while women are just their love interests; better authors, even ones who aren't trying to be "feminist," can still make the female characters interesting. Less good authors just make them decoration. But you are not wrong that bad female characterization is usually reflective of an author who's just bad at characterization in general. (A lot of early, and contemporary(!), authors write great ideas, great plots, but cardboard characters.)
Ironically, one popular author often praised highly for his female characters is Brandon Sanderson. It's true his female characters are usually interesting, smart, brave bad-asses who still remain feminine. (Don't forget, Sando is still a Mormon and that always shows around the edges.) But his female characters are also all the same character. He basically can only write one. (Okay, maybe two or three.)
So anyway, yes, the woman in the OP is fairly typical of feminist critics: it's not that any of the women are unrealistic or "bad" characters. It's that they aren't checking her boxes and measuring up against men in the way she thinks they should. I don't know how often women actually note "perky tits" on themselves or other women, but the meme on the Internet is "breasting boobily," which is basically about male authors who spend too much time emphasizing a woman's appearance (and especially her breasts) in every scene, having her examine herself in a mirror (so the author can describe her perky tits), etc. This sometimes happens, and sometimes you do get the impression the author is infatuated with his own character, but now it's like a lot of writing memes, where it's a pattern you sometimes see but the mere existence of it in a scene is not, contrary to lots of bad writing advice, "bad writing."
(I mean, if you start the book with your character waking up from a dream, or the first thing the female character does is check herself out in the mirror, I probably am going to roll my eyes hard.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
19hr ago
FWIW, we actually offered Hlynka the opportunity to be unbanned if he'd just promise to stop being a dick. We put it more nicely than that, and didn't demand he make a public apology.
His response was a fuck you, I didn't do anything wrong, and to start spinning up alts.
I can't say I would miss Dase as much. George is right that he just fundamentally despises anyone who disagrees with him. But I am sorry when interesting posters flame out.
We mods are discussing it, and while tempban is a possibility, it does get pretty tiresome tempbanning over and over someone who makes it clear he thinks an expectation of civility is a joke for him to wipe his feet on.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
I sympathize. I worry about this myself. Some of our most interesting posters are, well, assholes. And when we ban someone for being an asshole once too often, we lose an interesting poster.
(Sometimes. Sometimes we just lose an asshole.)
The problem is the same problem we had with Hlynka: someone who decides he's just not going to follow the rules presents us with a dilemma. We can treat him like we'd treat anyone else who refuses to follow the rules, or we can decide the rules don't apply to some people.
Personally, I dislike the notion of a tiered system where some posters earn the right to be assholes because their AAQCs are so valuable. But I can see an argument for it. Maybe we decide, "Okay, fine, we have to give Dase a timeout every time he has a crash-out, but we'll never ban him because his AI posts are so interesting." And we bring back Hlynka and just give him a timeout every time he launches a diatribe against one of his enemies.
It's an option.
But please keep in mind that you are asking us to do more work (babysitting incorrigible assholes), and also requiring us to field even more accusations of unfair and discriminatory treatment (not everyone loves Hlynka and Dase, and we will get people saying "How come they get to snarl and rage at people but this poster I like didn't get immunity?").
Also worth noting that Dase himself has rejected the idea that he should be treated differently because of his emeritus status. So it would be an amusing bit of irony to say "Well, we're not going to ban you after all, so there!"
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
Fine, if this is how you want it, so mote it be.
Banned pending mod discussion as to whether to make this permanent or not. As far as I'm concerned, you've Hlynkaed yourself.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
That's an odd proposition. So you believe "marriage" doesn't exist for non-Christians? Would that mean only Christians have a legal right to beat and rape their wives? You said "marriage is forever" but also would allow for divorce.
I don't think your views are well thought out. I think you are just saying things because they sound vigorous and Retvrnish.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
6d ago
Ah, the Vox Day argument. Good times, good times.
“I want to allow men to be monsters to their wife”. I don’t want that.
Yes, you do. You are literally arguing in this thread that this should be allowed.
Maybe you would prefer they not be monsters to their wives, but you are arguing that beating and raping them should be legal. Incidentally, beating your wife has been illegal, if not very well enforced, for most of American history. So while "Holding her down and penetrating her against her will" might not have technically been illegal in the golden days before the 1970s when all marriages were happy and fruitful, "Beating her until she stops resisting you" actually was. And "Threatening to beat her if she didn't submit" would probably also have been technically illegal, if again, rarely enforced.
If you don't think the government should interfere at all, then where exactly is the line between "wife" and "property with which I can dispose of as I see fit"? Either you have to go all-in and say "Yes, I believe it should be legal to beat my wife senseless if she won't stop resisting me (or for any other reason, only God gets to judge)" or you have to acknowledge there are limits to what a man is permitted to do to his wife.
How about children? You're very keen on the laws that existed before the 1970s. I assume you also believe the government should not get involved if a man wants to beat his children.
You're very fixed on Christian marriage traditions. You can argue that America is a Christian nation, which it is, culturally, but civil and criminal laws are not church laws and never have been. Do you think people who do not take Christian wedding vows should not be treated as legally married? Or should Christian laws apply even to women who never swore to "obey" their husbands?
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
As someone who has studied the Middle East and Islam, and has a working knowledge of Arabic (don't ask me to recite the Quran or anything, I have zero interest in tajweed), I will pass on your offer. I know too much about Islam. (And the Quran is shitty Bible fanfiction, second only to the Book of Mormon in transparent and low-quality mimicry, inexplicably adored by people who turn off all literary faculties to convince themselves otherwise.)
and only going to get closer as time goes by
Bro, I'm far from the most Islamophobic person here, but this triumphal colonialist attitude of yours really makes me start sympathizing with the Retvrns.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
Indeed. For anybody reading this, you are welcome to join and you will be treated like a full brother or sister no different from any other brother or sister.
This is not what African Muslim converts say about how Arabs treat them. And you yourself have posted repeatedly about how you consider yourself a higher class of being than the peasants ( but still Muslim!) who fetch and carry for you at home.
And of course, if there is one group that treats Arabs more brutally than the Israelis, it's other Arabs. Let's not even get into Shia versus Sunni.
Your own attitudes bely the pretty words about a universal Ummah. It's no more true than Christians saying " We are all brothers and sisters in Christ."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8d ago
Several people (including myself) have disagreed with @erwgv3g34, but if you want to tell someone they are wrong, provide some arguments and substance.
"You're wrong and delusional and silly" is just being needlessly antagonistic. Do not post low-effort "Nuh-uhs" like this.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8d ago
Congratulations. But set point theory is absolute garbage science, and taking science & dieting advice from Dread Jim is like taking dating advice from Dread Jim. I wonder what Jim thinks about all the obese female devotees of "set point theory" as the reason why they can't lose weight. CICO, as some people below have pointed out, is true but simplistic. You lose weight by creating a caloric deficit. You could lose weight by consuming fewer calories but all of it as pure sugar. That doesn't mean that would be a good or enduring way to lose weight. There is some fuzziness in the whole "caloric deficit" concept, because people do have different metabolisms, which mean two people eating the exact same calories and doing the exact same amount of exercise won't necessarily see the same changes; that is what people mistake as a "set point." No, that doesn't mean your body has a higher set point than the other person's, it means your body doesn't burn at the same rate as the other person. So yes, it is (unfairly) harder for some people to lose weight (and we know testosterone helps, which is why it's much harder for women to lose weight), but no, nobody has a "set point" of 300 pounds.
(The rant about how "Doctors are hiding the truth from you that they aren't allowed to Notice!" is typical Dread Jim histrionics. It's true some doctors are spineless about telling patients to lose weight. It's also true that losing weight long term is difficult, but the mechanism is well understood if not popular: people lose weight by exercising and restricting calories more than they like, they lose weight, and then they go back to their previous habits. This is the Eliezer Yudkowsky theory of Why The Laws Of Physics Do Not Apply To My Fat Ass.
I get that most people don't like exercise (I don't love it myself), but even a moderate amount of exercise will make you feel immensely better (I like having exercised). The improvement curve in early stages is enormous. Back when I was overweight, regular exercise among other things made my back pain disappear.
I'm ambivalent about low-carb and keto diets; I tend to think most of these diets with some elaborate theory of how the body processes certain types of calories are just calorie reduction smuggled as "only/don't eat these things."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
9d ago
That won't do anything. As Amadan just wrote, there is no sidebar, there is only precedence. The rules are what the mods do, not what is written.
That is not what I wrote.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
9d ago
Retarded thoughtless ragebait slander.
Calm down.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
9d ago
I doubt "Claude" hates Trump, in the sense that Anthropic has deliberately trained it with a bias towards anti-Trumpism. It probably has the Internet-average "opinion" of Trump.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
9d ago
Bub.
This is getting obnoxious. And yes, this is a mod warning, even though you will add it to your ledger of "The mods are persecuting me because I'm just too clever and edgy for them."
There is a certain category of user who continually wants to push boundaries, talk about things in a smarmy, antagonistic way, bring up topics in an edgy, circumlocutory fashion with plausible deniability, and then screech like a chimp kicked in the balls (not sure if being kicked in the balls actually affects chimps the same way, but I like the image so I'm going with it) when called on it and told to give it a rest, or at least tone it down. And they proceed to bring it up over and over, "calling out" the mods (or a mod) in every thread where they can possibly wedge it in because maybe if they keep grinding their axe often enough, everyone will take their side and throw rotten fruit at the mods and tell us to let them post as they please or something?
You are here.
There is also a category of user who is too autistic to realize that talking about their weird gooner fetishes isn't funny or fun and doesn't understand why we'd say "Not here."
It is not because the mods are prudes, or humorless (well, I am, but not all the mods are), or trying to BAN MY VIEWS THE MODS CAN'T HANDLE.
It's because we want people to be reasonable and civilized and not shit up the place, particularly by trying to see exactly where the line is between "I can get away with this" and "Too much."
You are here.
Now, FWIW, I kind of disagree with@netstack's original formulation: I would not say categorically that all "sex and sexuality" topics are inherently CW. I can imagine sexuality-related content that would be funny and light-hearted enough to be Friday Fun Thread material. The problem is that what was posted in that thread was not. (And this is not an invitation to test what you can get away with.)
As myself, @netstack, and @naraburns have explained to you and others repeatedly, a lot of modding comes down to "I know it when I see it," along with community sentiment, when it comes to deciding what does and doesn't fly. This means that yes, it's subjective, sometimes what passes one mod will not pass another, and we are not going to give you a long TOS contract spelling out what you can and cannot get away with and then gnash our teeth and say "Curses, foiled by your brilliant legalism!" when you figure out a way to post something that we did not explicitly prohibit.
So no, "boner jokes" are not prohibited in the Friday Fun Thread, but it is context-dependent (a boner joke that winds up being CW-bait or "joking about boners with minors," for example, would definitely not be appropriate material).
I'm not going to ban you, even though you have multiple "Ban this guy next time" warnings, because banning people for complaining about the moderation is a bad look and people without familiarity with your oeuvre (and past history under other alts) might think we're just being sensitive to criticism. But I am telling you that open and reasonable discussions about moderation are 100% allowed, even if accompanied by harsh criticism. You can take it up with us in public or private when offered in good faith. We do our best to clarify our thinking and our moderation decisions, and if you really want to know if a given post will be okay or not, you can ask us. But every CW thread is not an opportunity for you to complain about that one time a mod did something you're still chafing about.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
12d ago
I wasn't sure what you meant by "going far harder on those topics than anyone here" - going harder than SS would mean actually saying the quiet part out loud. I guess I can wade into the cesspool of marginal subs and see how much wrongthink is really being tolerated. I doubt Zorba will be moved to take use back to reddit, though.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
12d ago
No topics are banned. You're not being persecuted.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
12d ago
Are there really? Reddit is actually letting people post that they want to kill da Joos now? I wasn't aware of that, but if that's so and you can post that trans women are men, then maybe we could make the transition. I am skeptical, though, especially since even a temporary liberalizing could easily be reversed.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
13d ago
Consider the possibility that you get downvoted because your debate style is obnoxious and supercilious and you describe people who weary of it (or maybe just have lives and families to get back to) as "scurrying off."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
13d ago
We were already on the admins' radar when we moved. I agree that we probably moved sooner than we had to, but I absolutely think we'd have been banned eventually, and if we returned, sneerclubbers and other old friends would be reporting every post about HBD, Jews, trans, and Boogalooing. We mods get shit here for sometimes cracking down on people stepping a little over the line in their eagerness to express how much they hate their enemies, but I think people have short memories if they think half of what they get away with here would fly on Reddit.
Yes, we're probably in a long, slow death spiral. I occasionally visit forums I frequented twenty years ago; some of them are still around with the same dozen or so people who were there twenty years ago. Maybe that is the Motte's fate. I'd like to think there is a way out of that, but you're kidding yourself if you think "woke" is so over that we can go back to the days of the first Trump administration on Reddit.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
13d ago
The idea that she married her brother and committed immigration fraud was treated as a laughable conspiracy only Fox News-addled partisans would treat as anything more than a joke.
Elsewhere, maybe. I'm pretty sure there were plenty of people here who took the idea seriously, or at least did not consider it laughable.
No, I am not. I have read many words by smh and by Hlynka, and while I won't judge their relative literacy or education levels (that would be "classist," wouldn't it?) it's very clear smh has perfect command of the English language, and Hlynka knew that. In other words, he was lying when he said he thought there was a communication failure because smh spoke "Indian." He had been on the forum, reading smh, for years. We're not talking about some ESL learner who still misspells words or uses foreign grammatical constructions. I am not saying this to defend @self_made_human (whom I do blame for being too AI-brain-rotted lately), but to refute your disingenuous point that Hlynka only said something that was a plain, truthful observation and got called "racist" because we're a bunch of redneck-haters here. No. That is not true, Hlynka knew it was not true, and you know it is not true.
He wasn't banned because of classism, and I don't care if he's a sad about feeling "left out" - all he had to do was stop being a dick to the people he wanted to "leave out."
Enough with this nonsense.
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