netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
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User ID: 647
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Kid with some combination of personal and domestic issues.
Inadequate food or shelter, abusive or absent parents, fetal alcohol syndrome, that kind of thing. Includes a bunch of stuff which really can’t be the kid’s fault but will probably turn into a bunch of bad choices by age 18.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
first paragraph
He’s done it! He’s found a new hobby!
second
No way this is real…
third
Oh, there it is.
What’s your creative process for a post like this? Do you start by following Jews on Twitter, then looking for sequelae? Or do you see a modern habbening and start tearing up the floorboards?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
It was incredible watching the background FIFA hate melt away during the World Cup. Now that we’re back to forgetting soccer exists, Americans will presumably go back to hating FIFA for Qatar or whatever.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Are you being sarcastic or serious? How about the original xitter? Speak plainly.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
Not sure I understand what you’re envisioning. A few million tea partiers? A few thousand TPs hiding in a few million Americans?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
I know! The latter are a big chunk of what I had in mind. Bolt-actions with integrated or at least very limited magazines, which are probably the most likely gun to get a carve out from wider bans.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
See, this is what I’m talking about.
When someone gives you a measured, qualified answer, you accuse them of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning. That looks—looks!—like bad faith. Why is it so surprising that people might not want to engage with such a gotcha?
I understand that you think this is only possible because your opinion is simple, pure, and obviously correct. I promise you do not have a monopoly on that feeling.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
Nah.
Small arms haven’t been the deciding factor in state warfare since the proliferation of high explosives. The 2A remained relevant because you still have to interact with the population. Boots on the ground, as it were. That part hasn’t changed.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
Eh, you can’t really compare rights indirectly. You’ve got to look for places they come into direct conflict: my rights to fist-swinging vs. your right to facial integrity, your life vs. my self-defense, and so on.
Cars are very heavily regulated when it comes to other people. But they have a lot more uses which don’t involve others.
The closest gun comparison is hunting rifles, which not coincidentally tend to get the most slack from regulators.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
Upheld.
You have been previously warned about substituting LLMs for effort. This instance is not any better.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
Right.
There is an obvious third reason: you aren’t an abuser, but it takes more verbiage to explain so, because the question is stacked against you. Both of the one-word answers are inadequate by design. You are forced to spend more time structuring your defense than the opponent had to spend making the attack.
Adding qualifiers makes your answer weaker. Doubly so if your every word is being mined for sound bites. The most charismatic and agile speakers can still manage it, making a “gotcha” look like a normal question. (I was reading some of the Lincoln-Douglas highlights, and they’re chock full of qualifiers and hypotheticals. It was a different time.) These clips are not particularly charismatic.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
Asking gotcha questions is not bulverizing. Watching someone answer such a question, then theorizing on how they must be a turncoat, lunatic, or dishonest coward, though?
There is an excluded option, what I thought was the obvious one: they don’t want to play a rigged game. They recognize a loaded question, or outrage bait, and try not to walk into the minefield. Sometimes this works out. Sometimes it looks cringey and gives the baiters what they wanted. Regardless, it doesn’t require lunacy or cowardice or even cognitive dissonance.
Trying to rehabilitate “gotchas” as a totally legitimate strategy, one that only works on the deluded, is wishful thinking at best. One can score rhetorical points playing for any team.
Whose team do you think I’m on, exactly?
As the prophet once said:
How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.
Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.
I’m not trying to accuse you of bad faith. I think you have a standard human blind spot for tribal affiliation, and right now, it’s telling you that this weapon only works on the outgroup. That’s wrong. It works on whomever you can put on the spot.
I imagine might I feel like some liberal US Muslim leader, when he goes on the O’Reilly Show, and O’Reilly ambushes him and demands to know why he and other American Muslims haven’t condemned beheadings by ISIS more, demands that he criticize them right there on live TV. And you can see the wheels in the Muslim leader’s head turning, thinking something like “Okay, obviously beheadings are terrible and I hate them as much as anyone. But you don’t care even the slightest bit about the victims of beheadings. You’re just looking for a way to score points against me so you can embarass all Muslims. And I would rather personally behead every single person in the world than give a smug bigot like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction than you’ve already got.”
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
What? No, this is base Bulverism. You are ruling out the only answer which matters.
Have you stopped beating your wife?
- If you answer “yes,” you’re either a liar or an (reformed?) abuser.
- If you answer “no”, you’re either an abuser or a pedant.
- If you refuse to answer, or give a waffly non answer, what does it mean?
As you’ve framed it, the only reasons to take the third option are if you aren’t an abuser, but feel the need to pretend you are, or if you are an abuser, but realize you can’t say it out loud. Hence “dishonest coward.”
This is stupid. There is an obvious third reason: you aren’t an abuser, but it takes more verbiage to explain so, because the question is stacked against you. Both of the one-word answers are inadequate by design. You are forced to spend more time structuring your defense than the opponent had to spend making the attack.
Yes, this is a bad thing.
In the simple case, the accuser only gets a little mileage from an asymmetric question. Extending “no” to “no, because I never beat her at all” is relatively cheap. Anyone who cares can see the full version.
But we don’t live in the simple case. Setting aside intentional misrepresentation, a bad actor can get more advantage by extending the question. “Have you stopped beating your wife?” has an obvious gotcha. “Where were you on the night of September 13th, 1987?” is not immediately obvious, even if it eventually unfurls into the same accusation. Asymmetrical questions are the simplest building block of narrative control. Narrative control does not converge on the truth.
Okay, but I like it when my team controls the narrative!
Great. Unfortunately, so does everyone else. I think you should uphold norms which favor the truth rather than ones which flatter whomever has the initiative. Right now that involves some gender-critical congressmen. In two to four years, who can say?
For a different perspective, consider this.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
It doesn’t seem hard to you, one of our highest-effort and most rules-compliant users. I am quite confident that you could do it. Most users are not you.
The asterisks and the pretty words are useful because they slow down the burbling outrage which usually drives people to make this category of argument. Requiring a certain level of detachment is our negative feedback loop. It filters out a large fraction of the most reflexive arguments.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
The phone zombies thing is probably real (…I type from my phone).
I don’t want to speculate on TikTok sluts, or on the specific environment of Bath courses, but I note that imitating American thirst traps is not exactly new.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
Judging public opinion based on standup might not be an unbiased estimate.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
Amadan’s explanation is good.
If you took away the laundry list of Things My Outgroup Did, what would be left? The single last paragraph, which is pure culture war.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
Please do not use this thread to wage the culture war. That includes personal attacks, painting your enemies with a broad brush, and yes, picking inflammatory phrasing. You are clearly going for heat over light.
It’s been some time since your last ban, but not much time at all since you were last given a final warning for the same attitude. 30 day ban this time.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
Oh, it’s you again. You appear to have learned the wrong lesson from your last appearance.
Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War.
This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another
Three day ban this time. Expect it to escalate if you don’t use that time to actually read the paragraphs at the top of the page.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
9d ago
Krystal ball
Genuinely surprised that we never got a Metal Gear character with this name.
Anyway, I’m not really seeing the problem here. I don’t like an ethnostate. I think that claiming Israel is one but Palestine wouldn’t be is misguided at best. Therefore, I’m sympathetic to people who rank the current situation over the palette-swapped version. That seems to be Smith’s position.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
9d ago
Sorry. No sarcasm was intended.
My understanding is that the warming itself is easy to measure. We have thermometer records going back to the 1800s and reasonable proxies going back further. This would make 3) well-attested.
I do not believe that 3) is controversial. I have seen people argue that 3) was correlated with, not caused by, 2). I have also seen people accept 3) and then propose 4) it won’t be that bad. Those are both consistent positions, and I respect the people who are trying to seriously find evidence for them.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
9d ago
But 3) is the most well-attested part! It’s the whole reason Al Gore could get up on stage and point to those sawtooth curves. I don’t think I’ve seen an argument that the planet is actually cooler than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
If 3) is hard, the correct response is not to throw up our hands and let God decide. And there are some skeptics out there trying to make their own models say, yeah, it’s alarming but okay. Here’s a feedback mechanism, here’s a reversal, we’ll be alright if we bring back bunker fuels. Stuff like that.
But the mainstream version of climate skepticism is to accuse the people working on 3) of being paid degrowth shills who hate America. You can see it all over this thread. The motte is that spending money on climate research is wasteful and rewards the wreckers. The bailey is that it’s all fake and gay by default. Is that truth-seeking behavior?
I think your food analogy is wrongheaded. What you’ve seen are the fads, the contrarians, the countersignals. The people selling something by contrasting it with a mainstream. Climate science is the mainstream! That’s why so much time and effort has to go into discrediting it! The dynamics are completely different than the market for fad diets.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
9d ago
Thank you.
It’s amazing how many things are explained by sampling bias.
If the more exotic experience involves vastly outperforming slugthrowers, they can still displace ‘em.
Pick one or more and roll with it.
I think you could make a good setup by expanding on the classic “kinetic barriers.” Have your psychics passively repel bullets and shrapnel but not lasers.
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