Amadan
I will be here longer than you
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I got 34 out of 50. I figured out most of the human-created ones, but a few of the AI ones fooled me. The human ones that I mislabeled AI had some weird features that I'm still not sure why a human would paint.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I've seen Trump look sharp and alert, and I've seen him ramble and spew word salad. Maybe, like Biden, he has good days and bad days.
Harris, after watching her Fox interview, I think really is just dumb as a post. And yes, it's ridiculous that she's the "young" candidate.
But I remain of the opinion that Trump at 82 will not be in any shape to run for president, let alone to perform.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Contra the people who say he is senile (a sure sign of TDS by the way)
I don't think he's senile. I think he's showing signs of decline. Clearly not as bad as Biden, but come on. It's not TDS to recognize the man is old and shows it.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
He's 78. He'll be 82 in 2028. He's already showing signs of fatigue and cognitive decline. I wouldn't put it past him to still think he can make a run (I don't think he's capable of admitting he was beaten), but I can't see it being a realistic possibility.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I don’t think it’s a given that these humanitarian doctors sympathize with Palestinians especially rather than humankind generally.
Most of them are probably not literally Hamas agents or Jew-haters. If you asked them, the average doctor would probably say "I want peace for everyone in the Middle East." However, if you asked them "Who do you think is to blame?" I suspect the great majority of doctors in Gaza would say "The Israelis," and if you asked them (outside of Gaza, where presumably they could answer truthfully), "Do you think Hamas is to blame?" they'd give you answers similar to what we hear from American leftists, that Hamas is a justified/expected reaction to oppression and occupation, October 7 was horrible but the Israelis brought it on themselves, etc. So yes, they are probably mostly humanitarians, but they are humanitarians who would have strong incentives and ideological motivations to be willing to endorse a narrative that the IDF is targeting Palestinian children.
I would wager (total conjecture here) that volunteering in Gaza is actually a coveted position for young medical school graduates. Maybe 1% are accepted. It will probably shift to Arabic-speakers for practical reasons, so maybe that’s a small selection bias.
How many videos from Gaza have you actually watched? I've watched quite a few. Some in Arabic, as I said.
I can't say how "coveted" medical positions there are, but I doubt they are actually that competitive - if you are a medical school graduate who contacts an aid organization and says "I want to volunteer to work in Gaza," I doubt you'd have much trouble being accepted. From what I have seen, the majority of doctors working there are either Palestinians, or European or American doctors who have some Arab/Palestinian ancestry. Not all, but most. I have seen a few who are white or Asian; they mostly seem to come from fairly leftist charity organizations. Something like Save the Children - which does not directly employ medical workers (their thing is mostly providing food and education to children in poor countries). Save the Children doesn't explicitly take a political position on the Gaza war, but they are among those demanding an immediate cease fire. I suspect that the average Save the Children aid worker in Gaza does not hate Jews or support Hamas, but if you asked them "Do you think the IDF is deliberately shooting children?" would say "Yes" because they've heard of it happening and are willing to embrace any narrative that engenders horror and makes a cease fire more likely. I think this is typical of all aid organizations in Gaza. Look at Medicins Sans Frontieres. Are they explicitly anti-Israeli? No, but it's pretty clear who they think are the victims and who are the responsible parties.
You are clearly impassioned in this particular topic.
That's a tell too. You're right that it's tiresome. Insisting that someone is "impassioned" because they have a point of view is just a windy way of saying "You mad bro?" or "Why so serious?" If I used less words my posts would be too low effort to rebuke your voluminous walls of text; when I use more words: "Wow, why do you care so much? Must be because you're a Jeeeew!"
I don't particularly have a passion for Israel - I have stated before that I actually don't like Israel that much, I just dislike their enemies more. I do think the plague of Joo-posters is corrosive to reasonable discourse, because they are (without exception) disingenuous both about the facts and about their motives for posting. So it is one of the topics where I'll weigh in, because while I don't want to ban shitty points of views, I don't want to let them dominate the discussion and claim the field.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I don’t know why you would include the line “the NYT didn’t interview every doctor” if you weren’t insinuating that the sample was biased by the NYT. But okay, if you’re not alleging that, then you’re alleging that the doctors were under some pressure by Hamas to testify in a certain way?
I've already explained this several times. What I believe is that every doctor in Gaza is obviously someone who sympathizes with Palestinians and has seen a lot of dead children. They aren't out in the field, so they see kids coming in with bullet wounds, and they probably aren't doing forensics to determine if it looks like a direct shot or a ricochet. If people tell them "IDF soldiers are shooting children," how skeptical will they be? Are they really seeing a lot of direct "kill shots" (e.g. to the head and chest, as opposed to various other random wounds like you'd expect of civilians caught in crossfire?) If they see one or two, how much convincing do they need? If you have one or two doctors willing to go along with a fabrication or an embellishment (such as doctoring an X-ray scan), and then disseminates them, who is going to call bullshit on them? How much evidence would the NYT need?
What I believe, and have explained, is that the truth is probably much messier than either "Yes, the IDF is now sniping children as SOP" or "Every doctor in Gaza is now making up stories of children being sniped." It's going to be a combination - a soldier here or there who said "Fuck 'em all" and is willing to shoot children, a few credulous doctors, a very active Hamas PR campaign (with no small amount of help from people like you). The fact that the NYT is willing to signal-boost any hint of Israelis misdeeds and spin a narrative of Jews being child-killing monsters, on the thinnest of evidence, helps make the extreme version of the story more plausible to people like you, who hate Israel and/or Jews.
Please notice the italics. My assertion would wholly explain why the children are shot in the head. There are 20k-30k Israeli soldiers in Gaza. How many deprave, genuinely evil Jewish extremist soldiers do you need in order to see too many killed children? Not most. Not half. Mere percents in combat roles. Yet this is not excusable; the failure of Israel to check or punish its extremists is inexcusable.
If you just want me to agree that shooting children is bad and anyone who does so intentionally should be prosecuted, I agree. That Israel is allowing it is your claim; I suspect Israel is "allowing" it in the same sense that the US "allowed" atrocities in Viet Nam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan. Some people got away with shit, sometimes the brass were willing to look the other way, but sometimes people got caught and were prosecuted, and the American public was definitely not "okay" with it. Only people with a deep ideological hatred of America would say we committed war crimes out of sheer American evilness.
Jews are not a monolithic group. I hate the extremists, and I do not hate the others. I probably have positive valence toward secular Jews. While I hate aspects of progressivism, I do not see it as Jewish-driven like some commenters here.
Okay. That is genuinely surprising to me, though I am not sure I believe you. But I'll take your word for it--
I can’t help but ask: have you invested your identity into Israel in some way? Are you yourself a religious zionist? Your posts come off as biased, to say the least.
Oops. There's the tell. Gotta admit, I was waiting for that.
As I have told the other Joo-posters who eventually pulled that on me (and not that it is your business or should matter): nope. No Jewish or Israeli affiliations whatsoever. Well, I do have Jews in my family tree. Which according to some Joo-posters would make me a Jew genetically, so maybe my Jew-genes "bias" me. But given that my entire family is Protestant and I have literally never set foot in a synagogue in my life, that would have to be some deep DNA-programming.
Why do you believe that their sample of doctors is flawed? There’s not an enormous amount of Western doctors in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that the NYT Time only picked doctors willing to lie.
Reread what I posted. I did not say the NYT only picked doctors willing to lie, and I specifically addressed the "lying doctors" theory. Stop trying to use these slippery tactics and moving goalposts.
The doctors had the option to answer anonymously. There is no evidence of Hamas threatening doctors. Many of these doctors have already returned home permanently. So your theory here is wrong.
My theory is that the doctors are some combination of lying, credulous, and sympathetic enough not to question too much. "Your theory is wrong" is based on nothing but your belief that if you state something confidently enough it should be taken seriously.
Infantry officer is an influential role. It is a relevant role if we are looking at shot children.
Again, slippery goalpost-moving.
You mistakenly thought that there was not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military.
Again, stop being slippery. The specific claim (by you) was that "most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists." Do we need to go through this word by word? I never claimed that "there is not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military," because we didn't even discuss what "a high level" would be. I would consider 40% of infantry military officers to be a high level by some measures, but not by the measures you were claiming, when you used the word "most" and asserted that it was a sufficiently large majority of all soldiers to make it likely that head-shotting children has become SOP.
Your screed called this “specious”
Debunking you point by point and line by line, while tedious, does not make a screed. What I called "specious" was, again, your claim that most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists. You've retreated to "a lot of their infantry officers are from right-wing religious communities" but are now pretending that that's what was in dispute.
— are you willing to concede you were empirically wrong?
No, because I am not. You are provably and demonstrably so, right here, and I won't bother asking if you are willing to admit it.
There are, factually, a lot of extremists in the Israeli military.
"A lot" is a much slippier and unquantifiable number than "most." Again, moving goal posts.
We both know that is not my argument.
No, we do not both know that. I genuinely believe that you hate Jews and your, ah, "screed" of an OP is motivated by hatred of Jews. Are you willing to clearly state this is false and you do not hate Jews?
Let’s ask these questions: in what capacity is the religious practice different?
Why should I care? Every religion has different religious practices. This is only relevant if you're trying to argue there is something uniquely pernicious about Judaism.
Which type of cognition is increased by the different practices? Where is the moral concern located?
Those might be interesting philosophical questions, but nothing you've posted so far (in your many posts under this topic, under your many alts) has ever supported the conclusion you keep reaching for that "Jews are hostile aliens."
ETA: My apologies, I will retract one thing: I reread your post and you didn't say "Most soldiers." However, I will stand by my claim that this is the central thesis of your claim, that Israelis are now adopting tactics of shooting children because (some number of them which we can argue about whether it literally constitutes "most" or not) are sufficiently extremist that this is now commonplace in the IDF and widely accepted among Israelis because of their Jewishness.
"In other words, the Israeli military selects for the extremists which are raised up within the de-centralized schools of Israel" would be the primary quote here. I was mistaken, in that you used more weasel-wording than I remembered, but let's say it's 20% or 40% or 80%. It's still quite an extraordinary claim that the IDF is deliberately targeting children in Gaza, and they're doing this because.... Jews are monstrous and believe they are fighting a holy war against an evil enemy. You think if there were really Hamas militants in Gaza hospitals, or that doctors were advancing false Hamas narratives and faking bullets embedded in kids' skulls, "someone would tell." Yet you don't think if the IDF was being told "Shoot children," no one would tell?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Low-effort comments lead to low-effort responses. Knock it off, all of you.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Okay, @stuckinbathroom's "Source?" is obnoxious, but so is this.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I don't think the skeptics (hi) doubt that Israelis sometimes do awful things, including shooting children. Or that we believe Israel is noble and innocent.
I do tend to believe that their enemies are among the worst in a generally shitty part of the world. And that people who bring up cherry-picked and carefully described incidents taking anything critical of Israel at face value, and then extrapolate to generalizations about how this is just typical Jewish behavior, do not, in fact, actually care in the slightest about alleged dead Palestinian children, but are happy to invoke dead children if it presents another opportunity to talk about how Jews are lizard-people.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Israel, but it's hard to take them seriously from someone known to hate Jews. I mean, if suddenly you're willing to call interviews by the NYT asking people in Gaza if the Israelis are committing war crimes "high quality evidence" you can surely see why this prompts some see skepticism.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I know you have not missed the last year of media coverage, therefore I do not believe your conviction that the NYT would not criticize Israel unless they really had the goods and were compelled by a sense of commitment to accuracy to report it.
The NYT does have a wealthy Jewish constituency. It also has a very large and very woke constituency that has been criticizing Israel and signal-boosting the Palestinian narrative since October 8. (Well before that, actually.)
You know this. The NYT is not some bastion of Jewiness that was suddenly forced to admit to Israeli atrocities because they had no choice. Now to be clear, I doubt any NYT reporters are deliberately reporting falsehoods. They might or might not really believe that Israeli soldiers are now routinely and intentionally shooting 5-year-olds. Maybe they think the doctors in Gaza who are claiming this believe it and deserve to be reported, because it's "close enough" to the truth. But they are certainly being as willingly credulous as you in accepting a narrative at face value that tells a story they want to tell.
Re: your point that the doctors are forced to testify like this, they can simply abstain from answering if that were so, or they could answer anonymously. Is Hamas forcing them to answer with a gun to their head? I don’t recall reading this from previous medical workers. One of them is bound to spill the beans.
This isn't what I said, and you know this isn't what I said.
I don't suggest Hamas is holding guns to doctors' heads to force them to make up stories. The NYT clearly did not interview every doctor in Gaza. Do you think any doctor in Gaza would say "No, that definitely isn't happening"? At most, they might say "I haven't seen this."
I do expect at some point we'll hear stories from people who were in Gaza who will be more honest about the Hamas militants in hospitals (I mean, these stories have already gotten out), but (a) they will have to have left Gaza, as will their families; (b) they will have to be people who don't want to cover for Hamas. Which is not a lot of people.
Most medical workers in Gaza, asked "Have you heard of the IDF shooting children?" will probably say "Yes, I've heard that's happening." Some will also have seen children brought to the hospital who've been shot.Were they shot deliberately? The family might say so. Is the medical worker going to disbelieve them?
Take a handful of actual incidents, a large proportion of sympathetic and biased medical workers, and a heavily censored reporting environment, and unsurprisingly it's easy to get a story like "Yes, everyone agrees the IDF is sniping children." Every war produces these kinds of atrocity stories; many turn out to be untrue. We already have a lot of conflicting narratives about October 7, and about what has happened in Gaza so far.
I cannot resist pointing out the obvious: the evidence for the Holocaust is far more voluminous and convincing, and yet strangely your skepticism comes out in full force on that subject. Why, one wonders, are stories of atrocities committed by Jews so believable, and stories of atrocities committed against Jews so hard to believe? Could you possibly suffer from bias?
See: “Israel’s army, for much of its seven decades the country’s pre-eminent secular institution, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years. About 40% of those graduating from the army’s infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12 to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement.
That's still 40% and it's their infantry officer schools - a subset of a subset. So you tried to quietly move the goalposts from "Most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists" to "40% of infantry officers are from right-leaning religious communities." While this might be cause for concern within Israel, it still does not follow that even these 40% believe the things you claim, that murdering children is totally moral.
No, it is sufficient to show that there is an extremist section of Jewish Israeli society which is so radical that it would kill enemy children.
This is not sufficient when your claim is that the IDF is now routinely sniping children and Israelis are okay with it. There is an extremist section of every society radical enough to say "Kill the enemy, including their children." We have no shortage of them here in the US, and they come in right, left, secular and religious, woke and Dissident Right.
And that such a section serves in the military at a higher rate. I think I proved this.
The number of people in the Israeli military who believe it's fine to shoot children is greater than the number of people in the general Israeli population? Yes, I am confident you could say the same thing about the US military (or nearly any military) as well.
I also made a general point about how this is a unique vulnerability of the Jewish religion.
Yes, and your point was weak and poorly argued; it amounted to "Jews are awful and they are different from Christians, therefore it's easy to believe awful things about what they believe." There are plenty of Christian extremists with awful views and some of them join the military. A while ago there was a spate of stories about white nationalists infiltrating the Special Forces. I suspect you would be both more skeptical about the threat and protest about the unfair characterization of so-called white nationalists.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I have actually been following news from Gaza, not just the bits you might catch now and then on CNN, but by watching Western, Israeli, and Arab news channels ( including in Arabic). So I have a pretty good sense for how it's covered, including the biases most frequently exhibited by each side.
Bluntly, I do not trust anything reported directly from Gaza, especially from the people on the ground there. This is not to say I think Israelis or the IDF are always trustworthy (they are not), but no journalist is in Gaza without explicit permission from Hamas. That is just how things work there. There are literally Hamas soldiers in Gaza hospitals, but you will never see them shown by the journalists walking the halls to show you how terrible conditions are there. You will never see them criticizing Hamas, interviewing someone who criticizes Hamas, or presenting anything other than a Palestinian-sympathetic point of view. There are two reasons for this: (1) Most of them are sympathetic to Hamas, if not actually affiliated with them. (2) Even the ones who aren't know they will be expelled (at best) or disappeared (at worst) if they don't observe the ground rules. The ground rules are "Hamas is in charge here and Hamas controls the narrative."
High quality evidence would look like what the NYT did. They polled an assortment of doctors working in Gaza and asked them how often they saw children killed in such a way that would indicate intent. 80% said yes. Some said that it was a daily occurrence. This is high quality evidence. Perhaps 80% of the doctors are liars and the NYT team is lying. Or perhaps extremists who promote and condone war crimes are doing war crimes. Which is more likely?
This is a level of credulousness, and confidence, that I know for a certainty you would not display - especially from the NYT - on any other subject. This is not "high quality evidence." This is evidence that pleasures your priors. You took a sketchy story and from it wrote a carefully written polemic that argues, essentially, that Jews are taught by their religion that shooting children for fun is fine. You have already ignored a pile of contradictions to even your most specious claims (e.g., that the Israeli military is mostly made up of religious extremists), and ignored any sort of logical analysis. So let's take a few points in order:
Why would the doctors lie? Most aid workers in Gaza, unsurprisingly, are sympathetic to Palestinians and believe the "genocide" narrative. Some, like the journalists, are actually Hamas supporters. That doesn't mean they would all be willing to make up stories about children regularly being shot by Israeli snipers, but many of them would. Many others, if told this was happening, would be willing to believe it and/or at least not publicly display any skepticism. And if Hamas says "The narrative is now that the IDF is sniping children," doctors still working in Gaza are certainly not going to say "No, that isn't happening." Especially since they probably have seen a lot of children killed, a few might have actually been targeted, and so they're going to be willing to go along with "The IDF is now doing this regularly" – even if they know it's not really true, maybe the outrage will result in fewer children dying.
You have made it clear often enough in the past that you despise Jews and consider them a kind of invidious predatory species, so a story that portrays them as moral mutants clearly appeals to you and is easy for you to believe, but let's try starting from an assumption that Jews aren't monsters. Contrary to your careful argument above that Judaism is an alien and inhumane ethical system completely divorced from Western thought, Israeli cultural norms are mostly Western ones, especially considering how many of them came from the West. The IDF mostly behaves like Western armies, which is to say: they have rules and they follow the Geneva Convention. There are definitely breaches, as happens in all wars, but they aren't monsters who are given a doctrine of "preteen children are legitimate targets." Most people would not do that. It's only plausible that Israelis think sniping children is fine if one accepts your premise that Jews (all Jews!) literally Other gentiles into a "not human" category. You might believe this, but it's not actually accurate.
Do I believe that here and there, some fucked up soldiers have done fucked up things, like sniping children? Yes. Shit happens in war. Do I believe this is either explicitly or implicitly endorsed by the IDF? No. They might not spend a lot of time investigating claims by Al-Jazeera or looking too deeply into an accusation that Sergeant Steiner shot a kid, but they haven't been given the go-ahead to individually target civilians.
People have already talked a lot about the unlikelihood of military rounds (whether 7.62 or 5.56) entering a child's head and staying there, rather than turning it into an exploding pumpkin as it exits. Ballistics can be weird and unlikely things can happen, so one or two X-rays of kids with 7.62 shells in them? Maybe. Happening on a daily basis? A rash of children with 7.62 rounds in their skulls who are still alive? Come on now.
Basically, this story does not pass the sniff test on any level, and the NYT writing outrage porn with heavily biased sources is something you would normally readily pick apart.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
They both got a lot of leeway, so much that we got a lot of flack for allowing it.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
She was not banned, and while I feel bad that she decided to leave, she was not "chased away." Like Hlynka, she was told over and over again that the rules still apply to her even if we like her, and she decided that was intolerable. It was too important to her to say exactly what she wanted to say exactly how she wanted to say it.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Imperial Japanese imagined that Americans were weak and would not choose to fight. They didn't think they were signing up for WW2.
This is not true. It's a common historical myth, driven in part by some of the Japanese rhetoric at the time. Yes, the Japanese hawks did say things like "Americans are weak, and we will crush them with our bushido spirit!" But the reality is that most of the Japanese government and high command was well aware that they could not win a war against the U.S. and really wanted to avoid it. Yamamoto's Peal Harbor scheme was basically a hail mary; he was hoping they would do enough damage to cripple the US for months, during which Japan would secure its gains and by the time America was ready to gear up, we wouldn't have the will to actually go to war. And even he knew it probably wasn't going to work.
Countries do go to war underestimating their opponents and their will to fight, but it's rarely with completely delusional takes about how easy it will be.
China might convince itself that they can take Taiwan quickly enough to avoid an all-out war with the West, but I doubt they are dumb enough to think that the US won't react, or that there isn't a serious risk of a major war.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
So here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it.
I don't think it has "always been" like this.
I am usually the one who contradicts the catastrophizers, the doomers, and accelerationists by bringing up whatever American history book I have most recently read to point out that we had extremely hot culture wars in the past, with politicians literally assaulting each other on the floor of Congress, with ideological camps deriding each others' partisan cures for epidemics, with very real, widespread and sometimes laughably blatant voter fraud, etc.
But at least in my lifetime, we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas, but nobody actually wanted to delegitimize and disenfranchise the other side. If you lost an election, that sucked and you could be unhappy about it, but you set about trying to win the next one.
The Motte being the place it is, most people perceive the Democrats to be the villains here, and right now, they are, because they are in power and because the left has the upper hand in the culture wars. But it was during the Clinton years when I first noticed a radical shift amongst right wingers; Clinton was not just a bad president, he was illegitimate. He was a monstrous, degenerate, nation-ending catastrophe. Liberals were traitors. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter rose to prominence on the strength of their invective.
This wasn't a particularly unique period in American history and I am not (quite) saying "Republicans started it," but I am saying that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together. I know for certain that Congress was a more congenial and bipartisan body (and a lot of people criticized it for that, arguing that bipartisanship was bad because it meant making compromises and concessions with the enemy - well, those critics got what they wanted).
So I feel what you are saying, and what your National Review article is saying. I feel it every time I talk to my liberal friends. I feel it when I visit my hobby boards which have become essentially a chorus of daily agreement about leftist talking points. That someone could be a good person and still vote Republican is basically unthinkable. That you could be a liberal and remain friends with a Trump supporter is considered a logical contradiction, like saying you're a Jew who's friends with a Nazi.
I have seen liberals arguing that packing the court is a perfectly legitimate measure, that controlling free speech on the Internet is essential to combat disinformation, that the Constitution is fake and gay, and it's very clear that:
liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing.
This makes me sad and frustrated and gloomy, but while I am not going to say Republicans started it, I'm not not saying that either.
No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Banned for mangling Warren Zevon.
No, but seriously, even if you think someone is trolling, don't respond like this.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
That's possible. Is it TDS, BDS, or Poe's Law? So when we see a post like this, which could be sincere, or could be a troll, we have to make a judgment call. Usually we err on the side of allowing suspicious "new" accounts enough rope to hang themselves.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I approved this, with misgivings, because it looks a lot like boo-outgroup trollbait. There is certainly an argument here and a point of view, and posting polemics about how only Trump will save us is allowed, but your user name and your "first" post under this new account has a familiar smell to it.
I am saying this so you are aware, we made a decision to approve your post, but we have doubts about your intentions. Usually people who want to create a new alt let us know about it and who they were previously if they want to convince us they are returning in good faith.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Direct confrontation happens, if you have numbers behind you and you are positioned appropriately on the progressive stack. But shaming and personal attacks only go in one direction. I think you're completely wrong that white women envy black women's comfort with direct confrontation. They are afraid of it. That's why white women (and progressives, more generally) lose against cancel culture. Because they are afraid to say "No" (or more pointedly, "Fuck off with your bullshit").
Similarly, “bravery to go against the crowd” and “immunity to personal attacks and shaming” are key pillars of the 21st-century worldview and ethos!
No, those are key parts of a popular delusion. Everyone (including here!) imagines himself a brave iconoclast, not afraid of speaking truth to power, not going along with the sheeple, definitely not an NPC. I totally worked out all my beliefs carefully from first principles and examine all evidence and do my own research and don't just take anyone else's word for it, especially not so-called "experts"! And I totally don't care what people think of me, ima gonna speak my truth!
This is bullshit, of course, for 90% of men and probably 99% of women. But we all like to imagine ourselves brave little cockerels strutting around unintimidated by popular opinion.
Yes, conservatives are delusional when they claim progressives are the conformist ones. But you (soy blue-tribe ex-progressive, by your own description) still seem perversely fond of the mythology you claim to have left behind, that progressives are the "radical" ones who aren't afraid to stand up and thrown down. The confrontation and conflict you describe is mostly petty infighting. No progressive would be brave enough to become a centrist or a heterodox classical liberal (like a lot of us here on the Motte) because he'd be booed, shamed, and forced to grovel unless he actually goes on the "I left the Left" grifting circuit (which requires basically leaving your entire social circle behind). Progressives don't do direct confrontation unless it's a struggle session (a bunch of people ganging up on the designated scapegoat) or in solidarity against an approved enemy (Trump, Israel, heteronormative late stage capitalism, whatever).
Gay pride parades are, exactly as you say, not even remotely transgressive anymore! They imagine themselves to be so- which is why you see people wearing S&M puppy gear or spreading their cheeks to show their rectums on Folsom Street, to try to retain some sense of actually "shocking the normies." But yeah, the early pride movement might have had some claim to be transgressive and brave, when they actually risked bottles and arrests. The vast majority of participants today would fold like cheap suits if threatened with physical danger or actual social disapprobation.
@TheDag's point (which I largely agree with) is that Trump appeals to the voter who wishes he could say "Fuck you" to his HR department and to DEI hires. Here's a guy who is constantly being called Literally Hitler and he doesn't care! Politicians don't do that anymore! The average Republican, even really conservative Republicans, will fold if accused of sexism or racism and mumble something about how unfair such accusations are. Trump doesn't care! He'll laugh and say "I love women! I love black people!" And then keep doing what he's doing.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
You can, if you can do so civilly. Which requires putting in a little bit of effort - not a lot, but more than just "You're a liar."
I modded him because he was almost certainly posting in bad faith.
I modded you because you had a choice between civility and sneering, and you chose the low road.
Henry Clay. He never quite grabbed the brass ring, but he was a major candidate for much of the first half of the 19th century.
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