Amadan
I will be here longer than you
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
4d ago
Not really, he just mentions his wives regularly. Afaik he's the only penis in the mix.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
4d ago
This reply is very PUA or maybe more classically 'RedPill' adjacent. Which I found surprising considering the crowd one might expect to find following a pastor. But reading more of Pastor Fosters work, it looks to fit right in.
Devon Eriksen is an indie sci-fi author. He's a polyamorous libertarian with multiple wives. He's "redpill adjacent" in the same sense that folks like Eric S. Raymond are - anti-woke and evpsych aficionados (when it fits their priors) but not really part of the manosphere.
Ironically, Eriksen came to my attention through TracingWoodgrains, who positively reviewed his book. (I thought it was good enough that I'll read the sequel, though it's got some rough edges.) Eriksen also hides his power level a bit, probably because he wants to sell books.
This isn't the first time I've seen a somewhat improbable coalition of vaguely right-aligned people online, conservative Christians rubbing shoulders with libertarian atheist SF authors, united mostly by their hatred of woke. Often these affiliations fracture on their fault lines - KulakRevolt probably lost a fair bit of his audience once he started going hard on "Christianity is a pussy simp Jew religion," and the only time Eriksen gets pushback from his mostly rightie followers is when he reminds them he's a polyamorous atheist. (He probably gets a bit of a pass on the first because his situationship seems to be closer to "harem" than "polycule").
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
5d ago
For what it's worth, I thought phrasing was slightly rude but not out of bounds
Slightly rude is out of bounds. Not excessively so, but calling people idiots is usually going to get modded.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
6d ago
I'd let the fedposting crack go as I read it as (mostly) sardonic (not that I doubt you really would like to "fedpost" certain people), but your edit:
Since you idiots are out here defending the slop, these quotes are hallucinations:
is too antagonistic.
Even if you're right about the hallucinations, this isn't how you argue back.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
6d ago
No, the post itself was innocuous if rather banal, which is why it got out of the new user filter. I did a double take when I saw the username and realized it was either a new or returning troll.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
6d ago
Nine times out of ten, they are not a "newcomer."
User has been banned. Username made obvious troll obvious.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
7d ago
- Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
Okay, so that's how it's going to be.
I was going to let you have some some rope, but here I am looking at a queue filled with reports on your snarky, condescending, belligerent attitude towards all comers. You have managed to antagonize a truly impressive number of people in a short time. You clearly believe yourself to be the cleverest boy in the room, and boy are you having fun showing everyone how very very smart you are and they aren't.
I didn't respond to your previous rather demanding retort because (a) I was busy and (b) I didn't feel like it. We're volunteers here, and we are not actually obligated to justify ourselves to your satisfaction. We will usually try to explain our decisions, even to people complaining about being modded, because transparency is important, and the health of the community depends on there being some level of trust in our reasonableness and fairness. Obviously we still don't please everyone, but so it goes.
You, however, are a new member who just arrived and has immediately started some shit. We owe you very little and earning your goodwill is worth only the degree to which we care to see you stick around, which is a rapidly diminishing proposition.
Now on the one hand, you are a prime example of what @ZorbaTHut created this forum for: to allow people to come here and test out their craziest, wackiest, most fringe ideas, to argue for things outside the Overton Window, beyond the pale, or otherwise just too out there to be taken seriously anywhere else. In a sense, we want whack jobs, cranks, ideologues and extremists. We welcome them. They do have a habit of pissing people off and getting reported a lot (because most of our members, even if they pretend they are open-minded and devoted to free speech and willing to hear anybody out, still tend to be depressingly normie when it comes down to it, and use the "Report" button to register their disapproval or offense at opinions they don't like). But I have been trying to factor in that you are kind of providing what we want: a novel perspective earnestly defended. (Yes, I am convinced now I was wrong about you using an LLM, or at least you're definitely not using an LLM for the snide, condescending, and snarky bits.)
On the other hand, you really are being a flaming jerk in almost every post. You've pissed off a lot of members, you've got multiple mods now saying "What are we going to do about this guy?"
So when I read this entitled, demanding whine that I "please provide examples" like you are snapping your fingers at a waiter who's slow to bring you your water... you are exhausting what little charity I have to extend to you.
Most of your posts have been reported for various levels of antagonism and obnoxiousness. You're being heavily downvoted, which sometimes just means someone taking an unpopular position (and we don't like to mod based solely on someone being unpopular) but often it means someone who's making a real ass of himself.
You want "examples" of you being "belligerent" and "condescending" and "snarky"? No, I am not going to go collect all the plentiful examples you have provided and paste them here. You know why? Because you are, if nothing else, clearly very intelligent and well-spoken, someone who knows how to use words and is well aware of the power of words. In other words, you know damn well what you're doing. You want to argue with me. If I quoted a dozen or so objectionable things you've said so far, you'd argue with each and every one of them and want to litigate my interpretation and tell me I'm wrong, and think you will somehow "win," like the SovCits who think the right words will render a cop unable to issue them a speeding ticket.
So bluntly, I don't care if you think I'm "not fair." Trust me, I've heard that before. Yes, I will use my "undisclosed, private definitions" to decide if you're being unpleasant and uncivil. I am deciding you're being unpleasant and uncivil. Knock it off, now, and don't tell me you "can't stop what I don't know I'm doing." You know. Either that, or you have reached the age you are with a staggering lack of social grace and self-awareness, which is sad but still doesn't get you a pass.
If you continue to engage people the way you are currently engaging people, we will give you a timeout (a temporary ban), and if you come back and continue doing it, the bans will get longer. Frankly I would like you to continue contributing but if and only if you can do so without antagonizing everyone you argue with. I am not optimistic, but you are duly warned and our grand experiment in letting any random person come in and throw their glass at the wall continues.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
9d ago
I tend to avoid people who make crap up and pretend it's got anything to do with the facts. Opine on your judgment of the quality or snarkiness of what I say, speculate all you like about its origins, it's got nothing to do with what the ideas I presented. It's just another kind of rank-pulling diversion to avoid engaging with the ideas.
Well, since you're new to the Motte, let me explain a few things to you.
I am not engaging with your ideas at all. I do not particularly care about your ideas. I'm a moderator here whose job is to keep the conversations civil and in accordance with our rules.
If you did not use an LLM, I apologize. The flood of LLM posts lately is probably making us a bit paranoid, and I will admit to scoring a false positive now and then.
That said, you're still being condescending and belligerent to a lot of people who are arguing with you. You need to stop that.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
9d ago
New to The Motte,
doubt
looking for constructive, critical discussion.
doubt
I for one do not welcome our robot overlords.
Okay, reading everything you have posted so far, I think you are using ChatGPT to generate some or all of your posts, and what isn't coming from ChatGPT seems to be mostly snarky, condescending, and belligerent. Or maybe that's ChatGPT too.
You have a steep hill to climb very quickly: convince me otherwise or I am going to suggest to the other mods that we just start banning with prejudice anyone who looks like "Har-de-har let's unleash ChatGPT on the Motte with a random hot take it can defend to the death."
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
9d ago
It’s funny you bring up robots. Personally, I’d rather consult a logic-checking tool than rely entirely on one worldview expressed in one language formed by one country’s political myths.
You can consult all you want, but speaking frankly, a lot of your posts read like they were run through ChatGPT. We do not like people using LLMs to argue here. If you're using it for grammar checking, that's one thing, but no one here wants to argue with a bot, even if the bot has been told to express your argument for you. Unless you are willing to stop doing this, I will be unwilling to let any of your posts out of the new user filter in the future.
It's not the annoyingness of arguing with ChatGPT. It's that it calls your entire identity and presentation into question. On the surface, you seem to offer an uncommon perspective that would be valued here: a Chinese person with a Western-critical viewpoint. But bringing ChatGPT * into the discussion calls all that into question-- we have lots of trolls and sockpuppets who show up here thinking they are clever, and now I wonder if you're just one of them who got the cute idea: "ChatGPT, pretend you are a Chinese person critical of the West arguing with a forum full of Western rationalist nerds."
* I am using ChatGPT as a generic term here, but probably I shouldn't, you could be using any number of LLMs available nowadays.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
This is so low effort it's barely even a critique. Normally I'd leave it at that, but you've now been told about eight times to stop the low effort sneer-posting and that you were heading for a permaban. I dislike permabanning someone for a post that would normally be just a warning, even if it is like strike nine, but I think it's appropriate at this point for you to go away for a while. Thirty days, and don't come back unless you're going to stop doing this.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
Knock it off. You are also accumulating a history of anklebiting mods every time someone you agree with gets modded (but curiously, never when someone you disagree with gets modded for the same behavior).
People who post low effort comments that are nothing more than "boo" posts get modded. This has been true since we were still on reddit. People who do this repeatedly and refuse to alter their behavior eventually get escalated responses from warnings to tempbans.
You have a lengthy history of whining, sneering, bad-faith griping, and claiming any mod action you don't like is politically biased. Your history is basically terrible in every way. Not a single AAQC, not a single thoughtful or intelligent argument, just posts like this and a long, long string of warnings and temp bans.
If you want to substantively discuss moderation and why you think someone made a mistake, there are acceptable ways to do this. You are allowed to criticize the moderation here. You are even allowed to accuse mods of being biased. But you need to present it articulately and reasonably. There are several (leftist!) posters recently who've made a habit of writing lengthy complaints, mostly directed at myself but sometimes other mods, about how bad our moderation is and how we let righties get away with anything. I did not like those posts, I did not agree with their complaints, and I found it frustrating to engage with them and explain why I thought they were mistaken. But I did not tell them to stop making such complaints, as aggravating as I find their constant griping, because at least they were being civil and putting forward a sincere case for why they think we suck.
You just hawk and spit.
Stop it or you will be banned.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
Have you read the page in question? Did it strike you as erotic? Did it strike you as something meant to be arousing? Did you look at that panel and think it's something a teen is likely to jerk off to, or that the author thought of it as something to jerk off to? Because to me, it looked more like teens trying out a "sex fantasy" that turns out to be weird and ridiculous and completely unarousing, which was the point of that sequence. But maybe it did something different for you. I'll take your word for it.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
However, I have to disagree with you here. It's well documented that watching too much porn can induce transsexuality or autogynephilia at least.
Accepting that this is possible (I suspect there's more to it than someone coming across the wrong kind of porn at an impressionable age), obviously media affects people, especially children. This should be pretty obvious, but we fight about it because this can be interpreted as "watching too much porn can induce transsexuality or autogynephilia," "Reading spicy genre fiction is a slippery slope to degeneracy," "violent video games turns kids into mass shooters," etc. There are things I think kids should not watch or read and those things might not necessarily be just graphic sex or violence.
So I don't really disagree with your thesis, but I will repeat mine that this is a sliding and negotiable scale. Of course we should control/monitor what media children consume (and parents should be able to make individual decisions for their children). But inevitably parents who want more censorship are going to come into conflict with parents who want less, especially in common spaces. You should be able to prohibit your kid from reading Gender Queer - should you be able to prohibit mine? Libraries are one of those places where we're going to come into conflict, because it's a commons.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
12d ago
Erotica is meant to arouse. It's meant to be erotic. Obviously porn is erotica. But not all naked pictures are porn, IMO.
With the caveat that literally everything is "erotica" to someone, I have a hard time imagining anyone finding the specific scene we're talking about in Gender Queer arousing or stimulating, and it seems pretty obvious to me that that was not its intent. You can take issue with all kinds of things (like its suitability for children), but I think a lot of people are performatively clutching pearls about kids reading about sex.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
12d ago
When my grandfather was sixteen going on a picnic with a girl and her chaperone was considered risqué.
I find this... unlikely, unless your grandfather was Amish.
Assuming you are no older than me (and probably younger), your grandfather was dating in 1930s at the earliest. Picnics with a chaperone were considered old-fashioned in most of the US even then, and certainly not "risque."
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
12d ago
It means you won't be able to read our posts. But if we modhat a comment to you, we treat it the same as if you read it and chose to ignore it.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
12d ago
Sure they are. We can do this all day.
Okay, but using your own personal definitions and saying "Nuh uh" isn't much of an argument.
What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons.
Maybe so, though I am unconvinced by arguments that have been made basically since Roman times about the degradation of morals and the corruption of the youth.
I wouldn't have any heartburn about prohibiting Gender Queer from school libraries, but public libraries (which are meant to serve adults as well as children, and which can impose age restrictions on certain books) do not need to cater to your personal preferred level of acceptability.
Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.
Likewise, your arguments are toothless to me, because I don't know anyone who turned into a degenerate because they read spicy genre fiction as a kid. I am not saying there is no line, but the line is always going to be fuzzy and negotiable and subjective. You are afraid I'd be okay with exposing children to bestiality; I am afraid you'd like to censor anything that would raise a maiden aunt's eyebrows in 1890. You're right that this is where the battlefield is, however much I personally find Gender Queer offputting (and inappropriate for pre-teens).
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
12d ago
Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica." The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
13d ago
I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry.
So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer. I would not call them "erotica." It's supposed to be a coming-of-age novel about a queer kid experimenting with sex acts that she ultimately finds unappealing.
Would I want my pre-teen kids to read it? No. It definitely should be age-restricted. But "This shouldn't even exist in a public library" seems a bit much.
Influencing my opinion is the fact that I distinctly remember books like Flowers in the Attic and the John Norman Gor series existing in my school library when I was a kid. Now maybe you can make a case that text is less harmful/dangerous than images, but I would contest that. Those books had some fucked up themes and scenes, and the sex scenes weren't even explicit.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
13d ago
We are not cops, and we are often not unanimous. In the event of a serious disagreement, we will very occasionally undo a previous decision, but no one "overstepped his bounds." Mods are autonomous; we will often consult with one another when we're unsure of the most appropriate course of action, but sometimes we'll just act because no one else is around. Sometimes afterwards one of us will say "Eh, maybe that was too much."
You're getting transparency here because I value that, but it's not an invitation to demand a humiliation ritual because you think a mod made a bad call.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
13d ago
You should really try reading an entire post before jumping on your keyboard to Au Contraire Mon Frer now and then.
If you had, you'd see I am indeed not blaming him for restating his original message with more words.
I am blaming him for prefacing it with the "drooling retards" crack.
AI DESTROYS THE HUGOS!!!
Okay, that's totally a clickbait title and not really accurate. But hey, it's not as high stakes as a potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, or Trump's tariffs, or even whether or not polyamory is ruining society, but it's my beat: nerdy sci-fi bullshit.
It's a year beginning with a 2, which means there is drama over this year's WorldCon.
What is WorldCon?
We're all nerds here, but I know not all of us are SFF nerds, so for @2rafa and the handful of others who'd never lower themselves to reading shit with elves, WorldCon is the annual science fiction convention, held in a different city every year, that awards the Hugos, at one time considered the most prestigious award in science fiction. The drama and controversies over past WorldCons and Hugo Awards have been enumerated here often; at this point, as my lede says, it's practically an annual tradition. I don't collect links but maybe if you ask @gattsuru nicely he'll post some of the past dirt.
Usually these controversies are something Culture War-related. The Hugos are widely perceived to have gone fully Woke, and I must admit that I am one of those heavy SF readers who not only no longer cares much about the Hugos, whereas at one time I would have at least checked out the latest Hugo winner, I now consider them to be almost an anti-recommendation.
Just to give you an idea of the state of the Hugos: it's been ten years since a man won the Hugo for best novel (Cixin Liu and his translator Ken Liu (no relation) for The Three-Body Problem in 2015), and most years since then have seen between 0 and 2 men even nominated. This year actually features three men on the ballot (including Adrian Tchaikovsky nominated twice)! I'm rooting for Tchaikovsky since I actually read his books but, well, John Scalzi is the last white guy to get a Hugo, in 2013 (for one of his worst novels, Redshirts).
So anyway, technically this year's drama is not (so far) about the Hugos themselves, but about WorldCon (which this year is being held in Seattle).
What did they do this time?
Short version: They used ChatGPT to vet WorlCon panelists. Several WorldCon committee members resigned in protest, and the list of authors and other program participants doing likewise is growing.
https://file770.com/seattle-worldcon-2025-hugo-administrators-and-wsfs-division-head-resign/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/128296070
https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/06/0139251/hugo-administrators-resign-in-wake-of-chatgpt-controversy
https://gizmodo.com/worldcon-2025-chatgpt-controversy-hugos-2000598351
Longer version: Reportedly there were as many as 1300 people applying to participate in various WorldCon programs this year: this would be book signings, readings, panels, workshops, etc. Obviously not everyone who wants to be on a panel can be, and WorldCon has to be selective about who it invites. The vetting is done by volunteers, and researching 1300 people must be pretty time consuming; apparently they had the bright idea of using ChatGPT do a search and summary of all prospective participants as a "first pass."
I assume they mostly want to weed out obvious crazies and literal Nazis and pedos, but given that WorldCon skews very woke nowadays, the vetting almost certainly includes looking for any "problematic" public statements or other transgressions in someone's background that might lead to a Cancellation or Drama.
Honestly, using an LLM to summarize and categorize your list of randos seems like a pretty good use of AI to me. Supposedly all final decisions were made by humans, but nonetheless, the concom is imploding.
If you're unaware, most artists and authors hate AI. This has also been covered extensively in past CW threads, but the stated reason for the disdain towards AI is that authors' and artists' work was "stolen" to train LLMs without compensation, but there is also a very real fear of being replaced.
This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI, no final decisions made by AI, and that AI has nothing to do with any Hugo nominations or decisions, people are still Very Very Angry that it was used at all.
If you read the commentary, it's not just general AI-hate (though there is plenty of that), but also concern that the LLMs might have made Problematic Decisions. Obviously, people are bringing up hallucinations (what if ChatGPT made up a racist Twitter post?) and the possibility of false negatives, but, there is also concern about false positives. What if ChatGPT missed something Problematic? Again, supposedly humans were supposed to make the final decisions, but cynically, I think they're worried that ChatGPT might approve too many cishetwhitemales. Also much outrage at "Entering private data into an AI without permission" (i.e., typing someone's name into ChatGPT and asking it to do an Internet search).
This isn't as juicy as past WorldCon/Hugo dramas, but it's very Current Year. I cannot help finding it ironic that we're now at a place where science fiction fans are demanding that we ban AI tools.
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