Amadan

Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 19m ago

This looks like your words. Please tell me it was all your words and not GPT-enhanced. I don't want to be taken in. The writing is good, but bloated, which is why I am still narrowing my eyes a little.

As for the substance: well, you are right that this writer is a pathetic specimen. Now and then some woman writes some shit that seems almost perfectly attuned to misogynistic sensibilities. "Hey, you know how some men think women are vapid, narcissistic, neurotic, self-involved special special princesses incapable of genuine self-awareness, reflection, or taking responsibility for their own emotional reactions but expect the rest of the world to manage their needs? Yeah, let's write an article to exemplify that starring me as the main character." Really, it looks like ragebait but this woman is probably real. 2000 words to say "I am fat and my friend wants to not be fat and this made me have feelings."

Your response is more coherent but honestly, not wholly different in substance: she wrote something that touched a nerve and set you off. What you produced contains more insight and is more intelligent but should we really care what this specimen is feeling any more than she should care about her friend's medications? That is, do her feelings impact us any more than her friend's medications impact her? If they do, we should consider why we are allowing them to do so.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 36m ago

Funny how we have other people openly post about genociding Palestinians and that doesn't seem to get anyone banned.

This is a meaningless whine unless you have a specific post to talk about.

"Posting about..." is not a bannable offense.

Searching for the exact term "muslims believe" leads to 314 search results on the motte. Many of these comments are negative. There are over a thousand comments with the phrase "Russians are". Do they need specification as well?

Expressing negative opinions about Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, or Russians is not a bannable offense. Yes, this needs specification as well. I just told you above that you are allowed to have "negative opinions." I gave some very clear guidelines for what sort of "negative opinions" cross the line.

You show me where someone talks about Palestinians, Muslims, or Russians the way you talk about Jews. You show me someone with a history of raging about Palestinians, Muslims or Russians and not being told to cool it.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 6hr ago

Between this post and this one, the mods are now discussing whether you have earned the permaban you were promised last time you crashed out about Jews.

For now I am inclined to just tell you to chill out, despite the fact that I warned you no leniency would be granted last time. The reason for this is not because I think there is any chance you will moderate your behavior and stop being absolutely unhinged every time you post about Jews, but because threads about Israel and Jews always wind up here, and it's hard to say you are significantly worse than several other posters, who are more verbose and circumlocutious when they argue that Jews are monstrous and evil, but are expressing essentially the same sentiments.

The next post I see from you in the mod queue is probably going to be the trigger, though.

So just to review one more time for all our Joo-posters: you are allowed to hate Jews. You are allowed to say you hate Jews. You are allowed to advance theories about Jewish "behavior" and why they deserve hatred. But you cannot just "boo" your outgroup (e.g., Jews do this, Jews do that, Jews are blah blah blah) without pinning these accusations to specific groups. "Jews" are not a "specific group." You cannot realistically argue that there is something inherent to every single person of Jewish heritage that causes them to act a particular way. (I mean, if you want to, go ahead and present your biological/genetic evidence for this claim.) You cannot realistically argue that every single person in the "Jewish community" thinks a certain way or that everyone practicing the Jewish religion believes a certain thing. Because that is very obviously not true. So if you want go off on "Jews," you are almost certainly on thin ice, not because "Jews" are a protected class but because we mod people for doing exactly the same thing wrt every other group.

As always, you must proactively provide evidence in proportion to the inflammatory nature of your claims, and since claiming that an entire ethnic group is inherently treacherous, malevolent, and hostile to "our" interests is clearly inflammatory, you need to very diligently dot your i's and cross your t's every single time. And you don't.

Just as an example:

The jews see the goyim as cattle with no soul.

Really? "The Jews"? All Jews? All religious Jews? All Jews who are culturally Jewish regardless of their religious inclinations? You can argue (as some people do) from selected Talmudic excerpts that there is a strain of Judaism that considers "goyim as cattle with no soul." I think this is pretty clearly bad-faith cherry picking and you still need to, you know, point at the actual scriptures that say this (even @coffee_enjoyer only manages to produce some distorted and disputable texts to argue that that's what the nefarious Jews actually mean), but there are at least words you can point to as evidence that some Jews think things like this. There are rabbis who shitpost on Twitter and you can say "See, some Jews talk shit about goys."

But that's not sufficient evidence to claim "An ancient text says this, therefore all Jews believe this." Or "A prominent rabbi said this, so this is representative of what Jews think and we can indict them all on the basis of his words." It should go without saying that such standards would indict essentially every religious or ethnic group. But we've been over this before. Jew-haters gonna hate, but we're still going to apply the rules. Evenly.

You continue to post on very thin sufferance.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 6hr ago

Yeah, if you read mutual accounts of Israel/Palestine they both make a combination of plausible and risible claims about who was there first and who's been there longer.

There are Arab revisionists who claim that ancient Israel is a myth and the Jews literally never lived there at all (they focus on denying the Israel of the Old Testament and kind of ignore extensive Roman history- the Romans would have been surprised to learn there were no Jews in Palestine and Israel didn't exist). Zionist revisionists, for their part, will point out that small populations of Jews have existed in the region since antiquity, but try to link that to some unbroken lineage going back to King David.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 12hr ago

I don't know that any of the founders of Israel ever regretted it (though I am not that knowledgeable about all the personalities). Certainly they knew from the beginning that it was a fraught project that might fail. They were definitely aware the Arabs didn't want them there, though the more optimistic ones thought they'd eventually reach an accommodation and normalized relations.

The thing is, they really didn't have a lot of other choices.

Despite the fact that I am usually in the role of "Israel defender" here because the Jew-haters are so tediously disingenuous and ahistorical, I actually am not particularly invested in Israel. I wish them well but I also wish the Palestinians well - my preference would be for an impossible peace. I blame the impossibility mostly on the Palestinians, but not entirely. I also don't think the US should be so heavily invested in Israel. What do they do for us, really?

But I do like to understand where both sides are coming from. For example, I completely dismiss the "This is our ancient homeland" argument because that only plays if you are religious. Otherwise, no one has a right to land just because your ancestors lived there 2000 years ago.

That said, there are a lot of lies about Israel being a "settler-colonialist" project as well.

If you don't want to read books, my favorite current media figure speaking from the Israeli POV is Havig Rettig Gur. He has a YouTube channel and he is a Free Press columnist now. He's unabashedly Zionist, but he's very articulate and a clear explainer, without any of the anti-Arab vitriol you get from some Israel-explainers.

I wish there was an equivalent on the anti-Zionist side, but aside from people like Norman Finkelstein, there aren't many who aren't just antisemites with a coat of paint.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 20hr ago

To some degree, it's the euphemism treadmill. But it originated with the well-intentioned desire to treat mentally retarded people more humanely. Telling children not say "retard" did not, of course, cause children to become kinder, especially to retarded people, but since you asked for a steelman, it is now much more widely accepted in society that insulting and abusing the disabled is a shitty thing to do and the status of the mentally retarded is better now than it used to be.

That obviously didn't happen because we made "retard" a no-no word, but it can be argued that the mindset that tabooed the word contributed to greater awareness and sympathy.

I still think tabooing words is retarded, lame, and stupid (no shit, I've been lectured by SJs that "stupid" and "dumb" are offensive and ableist) but you asked for a steelman.

We had a small discussion last week about "Negro" and "Chinaman." Both of those words used to be perfectly acceptable. Now they are considered rude at best. Why? Mostly arbitrary shifts in usage, but those shifts came with improved racial conditions. The one didn't cause the other, but they are associated. Now "Retarded," "Negro," and "Chinaman" to describe a person all sound reductive and dehumanizing.

The advantage, of course, is now you have a power word to use when you really want to be offensive.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 20hr ago

I feel this describes most of the Jewish Americans that I knew in college and highschool. Especially the ethnically and culturally Jewish that did little of the actual religion part.

I think "opposed to the existence of Israel" spans a spectrum. There are people who think Israel in its present form is an oppressive ethnostate and it needs to be reformed ("reform" meaning anything from a one-state solution to a two-state solution to various other proposals that have been floated and failed over the years), and there are people who think Israel should literally cease to exist and if that means Israelis literally ceasing to exist, oh well.

Jews and other progressives who oppose Israel on moral grounds but don't actually hate Jews tend to be more of the former; they don't like Israel, but they also tend to not like the United States, or indeed the West. But they don't want to see a bloodbath, however unrealistic the alternatives they suggest.

The actual anti-Semites, of course, tend to be in the latter category, with their answer to "What about the Israelis who live there now?" ranging from "They can all move elsewhere" to "They should die."

It just seems like a doomed project to have an ethnostate and religious minority in a third world area, and neighbors with one of the most war happy religions out there. I am confused how the Israel project seemed like a good idea ever.

In all seriousness, read a few books on the topic. (I recommend reading both pro- and anti-Israel historians.) It might not convince you the Israel project was a good idea, but there are definitely reasons that made sense at the time, both ethno-religious and otherwise. Of course there were many alternative plans besides Israel itself; Uganda, Madagascar, Venezuela, and Alaska were among the proposals. It was both practical and historical reasons that lead to Israel proper being the location chosen. It may well be that it was doomed from the beginning, but for example, "Let all the Jews who want their own state move to America" was definitely not an option when the Zionist movement began in the 19th century, and it wasn't even an option for all the Jews to flee to the US after WWII.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 20hr ago

I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack.

Such a sly rephrasing.

What @FtttG said was:

sympathetic framing of the perpetrator ("his family were killed in an airstrike in Lebanon")

claims that such attacks are bound to be expected as a consequence of the war in Gaza i.e. victim-blaming (as if a handful of Australian Jews, many of whom had presumably never set foot in Israel, have the slightest say in Israeli politics or IDF tactics)

outright suggestions that the attack was staged by Mossad as a false flag attack

This is accurate.

We could perhaps add:

Pointing out the problematic social media posts of one of the victims.

You're right, almost no one is going to go mask-off and say "I support shooting Jews because I just really fucking hate Jews."

Even the most vehement Jew-haters are more sly than that.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 23hr ago

This is condescending and antagonistic. Don't do this.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 2d ago

Rarely do we say "You're right, that post should have been modded but we didn't notice it because no one reported it."

Instead, we tell people not to publicly demand someone be modded or attack them, but simply report the post if they think it warrants it.

People do over report, but that's because they use the report button to mean "I don't like this." We prefer that to public callouts, but people should really just let things go if they're mad at what someone wrote unless it was truly a bad post. ("Bad" in the sense of being against what the Motte is intended for, not bad in the sense that you don't like it.)

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 2d ago

Not every CW post has to fall strictly along tribal lines.

I suggest making use of the scroll button rather than demanding a Motte precisely curated to your tastes.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 2d ago

What are you even saying here? You agree, you disagree, you want to argue but don't have an argument, you just want to express snarky disdain, you understand and acknowledge the point? This is why we have a rule against low-effort posting. It's annoying and contributes nothing.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 2d ago

I think mods should intervene… somehow, because these posts are getting too frequent, too obviously agenda-laden, and aren't even remotely about the culture war (though AI discussion as such is necessary). It's becoming one guy's AI Bad blog.

I could name half a dozen topics that come up again and again, sometimes in tedious fashion, and sometimes by a few individuals who post about little else. Generally speaking, we don't "intervene" because someone is tired of topic, or even because we are tired of a topic.

And everything is "obviously agenda-laden" to people who have an opposing viewpoint.

If you don't like a post, you can ignore it or respond to it. You can even report it if you genuinely think it violates the rules. (Most reported posts are not violating the rules, they are just violating the reporter's sensibilities.)

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 3d ago

"Chinaman" is historical usage that harkens back to the 19th century. It may not be a slur, exactly, but it's kind of like calling a black person a "Negro" - it is not plausible that you are unaware that it's no longer considered polite.

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Transnational Thursday for April 16, 2026

Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 4d ago

Low effort and obnoxious comment providing no value. Banned for two days.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 8d ago

Argument by Google/Wikipedia is obnoxious and low effort. "What do you think that means?" is generally not a request for a literal definition and you know that.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 8d ago

When someone is antagonistic to you, report the post, don't respond in kind.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 8d ago

This sort of comment was not acceptable on the Motte even when we were on Reddit. Don't do this.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 10d ago

Your "prediction" has no circumstances in which we could say it was wrong. I suppose if Iran literally conducts an atomic test, you might concede you were wrong about that (though I am not even confident of that: it seems you would spin it as "We did not allow them to do this until we did/until they snuck it past us, and obviously we will punish them for it and not let them actually use their nukes"). But otherwise, if we are in exactly the same place we are now a few years from now, you will say that's fine because we made our point and can always bomb them again. That, to me, is not a "victory." If you were actually willing to define victory and own that that's what you're saying-yes, we may be perpetually at war with Iran and we will have to keep doing this- then I would disagree with you that that is a favorable outcome but at least we'd have something to disagree about. Instead, you are just saying "We won, we will win, because winning is whatever Trump says it is."

The difference is my predictions have conditions under which I will have to say "I was wrong." I don't TDS out, however loosely you define TDS, and say "Everything Trump does is bad and nothing he accomplishes could possibly count as a victory." I am not saying "The US lost the war." I know some other people are saying we did, by virtue of not having accomplished our goals. I am also of the opinion that we have not accomplished our goals (though it's also not clear to me what our goals are), but there is a difference between "losing" and "failing to achieve victory." Militarily, we won. How many times do I have to no-duh that? But winning anything worth calling a victory requires more than just inflicting a higher body count. We could say we're going to put an end to lawlessness in Haiti and drop bombs on them and say we won. Yeah, and?

"What are we doing here and is it worth it?" is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 11d ago

Since no matter what "peace deal" there is, you will say it's good, yes, you are just defining yourself to be correct no matter what.

This is cartoonish.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 11d ago

Yes, I think destroying their military "matters." You are ignoring every objection raised to pretend your dissenters are blind and not responding to points they have responded to.

So that's a no. There are no conditions in which you will consider yourself to have been wrong.

It's very easy to declare yourself the only one able to see the truth with such a posture.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 11d ago

Are you confusing me with my twin?

Whoops. Yes, apologies.

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 11d ago

Why is periodic warfare not an acceptable outcome here?

Because it's expensive and kills people and destroys things. In other words: war is bad.

At the risk of repeating myself for the slow kids in the back, that doesn't mean I am always against all wars. But I am against fighting wars just because we can.

I especially don't want American lives lost and American property destroyed, but as little as I think of the Iranian regime, I would also prefer not be killing Iranians and wrecking their shit without a good reason, one that benefits me and my fellow Americans.

You've gone from "We totally won, Iran is over, this was worth it!" to "What's the big deal if periodically bombing Iran is just something we do now?"

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Amadan Letting the hate flow through me 11d ago

They would not be asking questions as perceptive as that: they would beat their chest and scream and feel pride (and they would be right to do so.) In the strength of their military, of their confidence as a Great Power, and of the simple fact that their enemies are dead.

Yes, they probably would.

I am not Russian, and I would prefer the US not be like Russia.

These figures not only hate the United States, they have killed American soldiers through proxies and terrorist attacks. They are dead now. This is a good thing. It really is as simple as that.

If all we wanted was revenge, we could have achieved that a long time ago. What I want to know- pardon me for making "simple" things complex- is whether we have decreased the number of proxy and terrorist attacks that will kill American soldiers in the future. And for how long Iran will remain defanged. (Countries can in fact rebuild rather quickly unless bombing Iran is going to become an annual sport.)

If you are unsatisfied with the conclusion of the Melian dialogue, that's fine. But it is an answer, and I'm not hedging it.

In the Melian dialogues, Athens was the aggressor, unapologetically saying "We will crush you because we can, and you should submit to us because we are more powerful." There was no pretense that Melos had done anything to provoke them or earn this treatment.

Yes, I would be very unsatisfied if the answer to "Why are we doing this?" is "Because we can."

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