Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5hr ago
While I do not like MKC's snarky rebuttal, I have to agree that you seem to be doing a reverse-karen: "This poor guy got screwed because all the ladies were on Team Woman and too stupid or emotional to consider evidence." But the evidence is that this guy is dumb, irresponsible, and basically handed over his paycheck to his girlfriend to run his life, was terrible with money, the relationship imploded predictably (after they had two children!) and guess what, he's now responsible for the aftermath of that. We could quibble over the specific dollar amounts she should or should not be entitled to, but yeah, the case really was quibbling over how much he owed. Like, my dude, you have two kids with a woman you couldn't be bothered to marry to hook up with almost-free medical coverage? Yeah, that's gonna cost you. On deployment, you go out and drink like a sailor (because, duh) and ask her to pay for your bar tabs? Yeah, you're gonna owe her for that.
Agreed that fraud should not have entered the discussion, and it sounds like Chad's lawyer was terrible (are we surprised that Chad is as good at picking lawyers as he is at picking baby-mommas?), and I don't doubt the chicks were biased, but you have to be pretty much on Team Pump-And-Dump-The-Bitches-Deserve-It to think Chad should have escaped responsibility here.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5hr ago
or perhaps the story itself is fabricated
I (as a mod) do not appreciate the low-key insinuations that the OP is lying, and while I'd have let "your framing might be missing any more details in her favor" go (because yes, that is certainly possible), you have no reason to be accusing him of outright making up this entire story. Do people make up stories to post here? Yes, I'm sure they do, though less frequently than on reddit - I have certainly raised my eyebrows at a few implausible just-so stories posted here - but "maybe this is all made up" is a shitty thing to say just by way of disagreement with the thesis.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Jesus wept. Simple math, people. I like AI but stop using it because you are too lazy to break out a calculator and the sort of deductive reasoning you'd give an undergrad interviewing for his first internship.
Current spot price of gold is about $4,350/troy ounce.
An avoirdupois pound is 14.583 troy ounces, or $63,436.05. So $1B in gold would be about 15,764 lbs, or 7.88 tons.
There are cargo planes that can carry over 100 tons. So I don't know how you posed your question, but it is clearly not "physically impossible" for a cargo plan to carry billions of dollars.
(I don't know if the UAE has literal tons of gold on hand, or if that's how they'd transport cash. Supposing they have a vault full of US bank notes, each bill is about 1 gram so $1B in $USD100 bills would be 10M x 1 gram = 10 metric tons/9.8 tons. So whatever form the "cash" takes, yes, it's physically possible to carry billions in a cargo plane.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
Well, no argument here that MAGA messaging sucks. But you know the phenomenon of all those Bernie bros who turned Trumpers? I think it not unlikely a lot of burrito MAGAs will turn into DSAers.
The fact that you initiated this as you being angry that you think your father had it better than you is why people are debating that. You did a poor job of framing this about whether or not your party is appealing to its base.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Okay, fine, but that is also why people are voting for the DSA. Like you, their anger may be understandable but their reasoning is, as you put it, retarded. Maybe your base does need better messaging (the Dems certainly do) but it's not surprising you're getting tripped up by people pointing out that the things you claim are, uh, not necessarily true.
I'd prefer people engage with facts rather than demanding their anger and resentment be given a populist head-pat.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Dot com millionaires were not a thing in the early 90s, but as far back as the 80s, computer programming was considered a very well-paying profession.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
You're telling a lot of people they're missing the point. They're not missing the point. They're disagreeing with you.
Housing, food, and educational costs are real, measurable things that can be tested against your personal experience. Some of them check out against your perceptions, some don't. But it's also relevant, all the ways in which your life and the things available to you are different than when your father grew up. Saying "I want the same life my father had".... Well, too bad? The world is different. Your children also will not grow up in the same world you did.
Now what you're saying is "My world is worse than the one my father had." And that's debatable, which is why people are talking about lifestyle inflation and burrito availability, and you're stomping your foot and saying "No, no, you're missing the point!" But really, this is the point.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
Yeah, like not to belabor this too much, because I am not personally an oyster-enjoyer, literally or figuratively. But the point I was making is not that oysters are perfectly fine and no one should complain about them or find them disgusting, but that I find it dishonest to claim you consider oysters a perfectly fine thing to enjoy, just not for you, yet make it clear in your reactions that that is not actually how you feel.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
The shaming is the contradiction.
You might not like oysters, or want to watch people eating them, but presumably you won't make a point of letting oyster-enjoyers know how gross you think they are.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
Well, in that case, you are saying specifically that is not "fine" for someone with a female partner to like fan service.
Which, fair enough, if those are the boundaries you've established in your relationship. It's not unlike porn; some women are fine with their men watching porn, some are very much not.
But I'm talking about the phenomenon of women finding it objectionable for guys in general to watch it. @HereAndGone2 was not talking about her partner watching fan service, she's talking about being offended that she sees it.
Again, rather like porn: if you hate porn and wish it did not exist and wish men did not watch it, fine. But be honest about it, don't say "It's fine that it exists, I understand men like it, but also I will complain about it and try to shame men who enjoy it."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
There were some other things going on, but yes, we don't normally remove posts like that. Mea culpa, I will take the blame for messing up the threads.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
@FCfromSSC is an admin. As for the removed posts, the poster is a ban evader who slipped through.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
Why is there a groping scene in the show? For the male viewers to get their thrills. Which is fine, that's what these shows are about, but expecting women to watch it and go "nope, nothing to see here" is a bit much.
Okay, but... why?
Put it this way: you're entitled to dislike fan service. You're entitled to disdain the male gaze. You're entitled to not be interested in shows that exist to please men.
But you are arguing two contradictory things:
- "It's fine."
- "You shouldn't expect a woman to just sit there and not complain about it."
Like, if you genuinely believe that it's "fine" for some shows to featuring boobs and butts and groping and fan service, why is it "too much" to expect a woman to watch it without going off?
Now, if she was compelled/tricked/reluctantly dragged into watching it, or had no idea what sort of show it was and was enjoying it until the sudden fan service, okay, I can see some hard eye rolls, but I'm going to be honest, I don't think you (or most women) are "fine" with shows like that. You just sort of grudgingly tolerate their existence.
(FWIW, I have never seen Berserk and am not much into anime nowadays. Just sayin', as much as I dislike the seething hatred that sweats out of some of our He-Man Wimmin-Haters, they aren't completely wrong that a lot of media just gets outright snipped for the horrific crime of... being appealing to men.)
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
You are allowed to express opinions, other people are allowed to express opinions about your opinions, and whether or not technical analysis is beneficial or not is arguable enough that you are in no position to tell someone "not to tell people" this.
You've been warned repeatedly for the kind of low-effort eye-poking antagonism that constitutes the majority of your posts. Even your posts that don't get reports are mostly like this.
Your next warning will not be a warning.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7d ago
Nothing worth showing yet. Right now I am going through some actual Fundamentals courses, learning all the things I never learned properly the first time around, like value studies, one, two and three point perspective, contours and negative spaces, sight sizing, etc.
I am way too old to pursue my dream of being a comic book artist, but I'd just like to be able to illustrate my own stories.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8d ago
The rules for "low effort" are somewhat relaxed for the Friday Fun Thread, and "this is culture war" could arguably apply to anything with such a broad interpretation as "there exist people who disagree with you."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8d ago
Coming to this late, but like @George_E_Hale, I find your thesis both persuasive and not, because you accurately identify the rot in academia and yet cherrypicking the worst and most woke activists to represent every single person who goes into academia for the love of history, literature, or journalism is rather unfair.
I think the problems with academia are multifarious and go well beyond "leftist capture."
I'd distill them down to the following:
-
Academia used to be for the wealthy. You had to be rich to be able to go to college to study Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery, and expect to be make a living afterwards. There were only so many professorships available to teach more academically inclined scions of wealthy families. When that landscape changed (in the US, largely due to the GI Bill after WWII, but also due to the general liberalization and tearing down of class barriers that occurred after the war), the market didn't. Lots of people still thought studying Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery sounded like fun; the number of professorships did not scale.
-
But for a while, academia could still coast, because the very fact of being accepted into university and graduating was a sign of intelligence and industriousness. In high school, I was still being told by school guidance counselors that "Lots of companies will hire you just for having a college degree; they assume you can learn." This was already becoming no longer true. I don't know if school guidance counselors still say this, but if they are, they're lying.
-
The reason for that is, well, a college degree was seen as the ticket to a good job. Therefore everyone should get a college degree. Therefore denying anyone the opportunity to earn a college degree was unfair. Therefore college should be accessible to everyone. I don't think we need to go over the many, many observable negative consequences of this. It's well-trod ground that touches almost every aspect of the culture war.
-
So, here we are. College degrees are largely seen as worthless (or a minimum barrier to entry), the government has shoveled money into ensuring everyone can go to college, and universities have eagerly sucked up all that money in the form of ever-inflating prices. And we have all kinds of bombs ready to go off.
The solutions are both simple and obvious, and completely infeasible. Do I agree with you that academia should be "razed to the ground"? Well, I think we should still make space in the world for a few scholars of Anglo-Saxon poetry and ancient Greek pottery. But maybe not so much space.
As a side note, I liked to draw as a kid (had dreams of becoming a comic book artist) but put down the pencils for decades (I went to college for "a good job.") Revisiting some of my old drawings, I realized I was both better and worse than I remembered. And recently got an urge to actually Learn Art.
I've watched a lot of YouTube videos from professional artists who largely agree with you that art school is pretty worthless. Art instruction, among other things, is more accessible than ever before. Free YouTube tutorials are abundant, but there are also online ateliers and coaches who are vastly cheaper than art school. Much like my language studies, I have found more benefit from online tutors and a bit of discipline in my free time than I ever got out of college classes.
I wrote a whole post about this.
Whether or not AI text is "worthless slop" depends on context. For fiction, or original thinking? Yes. For summarizing things or presenting information? No. The reason we prohibit LLM-posting (except when clearly stated as such and to serve a purpose) is that the Motte is supposed to be a discussion site, and no one (well, almost no one) actually thinks LLMs are "discussing" anything. If you just want to see LLMs arguing back and forth, there is OpenClaw for that.
Shouldn't that incline us to skepticism regarding everything else boosters and hype men say about these bots?
Yes, and no. AI is already very, very good at some things. This is undeniable. It is getting better at a lot of things. It is an enormously useful tool, too useful to imagine that it's going to go away or turn out to be a passing trend.
Whether it's actually going to achieve AGP(ETA: AGI, wtf kind of Freudian slip was that?) or trigger the Singularity is what warrants skepticism.
Most AI boosters do not, in fact, think it's going to become a "super-intelligence that will obsolete us."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
14d ago
Who is "they"? The specific individuals named in the posts? Leftists? A particular leftist element? All Democrats?
The OP just got banned because the post was not much more than "Look at what THEY did this week!" Your post is no better- worse, actually.
I told you last time that you have taken all the slack we can give you and you still can't help yourself. It's frankly amazing how many warnings you have been given, compared to how few actual timeouts you have been given.
But if you are going to say "they" like crime, "they" have a strategy, etc., you need to talk about specific groups, not big nebulous groups like "the left." Unless you want to defend the proposition that literally everyone on "the left" likes criminals and dislikes people who arrest criminals. In which case, go ahead and make that case. But you won't, because while you may tell yourself you actually believe that, you know that it is in fact ridiculous and unsupportable, but rather than admitting that such absurd generalizations about leftists are in fact absurd, you'd much rather get the dopamine hit of ranting about how evil "they" (all of them) are.
You (and posters like you) are the exact mirror of the worst people on reddit, the people who have turned reddit to shit, the people who have made X and Bluesky hellholes (with different polarities): rather than grapple with opposing beliefs with a modicum of nuance, rather than recognizing that people believe things and do things for reasons other than being evil for the sake of evil, it's just so much more fun, more delicious, more pleasurable, to sneer and snarl and bark and get a good Two Minute Hate going with your fellow haters about how very much you hate Those People.
The Motte is not supposed to be that kind of place. I mod people like you not because my left-of-center sentiments are offended, but because I look at all the places where my mostly left-of-center friends post- Facebook, reddit, elsewhere- and see how casually, unthinkingly, and without opposition they post exactly the sort of thing you do except about you, comfortable in the knowledge that they can say you and people like you are murderous fascists who hate truth and beauty and desire only to cause harm because you love evil for the sake spite, and no one there will ever challenge them, let alone mod them. No one there will ever say "Hey, are you sure about that, do you really think they are literally golems of evil who do things for no other reason than unthinking hatred and spite and ignorance?" (Because you'll get dogpiled at best, banned at worst.)
And you want this place to be like that.
Banned for three days. Think about whether you really want a rightist reddit. If you do, stay away.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
14d ago
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
14d ago
Working against him is the fact that he's been warned about this before.
A lot of CW threads start with a link to some CW "bomb." And then the poster discusses what happened, and offers his thoughts on it. This is well and good. But we do have the rule @netstack cited, that you aren't supposed to just post something for the purpose of talking about how terrible your outgroup is.
Several times now, @StableOutshoot has posted this sort of "Crime is legal because of leftists" boo outgroup polemic and been told to put more effort into offering something to discuss rather than just "Can you believe what Those People did this week?"
Someone without a habit of doing this might get away with it, or we might rap them a little and say "Hey, this is just naked culture warring, do you have something to say here besides "leftists bad"?"
But he does have a habit of doing this and has been warned already. So now he's earning timeouts.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
15d ago
I am skeptical that this is being asked in good faith (and on a three month old thread). At best, it is idle (nosy) curiosity. At worst, you are fishing for something, or you're just expressing doubt in a roundabout way.
No, I am not going to clarify. You may believe what you wish.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
19d ago
Yeah, and you know, we usually let obvious alts who were almost certainly banned previously post, even if your new account has to spend some time in new user filtered purgatory for a while, because Zorba wants us to let people prove they've reformed, and we are wary enough of false positives to usually go "Eh, whatever" rather than being hair-trigger on alts.
But we do usually ban (or not even let out of the filter) someone who is obviously the alt of a banned user.
You've been on the borderline for a while, and the combination of obnoxious dunking on the community and outright bragging that you were banned for "being too insulting to the favored subgroups here" (never once has anyone been able to substantiate this, because the "favored subgroups" are always "people I don't like and want to insult and think I should be able to break the rules to insult") is enough for me to say bye-bye. Yes, I know you'll be back. Yes, I know you think you are very sneaky because you can't see our eye rolls when you start posting with a new account.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
19d ago
I was into anime back when a lot of anime viewing was literally bootleg tapes from Japan.
It has gotten a lot more mainstream now, but I assure you, the freaks, gooners, and fetishists have always been part of the scene (both on screen and off). But they've been part of every fannish community. Comics, SF, RPGs, etc.
I haven't been to Otakon but from the pics I've seen (and people I know who go), it's really no worse than most fan cons. 14-year-olds in thongs saying "Slap my ass" would likely be escorted out.
"Fraud" can mean punitive damages for being deceptive, which is not technically "fraud" as a criminal charge but is something juries are allowed to take into account in a civil trial. You could have accused him of being imprecise rather than going to "You are making this up."
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