Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
What I did say is that, in my experience, crimes get weirder as illegal immigrant migrant labor increases in small communities
Okay. I believe that. Are you satisfied?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
You (and WC) aren't just asking me to believe isolated incidents. You are asking me to believe that everywhere immigrants exist, they are transforming entire cities and turning them into third world hell holes, and hardly anyone is noticing all these horrible crimes and community destruction. It's not that any one story is hard to believe. It's the parade of horribles, more horrible incidents happening one after another than most people see in a lifetime.
I am actually not pro immigration, or at least not pro mass immigration. I believe they generally increase crime, put a burden on social services, and negatively impact society.
But it's kind of like the guy who really hates black people and is constantly telling stories about how everywhere he goes, at work, at the store, in his neighborhood, everywhere, there's always a story about a black person doing something awful. Often something cartoonishly awful.
Do I believe one or two of those stories? Sure, maybe. Do I believe black people often do awful things, and at a disproportionate frequency? Yeah. Do I believe that he is constantly running into black people being nothing but horrible? No. At a certain point you recognize a pattern to the stories. They are more of a vibe than accurate narrative.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
Sure, I believe an immigrant once went around stabbing people in the butt. I even heard about that one at the time. Because it was quite newsworthy.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
Stormlight Archive is where I pretty much bailed on Sanderson. I really liked the first book, but the second was so tedious I lost any desire to continue the series.
This is, in fact, what seems to happen with all his series. A decent first novel increasingly becomes self-referential Cosmere wank in the later books. And more and more it's Brandon Sanderson (tm) writing a Brandon Sanderson (tm) novel. The man has no range.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
I live in that general area, and none of this sounds remotely familiar or believable. Are there a lot of illegals, and crime (especially in the Baltimore -DC corridor)? Of course. But all these tall tales about one town after another being "invaded" by mustachioed Mexicans beating up the high school students, roads swarming with drunken gangsters, museums literally being torn up like an SNL sketch of Great Replacement Theory?
Obviously asking for places and news articles would be tantamount to asking someone to dox themselves, so happily, no one will ever be required to prove any of this and people will believe it or not according to what they already believed.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
More words to justify treating simple and clear descriptive names as if you are a Harry Potter character afraid of summoning He Who Is Not To Be Named. This is not any kind of rational or principled opposition to a nebulous "enemy." It's literal superstition.
There are any number of people and organizations we all hold in disdain or worse. Inventing euphemisms or derogatory epithets to avoid naming them is the level of response I expect from young teens.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
I don't follow Tiktok at all, but it's spread to YouTube and reddit and other social media. "Unalived" is usually used as a euphemism for killed or committed suicide. "Grape" also sounds like it's supposed to be a joke to me, but it seems to be replacing the "r*pe" obfuscation that I guess is supposed to be less "triggering" than seeing all the letters.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11hr ago
Oh, thanks for outing yourself. I already banned you for two weeks because you keep making shitty comments, but since you just admitted to being a very specific ban evader, I will make it permanent.
I don't get why you think this makes you clever, but whatever.
You've accumulated four warnings in a couple of months for obnoxious raspberries that add nothing to the conversation. And you decide you need to come back to a 17-day-old comment to say "Fuck off, retard"?
I'm going straight to a two-week ban this time, and will be in favor of escalating to a permaban next time, because you seem to be one of those people who's just here to shit on threads.
ETA: Escalated to permaban for ban evasion
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11hr ago
Numbering is mine. Amadan seems to think I've had at least 4 accounts and is holding this against me in his moderation decisions.
I did believe you have gone through at least four accounts between reddit and here. I did not hold that against you in my moderation decisions.
You have told me (in modmail) that this is incorrect, you never had any other accounts. As I told you in the response you apparently won't read, I will take your word for that and apologize for my error. But it doesn't matter, because as @naraburns and I said, "running alts" was never one of the issues with you. (I never claimed nor thought you were using alts for ban evasion.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11hr ago
Where's the part where we "warped the rules" for Darwin's benefit?
I don't entirely agree with Zorba's (6-year-old!) distinction between "abrasive" and "antagonistic" (they are two different things, but they are closely associated and someone being consistently abrasive is probably being consistently antagonistic) but I see what he was getting at. You have never been able to accept that you can't rules-lawyer your way into demanding we ban all and only the people you don't like.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
21hr ago
Nah, man, this is silly. His name was George Floyd. That's simply a fact. He was a person of historical significance who had a name that we use the same way we use names to refer to anyone else when we're trying to convey information about who we're discussing. You are not "Saying his name" in the liturgical BLM sense just because you use his name to communicate data.
You can despise him and the Black Lives Matter movement all you want, but literally Voldemorting words is giving "the enemy" more power over you than if you just used accurate names and descriptions for things. Notice that I typed "Black Lives Matter" without in any way implying that I endorse the movement, because everyone understands what I mean by referring to it.
These awkward affectations you use to avoid typing words remind me of Zoomers saying "unalived" or "grape" - originally because they had to censor certain words on TikTok, but now it's just becoming a Zoomer thing that you can't Say Those Words.
It's ridiculous and it isn't making some political point or p0wning the Wokes, it's just you contributing to the obfuscation of language.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
22hr ago
Information? No. Anecdotal observations? A few. But might I suggest you just create a thread in Small Scale questions or something?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
You don't have to say anyone's name, but "Fentanyl Floyd" is just obnoxious boo-lighting and very explicitly waging the culture war.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
No. You are still missing the point I was trying to make. By all means, perhaps it matters that the characters are white. My argument is that (the pro-race-blind-casting position is that) it shouldn't matter if a character who is theoretically white within the story is played by an actor who is visibly black. This is precisely what I meant about Hobbit genetics being neither here nor there to the debate: I am not denying that the Hobbits are meant to be white. I am saying that you can cast a bunch of black actors as white Hobbits.
Are you saying that when we see black actors on the screen or the stage, we should imagine they are actually white (if the characters are supposedly white)?
I am not sure if you're trolling or serious.
Like, first of all, are you proposing that this is actually the intent of casting black women as Viking leaders and black people as elves and hobbits? Like, the director was thinking "This black actress is actually playing a white Swedish man, but she really nailed the role and the audience will get that she's actually supposed to be a white man? And the audience watching black elves and hobbits will just imagine them being white?"
I think that is extraordinarily unlikely. I don't think anyone from the director to the actors were actually thinking that, and they certainly didn't intend the audience to think that, and imagine if anyone did say "Actually, their characters are really white." That would... not be accepted. It would be black erasure. It would be white fragility for being unable to imagine characters as anything but white. It would #hollywoodsowhite and white supremacy. Come on.
There is a thin argument to be made for affirmative action in casting, and likewise a thin argument based on historical inequity to say "It's okay to cast a black actor as a historically white character but not okay to cast a white character as a historically black character." I don't really agree with this (I think some roles don't matter much - a black James Bond, sure. A black King Arthur? Please. Hamilton was a special case where casting everyone as black was intentional to make a point) but I get why the one provokes outrage and the other we're just supposed to accept.
But when you go all-in on detaching race and physical appearance from any kind of historical or fictional verisimilitude, but only ever in one direction, that doesn't seem like affirmative action, that seems like a fuck you that they are basically daring you to object to. I am not fond of the frequent alt-right claims of "humiliation rituals," but goddamn if this doesn't feel like it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Like @ThenElection says, it's not just that Mamet is "successful in her field." It's that Mamet is a dudely playwright who offends feminist sensibilities (yet he's successful!) who is also a right-winger (yet he's successful!) and wrote a play about a "women's issue" that should have been written by a (feminist) woman (yet he was successful!) and also she isn't very successful. It's unfair!
This is just petty poison pen writing. Like trans author Gretchen Felker-Martin writing a post-apocalyptic horror novel where TERFs are the villains and inserts a paragraph about JK Rowling getting burned alive in her mansion, or Michael Crichton making one of his critics a child rapist with a small penis.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I agree with @Sunshine. This will make lots of noise in the usual places, but absent rock-solid proof that Trump banged underage girls (and not just "barely illegal" underage, but like 12- or 13-year-olds), it will just add to the growing pile of things that Democrats say prove Trump is a monster unfit to be President and Republicans say are a bunch of unfounded smears and whattabout Clinton.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
St. Elsewhere and its copy, ER (or was it ER that copied St. Elsewhere? I can't remember) were preachy at times and full of Very Special Episodes, but in the 80s and 90s conservatives could sometimes be depicted as sympathetic characters. (If they remade Family Ties, Alex Keaton would have to be a Never Trumper with a trans best friend, and West Wing would have to make all the Republican characters except the outright villains members of the Lincoln Project.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Can you point to the post where we said "being abrasive and antagonistic are totally different things, so see, darwin didn't admit to anything banworthy"?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Okay, come on, this is just pure reddit-tier boo-outgroup.
You are better than this.
Regarding @WhiningCoil and why I didn't mod him: first, sometimes a mod doesn't want to mod a particular comment for any number of reasons. It might be because they have a history with that user and are afraid they might be too biased. It might be because they are uncertain how "bad" it is and whether it merits modding (and honestly, they want some other mod to make the call). It might be because it's ambiguous enough we actually need to have a discussion in the mod channel about it. It might be because they just don't feel like taking the effort to write a justification statement for the banning, which especially in borderline cases, where the user is popular, and/or when we expect pushback, needs to be written with some effort to explain our reasoning, rather than just "Bad post, 3-day ban." Regardless of the actual length of the mod message, they do require more effort and thought than a regular post, because I assure you, we all take the responsibility seriously, we don't just react on impulse and ban people when they sufficiently annoy us.
In this case it was a little of all of those. I thought @WhiningCoil's comment was bad, but... eh, assuming you take his story at face value (which generally one should not, you might have noticed how very, very "on the nose" most of his stories are, with anecdotes stocked with horrible NPC caricatures from Central Casting), yes, he was very clearly making an intentional, racialized comment, but he was also (allegedly) describing a real situation. I expected a modding would result in people complaining that we're trying to forbid Noticing (tm). I didn't want to make the call because I am well aware of his animosity and I felt like a mod warning would be better from someone else he can't scream is persecuting him (and whose mod message he would actually read). I knew modding him would require me writing a detailed response justifying it (the sort that @naraburns is much better at), for the benefit of other posters, if not WC. And also, ironically, I like WC (as a poster, though not so much as a person) and he writes quite a few AAQCs. I would prefer he just tone it down rather than getting banned or rage-quitting, but unfortunately his cumulative record is bad enough that he's getting close to a permaban, and I just didn't want to add another stone to that pile, even if he deserves it.
As for the stated principles of the Motte: those are principals. They are aspirational. Do we always achieve those lofty goals? I am certainly not going to say every thread here is high quality discussion full of smart people saying intelligent things. We definitely do not see everyone acting with "charity and kindness." Still, I do think this place is not quite like anywhere else. There are reddit communities that are still good (for some value of "good") but only if the discussion stays away from certain topics. There are places where people can talk about "forbidden" topics (HBD, Holocaust denial, trans-critical views, etc.) but those places are full of people who outright hate the people they are talking about, and no matter how lofty and intellectual they try to be, the seething hate is always evident (and they are not much better than reddit about dealing with contrary opinions).
So is the Motte "converging" on an accepted range of opinions? Maybe, kind of, but we still have some leftists here, there is anything but a unanimous consensus on HBD and trans people and Jews, and the current events topics, the AI topics, the history topics, do often have genuinely high quality and interesting discussions from knowledgeable people with very different perspectives. We get accused of various things from being a "right-wing" site to being a den of seven zillion witches, but I think our principles are still intact if imperfectly enforced. I see the Motte kind of like America: it's never really lived up to its ideals nor fulfilled its promises, the "community" and sense of shared goals is often a polite fiction, and we flounder and sometimes fail, but damned if it doesn't still beat the alternatives.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Dude, for someone who has outright made up so many things about me and what I have said when I have not, it's rich you calling me a liar. (Yes, I know you have me blocked, but I also you know you'll see this message anyway when you look for messages while logged out.)
I know what your original account was on reddit. You switched to a new one, came here with yet another one, and I am pretty sure you went through a couple others along the way-I will admit I might be misremembering those (though I think I could name them). I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using.
You can feel how you feel, but my moderation of you has been, if anything, more charitable than what other mods would have been.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2d ago
Look, this is worth nothing, and I am no therapist, but I feel like a cry for help should get some kind of answer. I don't know you or your life situation. I don't doubt it's shitty for you to feel like this. But "defective subhuman" sounds pretty dramatic and very unlikely, and as for "decades of pointless misery," there are some things that are outside your control and some things that are not, and very people are truly fated to "decades of pointless misery" for reasons entirely outside their control.
I won't go further since I am not diagnosing you or trying to probe more into your "problems." If you just wanted someone to hear you, I hear you. If you want solutions, they exist.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2d ago
What is someone supposed to even say to that? There is no idea to respond to, only a person, but we are not allowed to make personal attacks. It’s frustrating to hear the only response to @shoeonfoot — “just debate the hot takes” — completely miss the point.
What do you want? A rule that if someone expresses a disagreeable sentiment, you are allowed to say "Wow, you're a racist, fuck off"?
You probably know he's hugely popular, and I'll admit I've read quite a few of his books because he's got a pleasant and entertaining style, but in my opinion he's very overrated. However, if you like the series (SA is his "flagship" magnum opus), he (unlike GRRM and Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch) will probably actually finish it.
And he'll also write like five other books per year along the way.
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