Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
In my experience, the French pronunciation is reserved for specifically artistic contexts. You pay homage to the King of France, you pay 'ommage to Jean-Luc Godard.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Study rhetoric! Preferably with a Classical flavour to it, though of the moderns I recommend Leo Strauss, HL Mencken, and Keith Johnstone's Impro. As Rousseau said, "man is the chief instrument of man", and rhetoric is how one accesses that instrument. Not entirely unlike wavedashing life, honestly.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
I address the argument that Watson is a kook, and that he's icky weird ew, in my demand for an argument from Count - Watson being icky weird ew is not actually inherently evident from those statements, but something you need to argue for and defend, that's the entire spirit of this place. I don't believe that the rules on speaking plainly and consensus-building are meant to say that you should throw out rough sketches of an argument, where it's impossible to distinguish between motte and bailey, and then expect commenters to paint out the rest of it for you. There is no good argument with to be had, so I declined the half-written invitation.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
So, previously, in response to justawoman, I wrote that there's a distinct stage in the decline of forums where their dynamic becomes increasingly dominated by people coming in to argue with "the forum", which they see as an amorphous outgroup blob. The paradigmatic example to me is all the incels (not in the lib sense, actual incels) going to 4chan's /fit/ to argue with /fit/izens about how self-improvement is impossible and nobody will ever get laid except Chad. It may be true that, in certain respects - perhaps on particular issues, perhaps in response to particular arguments, or perhaps, perhaps often, in response to obviously bad posts which cloak themselves in those issues and arguments - themotte can summon a hornet's nest. This is bad. It is bad to poke the hornet's nest, bad to summon the hornets, bad to be a hornet. If you do this, you are degrading the space and the community. Even though many people come here and see what they want to see, themotte is not a monolithic rightoid hiveblob, but to troll it as if it is a monolithic rightoid hiveblob is to summon that hiveblob out of the future as an entirely natural defense mechanism. If you like this dynamic in a community, I invite you to move on, and instead visit the beautiful imageboard of /pol/, where anyone can play 128D dramatard chess with whatever outgroupblob they choose to envision.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Do any of those quotes show James Watson faux-innocently asking questions in order to get someone else to argue for socially unacceptable positions? I don't seem to see one.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Thank you, Dean, I appreciate your thoroughness. It's a surprising pleasure to have a post analyzed and explicated like this.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
I appreciate your thanks, though having slept on it I do feel like trolling back at him and to some extent backseat modding wasn't the ideal good-citizen-of-themotte response to give BC. But whomst among us is the perfect mottizen?
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
I think you would very much like to believe that's how people see you here, and I can see how you might have read that into my sarcasm. I just think you spend too much time on arrdrama, enjoy shit-stirring for the sake of it (possibly picking your views based on that, I can't say, but would be many such cases), and lower the tone of this otherwise pleasantly autismal establishment.
No, I don't think you're a leftoid baiting - mate, I wouldn't have chosen to make that post if I didn't know your posting well.
Plus, mentioning Franklin would be poor baitcraft. You'd get written off as a leftoid and not get nearly as much attention as doing the former rightoid schtick.
This is a well-crafted piece, let's break it down:
- OP begins with praise of James Watson, that's good ethos, builds rapport.
- Then there's a little narrative of how he once believed the simple rightoid account of Watson's cancellation, but then [Adam Curtis voice] something strange happened.
- He links to a long list of quotes on a liberal blog. Now, this is very clever, in that the full list has plenty of quotes many people here will either chuckle at and consider understandable, or outright agree with. Much heat to be generated just from commenters digging in and litigating the quotes.
- The selected quotes are well-chosen on that criterion, but also to get the attention of particular niches - the manlets, the redpillers, the Peaters. The last one will get at least two mottizens arguing with over exactly which lines it crosses.
- Now, what you leave out of your writing is as important as what you put in. And see this spot here, where OP deftly leaves out an argument. Now, he could explain his reasoning, why he reevaluated his views on Watson's "respectability", but that would narrow the scope of the comments and keep him defending himself in them. But, as everyone knows, those statements are bad, and I'm sure you all agree that anyone making them must be crazy, that's just consensus.
- Very clever twist next to replace the argument: OP draws a parallel with mystical kookery of exactly the type that mottizens of rationalist heritage particularly hate. Now, the false equivalency is obvious, there are all kinds of differences you can draw between an HBD guy saying grouchy, inflammatory things about women and minorities, exaggerating theories within regular biology, or making spicy jokes, and a quantum consciousness homeopathy yoga guy, so the weakness of the analogy is particularly great for getting those comments heated up.
- The parting shot, the cherry on top, is to end by asserting that Watson's views are even worse for "modern civil society". Again, no argument, but none needed, and the use of "modern civil society" calls deftly back to the rightoid-to-enlightenment narrative from the start of the post.
I'll leave it to the gallery to decide if OP simply has natural talent at this, or is a trained and well-polished master baiter, but, from me, kudos.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
True, but I suspect geniuses consumed by self-hatred also aren't going to be agonizing too much about whether their work crosses lines in dealing with others. To think of Kafka, he doesn't air his dirty laundry like Knausgaard does, but there's a hell of a lot of his life and the lives of others in his work. But even among the self-haters, I'm sure, there's a counterexample for everything (that's why these questions about art don't have bright-line answers, only ironic heuristics).
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
There is no objective standard of greatness, I know that won't suffice for mottizen autism, but I'm right, and this standard is both more serious and more useful than any attempt to pin down art like a dead beetle.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
To put it seriously, as a writer who deals with this question in my own work: if you're a great artist you can do whatever you want, your work is beyond good and evil. If you're not, write like you took a Hippocratic Oath. If you have to ask the question you're not great.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Yes, Aristotle talks about this. So does TLP, in his own way. Time, commitment, action, none of these are black boxes. They're habits, and the question of getting to them is a practical one of habit-formation, not just willing yourself into doing something.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Despite the framing of the comment, where I share Thomas's objection, I don't believe for a moment that this story caused his suicide or meaningfully contributed to it. If it did, someone would bring receipts, if only for the scandal-click value. It really smells like a classic j*urnalist sensationalism-by-implication play.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Are memoirs ever ok? How many details does one need to change before one can write a novel? Is bitching about your wife on TheMotte ok because it's all under pseudonyms? What if she reads what a mottizen said about her and kills herself out of shame? What about twitter under a pseudonym? What about a blog under a real name? If Kulak writes a little tweetstorm about some "feminist bitch" he had to deal with, and she reads it and recognizes that it was her, is he in the wrong? What about the "blankfaces" that scott aaronson decried? Or is it the ideological agenda that makes the crime? What details is one obligated to change to conceal identity, and which are immoral to change because one is no longer telling the real story?
The Knausgaard Rule: if you're a great artist they let you do it. Grab 'em by the memoir.
If you're a hack writing discourseslop to go viral, fuck you, learn to have an imagination.
(For reference, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote a six-volume autobiography, definitely the best book titled "My Struggle" ever written and indisputably one of the very greatest literary works of the century so far. It was extremely candid about his family, with the first volume describing cleaning out the house of his dead alcoholic hoarder father. His uncle hated this and has been very open about that. One of his exes said "it was as if he said: Now I'm going to punch you in the face. I know it's going to hurt, and I will drive you to the hospital afterwards. But I'm going to do it anyway." But Knausgaard gets to do that, because he's a great artist. She doesn't.)
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
Very understandable position! I would say even 1% is a significant overstatement of how likely a captured medieval footsoldier was to be tortured, but we'll never know for sure, and captivity would have been unpleasant enough to count as "cruel or unusual" today, besides a nontrivial chance of losing your head and a far higher chance of dying of disease.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?
Nothing like trench warfare in the sense of two opposing armies in open country, but medieval sieges could last a long time. The song Men of Harlech is about a seven-year siege, and the Crusaders took seven years to siege Tripoli. Three years definitely on the long end, though.
I would not be particularly worried about torture as a medieval soldier (nobles, of course, would get three squares and a cot while they waited to be ransomed) - in times of war it was a rare occurrence limited to some instances of intimidation, like difficult sieges, a few religious conflicts, and, of course, rebels or traitors. You would be much more likely to get a quick death than tortured, but at the luckiest you'd be stripped and let go or, for professionals, offered a place in the other duke's army. Somewhere in the middle would be impressment for war labour or, if the captors weren't Christian, relocation or lifetime slavery. At worst, worse than almost any transient torture, you could be impressed as a galley slave. Harsh or torturous punishments such as blinding were considered shocking enough to Western medieval chroniclers to be specifically noted when they occurred (e.g. Henry I blinding a man who sang insulting songs about him). I'm not saying there was anything pleasant at all about being taken prisoner in the Middle Ages, just that to my knowledge torture is relatively rare in the sources compared to ransom/execution/release/enslavement, all of which are easier and generally more beneficial to the captors. The exceptions, outside of a minority of inter-faith wars, would be rebellions - unfortunately, you probably don't get much of a choice as to whether your war is considered a legitimate conflict or a rebellion...
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
Yes, I agree with you entirely, that is also how I have always interpreted it. But I think the wording of the rule is such that people who don't read it carefully and/or are less experienced with the forum culture can easily get the wrong impression of what it means. Essentially, we are using "consensus-building" as a technical term removed somewhat from its ordinary use, and people may misunderstand that and try to interpret it based off ordinary use.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
Thank you, whoever nominated my comment for an AAQC and whoever accepted it, always an honour. I know this is more of a meta-thread question, and has probably been discussed on them before, but since it's fresh in my mind I'd like to ask it here: does anyone else find the wording of the rule against consensus-building to be a little misleading? It was on my mind as something to avoid while writing the comment, and came up in the discussion, and definitely made me think it could be clarified. Here is the full text:
Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity. "As everyone knows . . ." "I'm sure you all agree that . . ." We visit this site specifically because we don't all agree, and regardless of how universal you believe knowledge is, I guarantee someone doesn't know it yet. Humans are bad at disagreeing with each other, and starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement. It's a nice rhetorical trick in some situations, but it's against what we're trying to accomplish here.
I think this is a straightforwardly good rule, but the phrasing of the summary appears to confuse a lot of people. "Building consensus" in casual use can cover many kinds of valid arguments ("I think people should believe...", "I think many people believe...", "I observe people acting like...", etc., even bracketing that building a consensus is an inherent side-effect of winning an argument), and the text of the rule doesn't really refer directly to ideological conformity (it sort of reminds me of how people use "begging the question," referring to something very similar, incorrectly because of confusion with ordinary language). It also feels a little ambiguous how much the spirit of the law is violated by people coming in arguing "All good people believe X and only bad people believe Y" as a way to bait out people who believe Y and attack them as Bad. I would suggest something like "Don't assume consensus or enforce what you believe to be consensus." If we want to say something about ideological conformity, maybe an additional sentence explaining that.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
Perhaps Nasser would have been able to hold it a little longer by force, but Syria is, as recent history shows, not an easy country to hold by force, particularly when your "force" is an Arab army with all that entails.
As for Egypt and Saudi Arabia unifying, do you seriously think the Saudis look at Egyptians with anything other than dripping contempt that would make BAP blush? Do you think the Egyptian stratocratic barons under Sisi could restrain themselves from clumsily sacking Saudi Arabia's oil wealth? For all the vile stuff that America has done in the Arab world, if you take Western hegemony out of the picture, you wouldn't get some fantastical unified caliphate, you'd have a generational bloodbath that would only end when the last warlord runs out of oil.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
If you have the crazies/fats actively hitting on you, the better catches are probably batting eyes and waiting for you. The woman at the event was just trying to signal interest by complimenting you, and she was almost certainly nervous as well.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
If you think that being attracted to you makes a woman mentally ill the problem is probably not with her.
I'll be honest, man, I have a low opinion of self-professed "centrists", precisely because many of them are never happy unless they have some hiveblob they can preen against. I appreciate you not doing that. My advice to onlookers - you want to make this place better, and truer to its mission, find the small cracks, the points of true difference between the people here, and crack into them with an open mind.
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