Amadan
I will be here longer than you
No bio...
User ID: 297
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.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
You were told, repeatedly, that you were on your last chance, and yet your last several warnings were mod-noted with "Permaban next time." Yet you weren't, because, well, you seemed to be making a good faith effort to dial it down... for a while. But your comments remain mostly low effort and shitty. So much so that after being here for months, we still have to manually approve your posts because you can't get out of the new user filter. This isn't because you have some brave iconoclastic point of view that's too much for the Motte; there are other edgy, lefty posters who establish themselves as decent posters.
This post is just another crappy low effort post. I've specifically told you to stop writing posts whose entire content is just "Your beliefs are stupid."
It's also the last straw. I will not miss fishing your posts out of the queue and having to decide which of the dozen posts you wrote during a drunk-posting spree need to be modded. This was a dumb hill to die on, but so mote it be. Good bye.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I have hate-followed the HAES/Body Positivity/Intuitive Eating movement for years. It is absolutely for fat women. There are a few fat men in the movement (though they mostly keep quiet because they will quickly be told that they don't suffer as much from society's fatphobia as women do), and there may be a handful of fat-fetishists, but the vast majority are fat women who want to be told that they are sexy and desirable and healthy and don't need to change a thing.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
FWIW, when I lost my weight, many years ago, I did so by following the "GI Diet" which basically recommends you eat mostly low-GI foods. The theory being that it would reduce sugar spikes and regulate your metabolism. Of course it also just happens to mean you are eating mostly lower carb and low sugar foods, and to some degree I suspect any reasonably healthy diet combined with exercise will work.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
CICO wasn't invented as an excuse to be cruel to fat people and blame them for being fat. Cruelty is how you treat people, not what you believe about them.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I think adherents of both theories can be accused of motivated reasoning. But I don't attribute the rise in obesity to a lack of willpower. I think any society in the past suddenly presented with an overabundance of tasty fattening food would see skyrocketing obesity rates. We see this now with primitive societies suddenly exposed to Western diets.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
But as far as I know, the overwhelming majority of people fail to lose weight in the long-term.
Yes, because they fail to change their CICO equation long term. They diet and/or exercise, lose some weight, then resume eating like they used to and stop exercising.
The food addiction hypothesis fails to explain why skinny people find it just as hard to gain weight as fat people find it to lose weight. The set point model explains both.
And yet in a post above you claimed that it's just like an addiction to smoking or porn or drugs, which we should not expect people to stop because it takes "superhuman willpower."
You are right that most people will not break their addictions, and most people will not lose weight. Because it's hard and unpleasant, and people do not like to do hard and unpleasant things. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
The more I hear about set point theory the more it sounds like just-so stories to explain why they can lose weight but I can't.
There may be something to it, but it looks as rigorous as most pseudoscientific theories, and I am suspicious of a theory that happens to be embraced mostly by fat acceptance activists.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Why do you think some people are able to lose weight, then?
Eating a lot is a habit. It is probably closer to an addiction. Eating less is very unpleasant and your body will fight you unless you satisfy it. Just like your body will fight you when you try to stop smoking.
I don't think you have a set point that demands you eat 2-3 times what a normal person does. I think you have a habit of eating that much, and if you stopped doing it, yes, you would feel like you are "starving" until either you give in, or your body adjusts to a lower intake.
I am not speaking hypothetically. I am a former fat person.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
We do have different worldviews, but not in the way you think.
Objectively, yes, you and I are probably "superior" to people who are eating themselves to death, at least on most axes.
What I think is a character flaw is feeling some kind of gratification at being such a superior person. Admit it is what it is; you like watching human trainwrecks. (That's why I watch the show.) You don't have to feel sorry for them or have empathy. But I wouldn't take pride in how superior I am or how it makes me a clear-eyed rationalist that I can deny them sympathy.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
If the threat of their imminent approaching deaths isn't enough to establish even a modicum of self control they're not really human beings, but automata who have lost their will to live.
If it makes you feel very superior thinking that, okay. But people who are severely depressed, delusional, schizophrenic, and suffering from various other mental illnesses often do, in fact, lack even a modicum of self control. They are human beings. Broken human beings are still responsible for their actions. Yes, they can also be abusive and manipulative.
The reason we have more morbidly obese people is that (a) we have the medical technology to keep people alive in conditions that would have killed them sooner in earlier times; (b) we have a hyperabundance of extremely cheap, calorie-dense food made to be hyperpalatable; (c) we have no real mechanism to force people to stop self-harming in this way except in the most extreme circumstances.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Set point theory is very popular among fat activists, yes.
People's metabolisms do vary (which is why "CICO" is both true and simplistic - the "burn rate" is not the same for every person). But nobody weighs 400 pounds because that's what their "set point" says they should weigh, and I have only ever met two kinds of severely obese people: those who admit they eat too much, and those who make up reasons why somehow normal rules of biology and physics are different for them.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I don't think mental illness is an excuse - you are still responsible for getting yourself fixed. But people who literally aren't in control of themselves can't be expected to act "rationally."
Even with the caprice of reality TV, the shit they do boggles the mind.
Well, yes, if you screen people for their high levels of craziness, they will do crazy things on camera. My 600 Pound Life, for all that it purports to be "helping" its patients (Dr. Now probably really does care about his patients, at least somewhat) is very much a modern freakshow. "Point and laugh at the freaks and then wonder why they don't just stop stuffing their fat faces..."
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
One of my guilty pleasures is trash TV, including My 600 Pound Life.
Your observations are generally true for the people on that show. But I think you're being rather uncharitable.
First of all, the patients on that show are extraordinarily obese and unhealthy. They are not your "usual" fat person, but people who've literally reached the point of "lose weight or die." They are also, of course, selected for dramatic and disagreeable personalities who will make for good TV. (You can even see viewers complaining when the season is "too boring" because the patients are cooperative and not dramatic enough.)
You also neglected to mention that most of them are suffering from severe mental illness. The food addiction that has rendered them nearly immobile is clearly a mental illness in itself, but most of them have all kinds of other problems. Most of them are impoverished and come from abusive backgrounds. Childhood sexual abuse is a very common theme. You say they are stupid, entitled, and ignorant; there's a reason you don't see many of them who come from stable and supportive middle class families. Most of the time, when we see family members, they are as fucked up as the patient, if not as fat.
And it's a reality TV show! You know that shit is heavily edited, right? My 600 Pound Life, like most such shows, has been accused of staging confrontations, feeding the "participants" their lines, crafting "storylines" to make them more dramatic, and so on. The patients may be real and their issues are too, but I would not trust the show to be giving you a really accurate picture.
Now, more generally I agree that fat people (even "normal" fat people) have a strong tendency to be in denial about how much they eat and how little exercise they do, or about the health effects of obesity. But it should be obvious that making broad generalizations based on the personalities who appear on a reality TV show is just taking cheap swings at easy targets.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
2mo ago
What do you mean by "lineage" then? I'd say that by definition it must include people from who woke SJW BLM-flag-posters derived their beliefs.
Maybe it's my bubble, but most of the SJW BLM-flag-posters I know are liberal Christians/former Christians, the sort who if they go to church at all anymore go to one with rainbow flags, or a UU congregation. They would argue passionately that their beliefs are derived from Christianity and what Jesus taught, and I don't think that is less accurate than saying their beliefs are derived from Marx. (There has long been a strain of liberal Christianity arguing that what Jesus preached was in fact a sort of proto-Marxism.) That many traditional Christians would vehemently argue otherwise is no more relevant than Freddie DeBoer saying they aren't "really" Marxists.
My point here is that calling a woke trans rights activist a "Cultural Marxist" is not much different than calling a MAGA a fascist.
I mean people who used to call themselves Cultural Marxists. Some of them still hold to the label, others seem to have moved on. In any case a lineage, the way I understand the term, exists, and is direct and coherent.
Are you talking about individual people who literally called themselves Cultural Marxists, or are you claiming the entire movement (for some value of "movement") used to call itself Cultural Marxism? Because there might be some of the former, though I don't know who you are referring to, but if you mean the latter, no, I don't think there is some single coherent movement that used to be known as "Cultural Marxism" and has now relabeled itself BLM, woke, trans rights, etc.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
2mo ago
I'm saying the average SJW/woke posting BLM flags and talking about trans rights is not a "cultural Marxist" in a coherent manner and literally wouldn't know what you mean by calling them a Marxist (or they'd laugh at you because they kind of know what Marxism is and don't consider themselves to be one). You can argue their ideas are influenced by Marxism, which is true, but true in the same way we all swim downstream of Marxism, Christianity, and all the other memeplexes in our culture. I'm saying calling them "Cultural Marxists" is only very vaguely accurate and not very useful except as a boo word. (And of course boo words are pretty useful as rhetorical devices, but annoying to people who actually pick apart what words mean.)
How is that my problem? Maybe they should have picked a better name?
If by "they" you mean the people who actually call themselves Cultural Marxists, obviously they wouldn't contest the label, but they are a small percentage of the people you typically attach it to.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
2mo ago
I think you kind of miss the point. The people arguing that modern SJW ideology is descended from Marxism aren't wrong, but they are wrong when they think it's a direct and coherent lineage, and especially when some people seem to think that it's part of some grand master plan laid out by Gramsci and the Frankfurt school. (Or, going deeper down certain rabbit holes, a grand master plan by George Soros and Da Jooooooos!) Frankly, I think it is all fundamentally about resentment of the have nots against the haves, and this is essentially a parallel development. Marx built an entire economic theory around it, but without Marx, we'd still have people agitating for redistributive efforts and cutting down the tall poppies; they'd just use different labels.
Thus, arguing about whether "Cultural Marxism" is a thing or whether it's "really" Marxism seems pointless to me. Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a thing whether you call it that or something else; are "Cultural Marxists" actually trying to bring about a revolution of the proleteriat and the True Communism That Has Never Been Tried? Mostly not.
Most people (rightists and leftists) don't actually think about this very deeply the way us Motteian nerds do. The average SJW, including, I would wager, the chick who drew that "Kyriarchy" cartoon @FCfromSSC linked to, and the average right-winger railing about "cultural Marxism," cannot actually articulate what Marx espoused except in very general terms. The New Atheist/Christian analogy is apt; you're right that New Atheists smugly declaring they know the Bible better than the Christians they're arguing with were very obnoxious, but they were frequently correct.
The problem with the "Cultural Marxist" label is that it just reads as a cheap low-effort pejorative. "Commie" is still a dirty word in America, and calling SJWs "Cultural Marxists" reads as "Hurr hurr you commie!" It reminds me of right-wingers claiming every Democratic president ever was actually a communist.
There is of course a visible shift happening now where the left is using the same tactics to call every conservative "far right" and every Republican a "fascist." Boomerang back to conservatives claiming Nazis were actually leftists.
It's sloppy thinking all around, and while @FCfromSSC wrote a very thoughtful post tracing the lineage from Marx to Everyday Feminism, most critics don't and can't. (Freddie DeBoer, everyone's favorite anti-woke actual Marxist, is constantly driving himself crazy(er) trying to explain how everyone on the right and the left is Wrong About Everything.)
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...)
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