naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Top posts need mod approval and the mod team only currently exists in American time zones. I've approved your post, so now it's visible to everyone.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Oh! Well, thank you for teaching me something new today! I find regional idioms endlessly fascinating.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Is this a correction? Did I misquote you? My best guess is that you are saying it should be
the journalist has remarkably little faith in their own opinions to get in the marketplace of ideas
but that's not what your comment actually says, and I don't see any other obvious candidates for correction.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
if you are gonna side with savages to litigate trivial matters like the fact that people won't vote for self-described atheists, you deserve to be wiped out and remembered only as an enemy of humanity, or of the only part of it worth anything anyway
This is far too antagonistic, even framed as a hypothetical. The bar for arguing that any person or group literally deserves death and/or damnatio memoriae is high, though perhaps permissible when accompanied by sufficient effort; arguing that someone you are talking to here personally deserves such things for things they've said here is a hard no. You appear to be new here so I won't hit you with a ban straightaway, but please understand that this is a banworthy offense.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
2 players:
Patchwork (short and very light)
7 Wonders Duel (short and medium depth)
War of the Ring (or Star Wars Rebellion if sci-fi is more your jam) (long)
2-3 players:
Splendor (short and light)
Race for the Galaxy (short and medium depth)
Le Havre (long)
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
(I know, I know, all views from all places, etc. But just as a drive-by nazism or pedoism wouldn't be welcome, it'd be cool if porn was in the same category)
Interestingly enough, porn is in the same category--but it is porn that is in the same category, not conversations about porn.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
My experience is that it is extremely politically biased--on any page where political bias seems likely. This is probably to be expected; "wokism" (or at least a certain strain of it) is arguably just "the unstable populist ideology that emerged from post-smartphone internet memes in the anglophone world" and so is the default ideology of all websites minus those that are explicitly anti-woke (compare Conquest's Laws). Wikipedia is online and not explicitly anti-woke, ergo it has the standard anglophone internet bias (where applicable).
Fortunately--I think!--most Wikipedia pages are not (yet?) politically relevant, and thus often quite useful and more or less devoid of political bias (though not, it bears mentioning, other kinds of bias, for example against any heterodox views on the relevant subject matter). Many people like to remind others that Wikipedia, while useful, should probably not be taken as a definitive or authoritative source of anything. It is my view that this warning is probably wisely heeded, however, in connection with all sources of knowledge.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Just as a bit of meta--I did not create a new thread since the third one did not top 500 comments in a week. There is a "Transnational Thursdays" thread posted each week by @Soriek that is probably the best place for Israel-Gaza discussion outside the CW thread going forward, at least barring any major new developments.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Part of the bizarreness of this entire discussion is all the posters (including you!) making claims along the lines of "no, I can read your mind, you're really trying to teabag modern southerners"
No--that's the claim that was being made. So your response made the conversation proceed roughly in this way:
Claim: Melting down statues is teabagging [modern southerners]!
Response: What the fuck is wrong with teabagging [slavers]?
Except that the word used for the bracketed terms was "outgroup" both times. You did not respond to what was being said; you substituted the argument for your own straw version. I thought it would be easier to just point out that making the point you've made here (two different outgroups are under discussion, maybe it's good to be iconoclastic about one of them) was fine, but actually calling names was not. When you then strawmanned my mod message, too, I got a bit more detailed.
I assure you that most people happy about the melting down are happy for the first reason, not the overly complicated second.
You're certainly allowed to believe that. But you can't assume it in the middle of a conversation with people who disagree, are you certainly can't do so as an excuse to nakedly assert that "some cultures/societies are so execrable that symbolically 'teabagging' them is great." That's too much heat for the amount of actual light you brought to the discussion.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
It's very difficult for me to see this post as anything but bad faith apophasis.
We don't typically ban people based on their usernames (after all, what is in a name?) and yet yours is suspicious. Bare links are off-limits; you didn't post a bare link, but copy-pasting most of an article is a near cousin. So you wrote some commentary, but it hardly seems to be effortful commentary--just a dismissal: also suspicious. If someone said "tomorrow, a user is going to make a post that is 90% copy-pasted ZHPL, followed by 10% commentary that is at best a limp-wristed disavowal of the piece," what would I predict was the reason for the post? I would predict it was posted by a troll who either agrees with ZHPL but is pretending they don't, or disagrees with ZHPL but is fishing for damning and sneer-worthy responses from the Motte.
At minimum, this sort of thing is egregiously obnoxious. Please don't.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Would "I hold this truth to be self-evident" be an acceptable formulation?
I mean, more or less; so long as you hedge it about with sufficient epistemically humble caveats about it being your own view, ideally with some bits of evidence (even anecdotal!) for why it is your view, pretty well any substantive position is permissibly expressed here. "I honestly believe that every person knows this deep in their gut, and here are some reasons why" is a much better post than "Every person knows it, that's just how it is." One reason why it is a better post is that you are in an ideal position to report your own views; you are much less ideally situated to make sweeping reports concerning what "every person knows." That's an invitation to bad (low effort) responses like "Well, I don't know that, so you're wrong," which is a much less productive discussion than "our experiences of the world do not seem to align, so perhaps we can learn something from one another."
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.
This is about as clean a violation of the "consensus building" rule as it gets. Please don't do that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
There is not nearly enough effort backing up your substantive point, here. Please engage with effort, charity, and an eye toward writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
(funny how Jews pop up in any event)
Snide asides like this add only heat. Please don't.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
This specific interaction with you seems to happen every time I comment about trans stuff.
Interesting. I did not originally see that this was a thread about gender revisionism, however--only when I went back to check the context of the conversation.
The first comment was sincere confusion.
Well, like I said, that doesn't strike me as totally implausible. But "I'm gonna ask a question that is non-specific, without even making any clearly charitable attempt at interpreting your position as written or expressing my own views in vulnerable detail" is often used as bait, by positioning one commenter as "just asking questions," placing the entire burden of carrying the discussion on the other as they explain their own position while getting increasingly frustrated with the refusal of the other party to engage. Of course--sometimes we are completely ignorant and the best we can manage is a "huh, say more please?" But often such noncommittal engagement is just insincere.
The second comment was genuinely trying to point out an alternative explanation for their observations (the two situations look very similar to the receiver) and see if they wanted to reflect and talk about the topic more (apparently not).
Part of charitable engagement is accepting evidence presented in the best possible light. Sometimes the evidence is sufficiently unlikely that a different approach is warranted, but when you re-describe someone's experiences you're engaged in a sort of mind-reading argument, rather than meeting them on their own terms. This is encapsulated in part in this rule:
In addition, we ask that responders address what was literally said, on the assumption that this was at least part of the intention. Nothing is more frustrating than making a clear point and having your conversation partner assume you're talking in circles. We don't require that you stop after addressing what was literally said, but try, at least, to start there.
Like, in our non-mod-hat interaction here, imagine if instead of just pointing out to you something you didn't know, I had responded
I've never seen added to the LGBT+ acronym by anyone other than opponents
I wonder if you've actually never seen that, or if you understand on some level that "2S" is so blatantly ridiculous that you have always just assumed any time you saw it that you were dealing with opponents.
This is a strictly inferior response to the one I wrote. Instead of giving you (I assume) new information directly correcting your false belief (as my actual response did), this response assumes you are in fact wrong about your own experiences and skips straight to describing why you are wrong by insinuating, and not even very subtly, that you are just using arguments as soldiers, rather than possessing any real understanding of the world. Slapping an "I wonder" at the front to make it speculative rather than declarative softens it some, but comes across as passive-aggressive instead, on account of the Bulverism that follows.
I'm pretty sure I've seen much harsher language against "the woke" or whatever around here.
As usual: other people's bad behavior doesn't excuse your own. If you see something you think violates the rules, report it. I'm not going to claim we catch every violation--far from it! But if the whole substance of a comment is "nah, $OUTGROUP deserves utter scorn," that's just not contributing anything of value to any conversation anywhere. It's pure noise, no signal. And that's without addressing the suspicious move where you substituted "people who prefer not to have Confederate statues destroyed" with "people who rebelled to support slavery" as the outgroup being discussed--maybe that was just an innocent mistake on your part, but even assuming this is so, your comment brings no light.
You're really going to play into this what I though was a strawman where you can insult wokeism but need to be careful how you talk about literal confederate slaveowners?
No. It continues to be basically everyone's favorite complaint about moderation here, though--"the mods are definitely thumbing the scales for my opponents!" But no--you're just the one breaking the rules, this time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I wonder if you've actually met a lot of progressives who believe that
I kind of frowned at your comment above, which is plausibly innocent in spite of the fact that it reads like thinly-veiled, low-effort bait. But leading your further response with a backhanded "hmm I wonder" seems like confirmation that your initial question was insincere, and you were just probing for an angle to sneer at. This is unnecessarily antagonistic (and arguably Bulverism, too). Engage honestly, or not at all, please. (In particular, speculating on the motives of your interlocutor is something that must be handled with effort and charity, and is often better never raised at all. And yes--I understand that is what I am doing here, but it is something moderation sometimes requires.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I believe they are referring to 'two-spirit', an idea that I haven't seen any actual members of the LGBT community bring up unprompted in at least 10 years (outside of adversarially-chosen social media screencaps), and something that I've never seen added to the LGBT+ acronym by anyone other than opponents.
The Canadian government does it all the time.
This acronym represents Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and additional people who identify as part of sexual and gender diverse communities. The “2S” at the front recognizes Two-Spirit people as the first 2SLGBTQI+ communities.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos
Let's not do this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
conservatives still mindlessly repeat
But
There are literally millions of people on either side of every major conflict, and finding that one of them is doing something wrong or thoughtless proves nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
So please don't drop low-effort group smears.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
it's full of horrible people like you
Let's not do this please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Can someone explain to me why teabagging this particular outgroup is a bad thing?
It's against the rules.
The question was fine, but the actual tea-bagging--
some cultures/societies are so execrable that symbolically "teabagging" them is great. The Confederacy/Antebellum south is one of these
--is not.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Except I don't think "that bird has a Western, Anglo name" is what is keeping black, Asian, Latino etc. people out of birdwatching.
Yeah, this sort of thinking has always been puzzling to me--nobody studies biology without learning Latin names, nobody studies math without learning Greek letters. "Black people won't go birdwatching because all the birds are named Smith" is an utterly baffling take. That said--
Nol says she recently was visiting some salt marshes this summer and saw a common bird there that's called Wilson's Snipe, which has a long bill and engages in dramatic displays such as flying in high circles, which produces a whistling sound as air flows over specialized feathers. "And I thought, what a terrible name," she says. "I mean, Wilson was the father of modern ornithology in North America, but this bird has so many other evocative characteristics."
If "evocative" is the real goal, I suppose if they decide to start naming birds stuff like "Talonflame" or "Spearow" maybe I could get on board...?
One one hand, it is true that the IRS cannot and does not audit everyone, or send all delinquent accounts to some form of collections. It is also true that they are disinterested in de minimis settlements from judgment-proof citizens, i.e. they're not coming after you for a $5 error (though they might send a letter about it!).
On the other hand, it is also true that there are things you can do that their computer systems will now notice more or less automatically, which will substantially increase your risk of an audit and/or collection activity. People can, and do, get hit with wage garnishment and even jail time for unpaid accounts.
I have never been able to think of a good moral argument for income or capital gains taxes; sales taxes possibly, certain limited property taxes maybe, but income and capital gains taxes are just straight theft. So please don't imagine I have any sympathy for the IRS when I say: just pay the IRS what you owe under the law as written. Unless you are at least a centi-millionaire for whom the cost of legal defense is arguably less than the possible savings, there are very few situations where I can imagine the risk outweighing the reward.
Now you might say--"but I don't know what I owe, because 'estimated taxes' are bullshit!" I sympathize, I really, really do. The fact that a single windfall can result in a year or more of the IRS asking you to pre-pay your taxes based on unrealized income you can't possibly predict is incredibly abusive. But so long as you pay a plausibly good faith estimate, you will have done something defensible. And also remember that the IRS doesn't (usually?) escalate to "jail time"--the first thing they do is demand their protection money, and the second thing they do is add penalties on top of that. So if you underpay your estimated taxes, there's a chance they'll hit you with a penalty for it.
Setting up a shady small business and taking deductions can indeed reduce your apparent tax burden, but it also exponentially increases your chances of an audit (and the penalties you will incur in the process).
Good luck!
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