Amadan
I will be here longer than you
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Yeah, uh, dude, this is like saying "let me Google that for you."
Presumably if the OP wanted a Copilot or ChatGPT summary he could have gotten one himself.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
That's not an entirely fair standard to hold someone to, because extreme politics is a niche hobbyist interest rather than a general interest.
Sure, but when someone says "I know leftists in my life who admire Lenin and Trotsky," I can't help wondering where all these literal Bolveshiks are hanging out.
Concerns about LLMs notwithstanding, everyone who is present online is present in real life too.
Yes, but we are all familiar with the phenomenon of fringe, niche freaks who'd be all alone in their community gravitating towards each other online and thus presenting an online presence that dramatically exaggerates the impression of how many of them there actually are. A lot of rightists who are convinced that every leftist is a literal Bolshevik are quick to scoff that the actual number of real Nazis is miniscule, and vice versa.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Skepticism isn't the same as "pointing and sputtering." Of course I am speaking for myself; I don't know if you mean me or if you have seen other people "pointing and sputtering." (I haven't, at least not here.)
The thing is, you can make inferences about someone's health and genetic gifts based on their appearance, sure. A tall, well-proportioned man with a strong jaw probably is a more fit physical specimen. So I, at least, am not claiming that you can determine nothing from appearance.
My skepticism encompasses the following points:
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Being a handsome strong-jawed chad may have some statistical correlation to also being smart and possessing natural leadership qualities, but the two don't automatically go hand in hand, so picking a "leader" because someone looks like Captain America in a headshot is probably at best a flawed heuristic. Yeah, given no other info, I'd pick Captain America over soy-face too. I would not agree that you can, as a general rule, pick people for their leadership qualities and competence based on their photos.
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A lot of what you see in photographs is superficial presentation. Any stylist, photographer, or couturier can tell you that you can make a strong man look weak or a weak man look strong with the right outfit and angle and lighting. (Same with women; turning a 4 into a 8 or a 8 into a 4 is not hard.)
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Going back to the OP, there wasn't even any discussion of specific characteristics of the people in question, just vague hinting that they aren't white men and therefore are inferior.
Which is why I am pushing back, because I'm totally interested in well-presented arguments about how you can correlate specific physical characteristics to positive traits (and anyone who's been around for a while knows I am not afraid of HBD arguments), but the OP's post was lazy. If all you have to say is "Look at all those women and blacks, obviously incompetent garbage!" what are you expecting, sober head nods and clapping at your well-reasoned argument?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I am very skeptical of this kind of phenotyping, which is often little better than phrenology. "You can just tell by looking at the strong-jawed white chad that he's a superior New Soviet Manalpha male." A lot of people claim they can detect "soy face" when it's just a guy making a goofy expression. Really, do you think you could pick Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower out of that West Point photo without being told who they are?
In this instance, it seems pretty clear to me that the judgment is purely based on the fact that the OP saw a lot of women and blacks.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
As it happens, I just finished reading a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. He certainly respected Lee, but as @HaroldWilson says below, he thought Lee was overrated. Early in the war the Confederacy had notoriously better generals, and Lee was pretty much walking all over them, leading to a general sense of dread and doom whenever Lee acted that Grant lost patience with.
It should be noted that Lee also came under criticism from his own side, when they felt he was too slow and passive in his responses; some Southern newspapers took to calling him "Granny Lee."
There is also a sort of myth that has grown up around Lee that he was the most brilliant general in the war, and that Grant was plodding and mediocre and only beat Lee because of the North's superior numbers and equipment. This also isn't really born out by history.
In summary, Lee was certainly capable, but the South has turned him into a sort of Alexander or Napoleon, and not only overrated his military prowess but his honorable and humanitarian nature. In fact Lee was no worse than most Southerners, but he was no better; like most of them, he might have told himself that slavery was a benevolent institution and that he didn't personally hate black people, but he clearly did not like black people or consider them worthy of civil rights. He was also not a gracious loser; Grant was always hospitable and gracious when he met with Lee to discuss surrender, and afterwards when Lee petitioned him in the White House. Lee could barely manage to keep his resentment and contempt in check to be minimally civil.
He wasn't a terrible man or general, but he wasn't the Great Man that Lost Causers have made him out to be.
I also really want to know what leftists you have met, other than on social media, who adulate Lenin or Trotsky. I am pretty sure my circle is considerably leftier than yours, and I don't know anyone who admires the Bolsheviks. I know genuine tankies exist, but I think they are much more present online than in real life.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
They look like bureaucrats. They look like people that have spent their entire professional lives pushing paper around and playing office politics.
They look like every person I see with a professional headshot on LinkedIn, from sales managers to software engineers.
I can only imagine what skillset it takes to advance to leadership in the federal government, but it seems unlikely that they’ve been selected for competence at responding to emergency situations.
Actually, being an adept bureaucrat is very important for people in charge of managing and funding a disaster response. These are not the people who will actually be wading through floodwaters to bring emergency supplies, which is of course an entirely different skillset.
People should ask themselves, does this group look like the type of people that would prioritize Ukraine, “migrants”, or rural Americans.
I would ask myself that about the politicians who determine policy, not try to divine someone's innermost loyalties based on a picture that reveals only sex and race.
There is a well known trope that coastal elites seem to hold rural people in contempt.
"Well known trope" = "Thing that lots of people are happy to believe because it fits their culture war priors." In fact most civil servants (and these people, while fairly high up in FEMA, are pretty low on the fed food chain) are no more or less diligent about their duties and responsibilities than the average corp wageslave, and I would argue generally moreso. You don't join FEMA because you have a seething hatred of "rural people" and think this is your best avenue to hurt them.
I’m willing to make the leap that the people on that leadership page are part of that group.
Again, I am asking why you think you can be so confident about this based solely on their photographs? If you just assume that anyone in a government agency leadership position is a "coastal elite" who holds rural people in contempt, then it wouldn't really matter what they look like. You could have just said "I'll bet FEMA hates rural people." I think you have a very unsophisticated inductive reasoning chain.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
How exactly are you judging them as "an embarrassment"? Those look like ordinary professional photos and they look Iike normal people. Without knowing anything else about them, should I assume it's just the fact that many of them are black and/or women that's causing the curled upper lip?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Come on now. What do I have to do to convince you that I genuinely mean it?
I thought you're complaining about no BLR. I don't associate you with the group constantly bitching about moderation in general. I believe you mean it about wanting a BLR and thinking it would be an improvement. I don't agree, and most of the mods don't agree, but I guess you could try to convince us that everyone else on the Motte wants a BLR.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Okay but can you see how this doesn’t inspire confidence? It’s great that you think that the minimum level of effort required is X, but your opinion (presumably) doesn’t carry any more clout than @netstack’s does, and if the modding is going to be inconsistent, with some mods being more overzealous than others, than I think it’s pretty understandable that users (especially those without the post history and reputation that provides some armor) might feel very apprehensive about posting anything less than a maximally-effortful essay about something they find interesting.
Netstack did give his reasoning. He didn't mod it because it wasn't effortful enough, he modded it because he thought it was nothing but "boo outgroup."
Like I said, I probably wouldn't have modded it myself, but I can also see why he would.
We have never claimed 100% consistency. There are days when I might be more strict than others. That's why the vast majority of modposts are just warnings, and if people took those with more grace instead of flipping out and deciding they need to litigate them like they have been issued a traffic fine, there would be less angst about it.
I am sorry (but not very) that some people feel "intimidated" into not making more posts, but being perfectly honest with you again, the people who complain most frequently about how we're too strict and too capricious are not complaining in good faith. They just don't like the rules and don't want to be restricted as to what they can say. Can you see why that makes us less inclined to consider it a problem that allegedly there are all these posters afraid of being told to do better?
So, for all of a bare links repository’s potential flaws, at the very least it would not foster any doubt or require people to discern the intentions of all of the various mods.
Even if we did bring the BLR back, it would not be a "mod free" zone where people can just post things that are nothing but boo outgroup and sneering. Some BLR posts would still get modded, and the complaints about our decisions wouldn't change much.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't have modded that post, though it is a bit borderline, being not much more than "Boo outgroup" with MOAR WORDS. The mods are not a hivemind. I stand by my point that you don't have to put a lot of effort into your post, not everything has to be an effortpost, and the BLR would be a net negative. Will the other mods sometimes have a different opinion than me of what constitutes "enough" effort? Yes.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
This discussion would really benefit from some more charity towards my position. I am not arguing for The Motte to become Twitter, that is a strawman. Neither am I arguing for the roundup to be flooded with "low effort shit".
Yes, I know that's not what you want. I am saying that IMO that is what your proposal would result in.
And a BLR wouldn't clutter up anything because it would be one click away from being minimized. No wading required.
Here is my prediction of what would happen (because it's what happened when we had the BLR back on reddit):
- Most posts to the BLR would be very much "Can you believe what those fucking wokes did now?!" Most people would nod and agree, yeah, those fucking wokes are the worst.
- Now and then someone would post a link to an article about why Trump is a fascist or DEI is good, actually, and it would get mass-reported.
- Very rarely would the resulting discussion be anything approaching "good" or "interesting." It would mostly be circle jerks of people agreeing with the premise.
- It would encourage laziness. People who can't be bothered to contribute meaningfully to a discussion or write an effortful post but really want to talk about how much they hate their enemies would have a convenient dumping ground for this.
I just have zero sympathy for people who want to post bare links, because our requirements to add something meaningful are not that stringent. Every person who claims we require MOAR WORDS or meaningless verbiage or a ChatGPT sensitivity pass is lying. All you have to do is add something like "Why is this interesting? What is your take? Why do you care? Why should we care? Why do you think it is worth bringing to our attention?" Add some commentary (doesn't have to be very much, does not have to be particularly insightful or long), just more than "Hey, look at what those fucking wokes did now!" It's not a high bar. It just fucking isn't. I am tired of people pretending that we put barriers in the way of their very interesting conversations that we do not.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
If you look at Twitter, it has a vastly greater amount of content. The vast majority of it is low effort shit. Sometimes a low effort shitpost does produce a high quality discussion. Just like here.
What you are arguing is that since some percentage of shitty, low quality posts will produce good posts, if we allowed more shitty, low quality posts, the result would more good posts. In raw numbers, this is probably true. The price would be that you'd have to wade through a dramatically greater number of shitty, low quality posts.
That is the difference between what we want and what you want.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
If you insist. Both of you are being jerks. (And @The_Nybbler, as usual, is being dishonest, claiming that we prohibit "wordplay." Like all our other anklebiters, you know where the line is and you pretend not to when you petulantly insist on crossing it.)
Knock it off, both of you.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Bring back the link repository!
No.
There is a genuine conflict of interest here between moderators and users of the forum.
No, there is a conflict of interest here between the moderators and what some users of the forum would like.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
And thus we import cheap Chinese goods instead of supporting American manufacturing, and outsource millions of cubicle jobs to India and the Philippines.
I have no strong feelings on longshoremen or automation in general, but optimizing for the lowest cost of goods and services for the greatest number of people is only maximally beneficial in an actual global economy where everyone from India to the US is fungible. In the world we are in now, it's not just a choice between "Should longshoreman be overpaid or should Americans pay more for a toaster?" Eliminating American jobs eats away at American prosperity also.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
This is almost all of Freddie's posts lately. He's a generally miserable person who's reached the "kids on my lawn" stage of life. Now and then, like Scott, he still knocks out a banger, but he's gotten old and soft and he's mostly defined by what annoys him. He seems particularly annoyed by successful people. (I sometimes wonder if Taylor Swift ran over his dog, with all the essays he writes about how much her popularity annoys him, not that he cares...)
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Convincing people is precisely what I am attempting to do! I’m well aware that you don’t think I’m doing a very good job of that. I’m well aware that my position is very much a minority one, both on the Motte and in American society at large.
Fair enough. I will tell you one of the reasons you fail to convince me: because even though I am not a member of the black criminal underclass that you want to put a boot on, I have seen what people like you and your compatriots have said they would do to me and mine just for being your political opponents. In your hypothetical police state that doesn't have to care about civil rights or reasonable doubt, I have no illusions that it would only be junkies getting the boot. No, don't tell me that as a respectable law-abiding white guy I would be safe; I don't believe you.
Do you genuinely think, based on anything I’ve said, that I’d be happy to see some respectable black guy with a wife and a mortgage and a full-time job get snatched up by police and railroaded for a crime some white junkie committed?
Happy? No, but I think if that were the price for putting more junkies away, you would be okay with it.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I'm sorry, but you sound like a young man who has just discovered that the justice system is not perfect, but you have simple and obvious solutions that no one in the history of American jurisprudence has thought of before. If only they would listen to your common sense solutions!
There are several reasons defense attorneys put up a spirited defense:
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Contrary to your belief, no, they don't always "know" their clients are guilty. They might believe it, they might strongly suspect it, but sometimes innocence is actually a possibility, even if an unlikely one. And our legal system is built on the premise that "reasonable doubt" is enough to acquit, and it's better to let ten guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man. You might disagree with these premises, but then you have to convince everyone else; it's not something no one has actually put thought into.
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If they do know for a fact that their client is guilty, they are actually not allowed to make arguments contrary to fact. (They can't claim the defendant wasn't there if they know he was.) In that case, they still can require the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That is because the state has enormous power, and requiring the state to prove you are guilty, not just "know" it because "it's obvious," is one of the few things preventing people from being casually railroaded by malicious cops and prosecutors (which still happens even with all these safeguards).
I strongly suspect the probability of that happening not bothering you is because you know who would be railroaded more often than not, and you think that would be a good thing because you have openly stated you don't really care about the procedural ethics or truth valence of any particular charge against blackcriminals as long as they get got for something. But most people don't share your values or your eagerness to unleash the full power of a police state, with your confidence that that power will mostly fall on your despised outgroup.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Well, here's another example for you. Me 😊. I have zero chance of ever climbing out of the karma hole here. I'm not super worried about it, but, for the record, the reason for it is one (intentionally provocative) thread that did lead to a discussion challenging the standard beliefs.
No, most people don't even remember a post from months ago. I don't even remember you. The reason you haven't accumulated enough "karma" is that you've posted a few times today, and last time was a couple of posts 4 months ago, and before that, a couple of posts a year ago.
Was it bad enough to warrant a permanent modfilter?
You are misunderstanding how the filtering works. We don't put a "permanent modfilter" on you because you make a bad post. All new users automatically have to have their posts manually approved. After a certain number of upvotes (I don't know what the algorithm is, only Zorba does) you come out of the "new user" filter. Now if you have acquired a reputation for being an asshole, so that a lot of people downvote you as soon as they see you post, yes, it will be harder to get out of that filter. As far as I know, you aren't one of those people. You just haven't posted enough.
It was trivial for me to find an example perfectly illustrating my point from just scrolling through the modlog. Here you go, the comment is essentially saying "people vote for communists because they just want to kill niggers." Votes on it are +3/-1, the -1 probably coming from the moderator who ended up handing out a tempban (no complaint here, it was a right choice). Voters had no problem with it. Is that how the system is supposed to work?
Yes. The new user filter is only to keep out low effort trolls. Once you are no longer being filtered, it's the job of reports and mods to handle people who make bad posts. As you noted, that post resulted in a tempban. I would not get so upset about upvotes and downvotes. There are people who will upvote any post that talks about how much Jews or blacks or leftists suck, especially if the poster uses language the upvoter knows better than to use. We don't mod according to the popularity of a post.
If the goal is to avoid the things you mentioned, adjusting the filter to deal with that would be trivial. Simply adjust the filter to be 7 days + 50 comments (or some similar number) which will still filter random incoming trolls, without enforcing the echo-chamber and punishing going against the circlejerk.
Maybe @ZorbaTHut has thoughts on why we should/shouldn't do that. Though I will note that if the threshold were 50 comments, you would still be in the new user filter.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I’m not saying that no parents are short-termist psychopaths, I’m saying that no childfree people aren’t short-termist psychopaths.
Too inflammatory and general to just be asserted as a hot take. Literally 100% of childfree people are short-termist psychopaths? The rest of your post is pretty bad too.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Since I'm never going to be able to climb out of the new user filter you seem to laud, I doubt this comment will actually appear in the thread. But hopefully you'll at least see it...
The comment does appear in the thread after we approve it, which I have.
Look, I don't love the new user filter mechanism myself, and I have noticed that yes, liberals have a harder time climbing out of it because they get downvoted so heavily. That said, those who actually post reasonable and good faith arguments eventually get enough upvotes that they aren't being filtered, and it really doesn't take that much. The only people I can recall recently who posted regularly yet stayed in the new user filter persistently for months were AahTheFrench and Darwin/guesswho. Both of whom mostly engaged in trolling and shitposting.
Without a new user filter, we mods would wake up to a ton of "Kill All Niggers! Death to Kikes and Faggots!" posts spamming the board which we would then have to clean up. (This is not speculative on my part; you should see how very determined and noxious some of our long-term trolls are.)
If you have an alternate suggestions, propose it. Zorba has limited time to fix things and add features, but no one is under the illusion that our current setup is perfect. It's just the best we have managed so far.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Speak plainly and without the sarcastic faux-irony.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
An adversarial system is manifestly retarded when guilt or innocence can be easily adjudicated by viewing photo/video evidence, and/or by assessing DNA/forensic evidence.
You are not the first person to suggest that it is "easy" to decide guilt or innocence in almost all cases and it's just those pesky tricksy civil rights technicalities getting in the way of justice.
Leaving aside the fact that knowing your priors, no black person in his right mind would trust any system you find satisfactory, your system will straightforwardly give absolute power to the state, carte blanche to cops to do whatever it takes to get a conviction, a justice system on a rail, and you would endorse this because it will mean no guilty people go free.
I can believe the writers thought the audience "didn't get the point" the first time and wanted to write a new movie with the "correct" message.
I think the more sinister conspiratorial nonsense - that the studios literally don't care about making a profit (!!) and deliberately did this as a "humiliation ritual" just to punish the audience, whom they hate - is ridiculous and a sign of how far down a rabbithole this sort of "THEY are out to get you" thinking can take you. Maybe there is a screenwriter somewhere chortling as xe/xir thinks "This will show those white incel losers!" but I am pretty sure there is no studio that will deliberately put out a money-loser because all the money-men are on board with a "punish incels" program.
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