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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   6206 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for October 2022

Y'all must be trying to kill me. The sheer volume of quality contribution reports, combined with the outrageous volume of text you maniacs generate every week, made this an astonishing month to be sorting through the hopper. By far the busiest month for AAQCs since I took over the task. This made winnowing them down especially challenging, and some very good posts simply didn't make the cut simply because the competition was so fierce.

Good job, everyone.

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions in Culture Peace

@problem_redditor:

Contributions for the week of September 26, 2022

@PmMeClassicMemes:

@KulakRevolt:

Battle of the Sexes

@Tanista:

@problem_redditor:

@Ben___Garrison:

Contributions for the week of October 3, 2022

@Primaprimaprima:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@FCfromSSC:

@urquan:

Identity Politics

@Stefferi:

@urquan:

Contributions for the week of October 10, 2022

@urquan:

@Amadan:

@Chrisprattalpharaptor:

Battle of the Sexes

@VelveteenAmbush:

@sodiummuffin:

@JTarrou:

@bsbbtnh:

Identity Politics

@georgioz:

@gattsuru:

Contributions for the week of October 17, 2022

@MadMonzer:

@Minotaur:

@faceh:

@Butlerian:

@FCfromSSC:

@hydroacetylene:

@urquan:

@Eetan:

Identity Politics

@Hoffmeister25:

Contributions for the week of October 24, 2022

@urquan:

@johnfabian:

@LacklustreFriend:

@FCfromSSC:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

Battle of the Sexes

@cae_jones:

@SSCReader:

@Hoffmeister25:

Identity Politics

@FCfromSSC:

@Tanista:

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Religion does not have biological basis, but sex very much does. And not just a peripheral issue - like which garment I wear or such - but as one of the basic frameworks of huge spectrum of biological organisms. You can't just wave it away with "oh that looks stupid, just ignore that part" - no more than you can ignore other part of your biological reality and decide from tomorrow morning you are capable of FTL spaceflight.

You're only looking at one wrinkle. As I've been trying to express with my trans posts there are actually several interlocking frameworks of gender that are each flawed but each cover for each other's flaws such that any individual piece of criticism can be deflected by subtly shifting the framework. The response to your post is to shift into the transexual framework and point out that physical dysphoria is reported to exist. Yes, twilight sparkle gender is all in our imaginations but there is something to the idea of your immutable map of your body not lining up with the territory in a distressing way. Or they could switch to the dualist framework where they postulate an internal qualia of gender that us cis by default or perhaps nonbinary people seem to have no access to.

That these frames are mutually exclusive ought to be a problem but the advocates of gender seem unwilling to actually pin their beliefs down enough for this to be demonstrated conclusively.

"the idea of your immuntable map of your body" is what we call gender identity. It is an illusion.

There is no epistemically robust way to show this and I think you're still stuck on trying to unify support for neogenders with the more grounded body integrity disorder adjacent feelings that seem associated with traditional binary transgender people, especially those from before the recent memetic expansion. There is no unifying theory, they're just using the same word for very different things, basically as a proxy for the subjective component of having a sex and as a generic word for aesthetic expression.

Gender is a social construct but so is crime. After all, don't we talk of hate crimes?

One solution to the gender problem is to get rid of the body, we are told their soul was mismatched into the wrong body. No more body, no more problem. The soul is then free to find another host of the proper sex, and not get it wrong this time.

It seems to be a common solution but it was more of a reductio ad absurdum. If souls can be mismatched to the wrong body, surely then the process can be reversed?

Obviously God makes no such mistakes and the ideal solution would be to pray for repentance for entertaining the heresy.

Dysphoria is not the issue; gender is. Remove gender entirely from the equation, then there is nothing for dysphoria to latch on to.

What would you remove from the equations for weight and muscle dysphorias?

More comments

Question to the devs: I see that replies to a deleted comment still include the parent's username. Is that intended?

/images/16673834794149373.webp

The fictional example from The Legend of the Galactic Heroes that @KulakRevolt referred to in his comment is incorrect, and unfortunately undermines his entire argument. See my reply there.

Confabulation is an amazing thing. Often I see people make clever points referring to such idiosyncratic memory farts (or not very clever but just curious, like my token plasma metaphor). LoGH is fictional evidence anyway, so I think we should cut Kulak some snack.

Obviously I'm willing to cut him slack, but as I've said, unfortunately his entire multi-paragraph argument, which I'm not criticising in itself, hinges on him confusing Staden with Erlache.

@ZorbaTHut Not a pressing issue but if it's an easy fix. When you follow a context link to a comment in a thread you've previously collapsed the thread stay collapsed and one needs to expand it then follow the link again to get to the context. Hopefully It's a one liner to disable the cached thread collapse status on context urls.

This may now be fixed!

Awesome thanks!

Yeah, we've been sitting on a bug for this for a while. Just gotta get time to fix it, I'm afraid.

@Carlsbad made a series of quality posts over the past week, but sadly, it appears he has deleted them all. I wonder if he will repost them to his blog.

This doesn’t assuage my initial impression that he was more interested in evangelizing than discussing. Did he respond to any of the thorough criticism? If not, I certainly hope he goes back to include them on his blog. It’s a more appropriate place for monologues.

No, which is why I didn't bother responding to anything he wrote. If a former Trump Administration official wants to post articles here that were originally published elsewhere, fine, but this isn't a distribution platform, it's a discussion platform, and I'd expect that they'd at least want to engage with the community and defend their position from criticism. Instead he posts an article that gets picked apart even by people who I would normally expect to agree with such an argument, and not only refuses to respond but deletes the post outright, the equivalent of flipping over the gameboard. Not that I would have expected him to respond much in the event that his article was received with gushing praise, since the whole account came across as geared more toward self-promotion than desire for discussion.

Agreed in principle. Though the deletion was apparently a mod-driven penalty for ban evasion.

Was it deleted by him? Usually it’ll show as deleted by author but the whole thread disappeared including replies.

Was it really the same carlsbad?

There were some good points embedded in there, I think, but it was insufficiently adapted to the audience. I know a lot about the DR and the history of RW thought and so on and was still somewhat confused.

I don’t think it was stylistically the same as that Carlsbad.

verbosity is not the same thing as quality.

Nice, I actually got notified that I'm on the list this time! IIRC I had one or more QCs back on Reddit, but Reddit just doesn't ping you if more than 3 usernames get mentioned.

I'm glad it pinged you! I was just noticing that it doesn't auto-generate links to user pages for users with underscores in their name.

Arguing it would take a fair amount of effort, effort that I have not chosen to spend, and so it behooves me to admit that it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and not to expect other people to give my gut feelings any consideration. It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously.

Can we please pin this to the top of the overall board, and put it in bold at the top of every CW thread?

Putin is a terrible man and he is ultimately responsible for his actions, but provocation is real and we have been poking the bear for a long time for no reason other than a deep-seated hatred of Russians swimming in the very DNA of our ruling class.

I find this these a little unbelievable, when just 10 years ago Mitt Romney was being mocked for suggesting to President Obama that Russia might still be a threat. I don't think there's much that's special about Russia from a US point of view. The military-industrial-professional-intellectual complex wants an enemy, and Russia is convenient and certainly deserves plenty of derision. But in an easy-to-imagine alternate world where Putin chokes on his dinner in 2008, I think they would just focus on someone else instead. Plenty of the "ruling class" spent the cold war desperately trying to make the USSR seem not so bad or otherwise simping for communism; I'm sure they would be fine turning the eye of Sauron towards Hungary or Brazil or whatever.

Russia’s proximity to Germany is a geopolitical risk for American hegemony, but also, identity politics increased post-2008, and see Raskin’s recent statement for all the regressive sins Russia is guilty of. Russia is white and Christian, which makes them an easy target for those whose ideology is essentially against white Christian organization

Russia is white and Christian

I wish.

Russia is white and Christian

I wish.

Why?

Christian world (Latin America and Africa) has no interest in white supremacy, while White world has no interest in Christianity (and is not keen on white supremacy either).

Explicitly "White Christian" country would be more isolated and treated worse than North Corea.

Not the best way to make Russia great again.

There was one poll (I can't give link now) which tells that nearly half of Russian self-identified Orthodox do not believe in God. "Orthodox Christian" is just a tribal trait for them

Russia will be more isolated and treated worse than «North Corea» anyway, but at least Koreans have their Juche bullshit to explain what they're accepting this sacrifice and antagonizing the planet for. So would have the White&Christian Russia. Likewise for some other antagonist races of history who after their demise become fuel for fetishistic fantasies.

What about the real Russia? Духовность? Антифашизм? So profoundly phony.

Well, it is, at least as much as Germany, France, the UK and Sweden are.

Is it? If it's only as much as Germany, France and so on, then why is Raskin singling us out on the account of whiteness?

I disagree. Russia isn't ideologically white or Christian, which is what seems to be alleged here. There are more divorces and abortions and fewer Church visits in Russia than in those countries, and as for whiteness, well, we stand with the people of Zimbabwe in their anti-colonial struggle. Raskin can rest easy.

Is France ideologically White or Christian? They avoid the whole topic of ethnic background like plague and religion is something adult people do behind closed doors with mutual consent.

Is France ideologically White or Christian?

No one is anymore.

Only ideologically religious countries left are Muslim countries and last country officially based on racial supremacy was South Africa (Israel, despite everything, allows conversion to Judaism, no such thing as conversion to Whiteness was possible in old time SA).

Don't we all

Sure, but the same is true of Hungary, and it's almost true of Brazil, the Philippines, and probably several other countries I'm forgetting.

The same is true of Hungary, which is why there has been anti-Hungarian sentiment since Orban. It is only true for half of Brazil, hence the anti-Bolsonaro stuff. It is not true of the Philippines

It's not true at all? I agree other countries are not a perfect substitute, but if you have to have an enemy then presumably it doesn't need to be a perfect fit.

I don't think there's much that's special about Russia from a US point of view

Aren't they still the only, or only other besides China, country that could match the US in a nuclear war?

I think in that case opposition to Russia would reflect a valid fear of nuclear war, rather than a "deep-seated hatred of Russians in their DNA".

I'll get on this list one day... one day!!! shakes fist

I think this is the fourth or fifth time that a direct reply to one of my comments is a QC. So its safe to say I am doing my part in making the community better...

...By saying things that are just wrong enough to make people type out a 500w response but not so wrong that they ignore it totally.

Our work makes their work possible!

Keep fighting the good fight, comrade.

If you ain't complaining about woke people, you're playing on hard mode my friend.

Other motte cheat codes (can probably be accused of most of these, I kid because I love)

-- Cite and link throughout to academic articles with titles and abstracts that seem related. Don't worry if the text of the article supports your thesis, very few people will actually read it, or even ctrl-f it. If possible, cite to non English sources, most of us are monolingual self hating Americans who will instantly give it extra cred, but we won't ever try to read it.

-- Accuse your opponents of LARPing their beliefs because they haven't martyred themselves yet. If anyone asks what you do about your beliefs in real life, refuse to talk about it and accuse them of being a narc trying to catch you admitting to something illegal.

-- Claim to have vague personal experiences that support all your points and dispute your opponents'.

-- Blame everything wrong with your life and the world in general on a mysterious cabal of humans so different from the average mttizen that we can barely understand them, who seem to hold mysterious power over us despite their lack of physical strength: Women.

-- work the refs. We all want to think we're fair minded, if you hop on right after a lib gets fucking buried you'll get the makeup call. See! We upvoted @thedag we ain't prejudiced!

-- Just keep typing. The longer your post the lower the odds anyone actually reads or argues with most of your points. The haters will reply to the first point, and you can just say that was addressed in paragraph 15. Your fans will also reply praising the first point, and just assume that paragraphs 20-25 support it.

Hey now, this memo wasn't supposed to be for public eyes.

-- Blame everything wrong with your life and the world in general on a mysterious cabal of humans so different from the average mttizen that we can barely understand them, who seem to hold mysterious power over us despite their lack of physical strength: Women.

I am always on the lookout for some new gender war posts because the whole "child bearing ~ p-zombies" debacle was very entertaining to read (regardless of the drama spill over). And that the discussions of that topic on the motte were some of the best I have read.

But I don't see any of those posts after that saga! Where are they?

By volume of posts I really don't think this is how the process works. Woke aligned posts if anything seem to have an advantage because they generate significantly more interaction. If you're talking about upvotes I agree but for aaqc if it were harder to get on without being anti-woke then the complaints of this place being slanted to the right would be ridiculous considering how often left aligned positions get marked as quality contributions.

Agreed.

The upvote:aaqc ratio is much higher for posts that come from a left wing angle.

Counter to @Chrisprattalpharaptor, I think if a post makes a good faith attempt to explaining a left wing position without sneering at right wingers 3 sentences in, or just without being disrespectful to rightwingers and calling them nazis or cousin fuckers or whatever, there is a much higher chance of it showing up as an aaqc.

I have nominated a few left-wing posts based on that criteria alone, "didn't call right wingers nazis and blamed all of the worlds evils on them, and made an honest attempt to understand their worldview". You might not realize how rare that is!

This has been said in the motte a whole lot, but for the average Blue Triber, the default mode of interaction in most of the internet is vehement agreement. Inverse for the Red Triber. So most blue tribers have their calibration way off and come away with even mere disagreement being hostile, and acceptance of Red Tribers as almost downright unbearable.

For all the bitching and moaning that progressives do about the Motte, does how the motte talk about progressives or their sacred cows even hold a candle to how most progressive places talk about right wingers?

It was mostly tongue-in-cheek, and I'd probably agree with the first half of your comment.

As for the second, well, I think you just haven't found the right corners of facebook/gab/parler yet.

For all the bitching and moaning that progressives do about the Motte, does how the motte talk about progressives or their sacred cows even hold a candle to how most progressive places talk about right wingers?

Not for the most part, but you're comparing the highly educated and slightly restrained members of one group versus the rabble of the other. Compare /r/pol with the breitbart news comments section and you'll find some interesting symmetries.

I don't think a left-wing parallel to the motte exists at all to make a comparison to. That is a left-wing forum that discusses the culture war primarily. Ironically the ones that do somewhat meet that criteria are all rationalist adjacent places.

But if we compare the motte to non rationalist, educated, restrained left wing places such as academic forums, hackernews, or even some very high quality subreddits. Its atleast obvious to me that the word "republican" is much more of a slur than the word "democrat" is a slur here in the motte.

So I am sticking to my premise that leftwingers in general are just not used to disagreement because their baseline is everyone agrees with them.

classic memes, tanista, whichever of the guys with ssc in their name doesn't bitch about the woke, stefferi, amadan and even you made the list.

There are dozens of us! Maybe!

Hah well I am a liberal but I also don't like wokeism so maybe I can shift gears. I've also only been posting since the site move so I probably have a ways to go.

@urquan:

My apologies for never responding to your comments on politicized moderation. I think you’re absolutely correct about the conflation of slur-spamming and genuine right-wing posts. Most places aren’t the Motte, and I am keenly aware that our moderation is particularly unusual.

I was trying to argue apologetics for how this conflation comes about. It is popular on this board [citation needed] to assert leftists coordinate such takeovers. That’s obviously a thing that actually happens, I.e. the RPGnet example. The OP was specifically theorizing that leftist activism is memetically fit because it encourages takeovers.

That seemed less likely, to me, than a more organic approach. I think the initial impulse for hobbyist communities sliding left is usually “sane” moderation: banning obvious slurs. Insofar as the right wing is more likely to value free speech, this is more likely to cause evaporative cooling on the right. The runaway slide starts with a couple guys saying “xyz was a dick, but he didn’t deserve a ban...” and then leaving.

Now, lots of the responses gave examples of left-coded slurs. If these are being ignored from the start, then either they’re not as severe, or the moderation starts out captured—which would be evidence for the takeover theory. I’m not sure how common this is, or how commensurate those examples are to race-baiting or fedposting. I remember a guy on [small video game discord] deciding to monopolize the funny pictures channel for “America will never be tried for war crimes!1!!!” He got muted, not banned, and I’m not confident if it was leftist bias or just...less threatening.

Unrelated, but I encountered that multimc drama around the same time as you. I was picking a launcher to try out Valhelsia 5, which only released in mid-October. (It’s quite good, though.) The Val install guide hadn’t caught up to the news, so clicking through was a complete surprise. It was like looking out on the Mad Max wasteland, except with discarded commits.

I have to wonder if they ever decided where to fork.

That’s obviously a thing that actually happens, I.e. the RPGnet example. The OP was specifically theorizing that leftist activism is memetically fit because it encourages takeovers...

That seemed less likely, to me, than a more organic approach. I think the initial impulse for hobbyist communities sliding left is usually “sane” moderation: banning obvious slurs. Insofar as the right wing is more likely to value free speech, this is more likely to cause evaporative cooling on the right. The runaway slide starts with a couple guys saying “xyz was a dick, but he didn’t deserve a ban...” and then leaving.

Now, lots of the responses gave examples of left-coded slurs. If these are being ignored from the start, then either they’re not as severe, or the moderation starts out captured—which would be evidence for the takeover theory.

For the precise example of RPGnet, I think it's kinda useful to look more precisely, because it doesn't really look like the sort of thing where this is a meaningful question that could be separated either direction.

I'll admit that I'm very far from an unbiased historian, but I was there for a lot of it, and while I was mostly a lurker during the self-described 'wild west' period, you didn't have to post to see it.

But I don't think 'coordinated' versus 'inorganic' is a useful way to think about it.

A big example of the end of the Wild West era came because the moderators were a lot more willing to ban posters who made "trap" jokes, for the understandable reason that a lot of trans posters considered it a slur whether discussing trans women, non-trans crossdressers, or even people (mostly femmy gay men) who self-identified as such. And, to be fair, there's an argument that this is a central example of "sane" moderation, even if the first four years or so didn't result in much evaporative cooling (there's a reason therpgsite devolved into something more depressed than either CWR, Data Secrets Lox, or TheSchism did for us), and even as left-coded slurs were (and remain) tolerated or encouraged.

I'm not gonna go through FCfromSSC's list here, not least of all because their 'working' search engine doesn't handle before the url changeover well and you'd need an account to see the ones inside Tangency Open proper, but the unwillingness to act on 'teabagger' was contemporaneously noteworthy by other posters; quite a lot of the relevant ones, and a number FCFromSSC wouldn't have cause to even imagine, were present.

And those, are frankly tame when it comes to undermining meaningful communication, compared to things like "Wealthy people are literally like bedbugs, with the wealthier, the more damaging." or "And in this case, all the arguments about "freedom" and "responsibility" really come down to "Fuck you, I got mine". And fuck those people." or "It's only defensible if severe mental incompetency is part of the defense.". There's ways to split the baby here, where insults against the left and slurs were meaningfully different than insults against the right and this sort of non-slur disruption, but the moderation team there didn't make that argument and frankly didn't even try very hard, and coincidentally self-serving doesn't actually look much better even if they had.

((And it's not like this was successful at improving the quality of political discussion, even among its internal population: is banning the Big Gulp good as a policy matter, dumbest thread ever, closed by moderators after 477 posts.))

And in some ways, despite the many faults, this was a success story even for a few years after my ban: for nearly eight years their "fuck Nazis" policy actually did make fine distinctions between actual fascists and the merely right-wing, as made evident by protecting UKIP and not the BNP... until late 2015 had that eaten from the inside out.

It's not like there wasn't a coordinated group meeting in a shadowy room (literally called "Backstage"), almost all of whom were selected in part for their ideological affiliation since the Curt and Davenport fiascos. But at the same time, it's also a bunch of people organically deciding that they wanted to have people they trust make decent moderation decisions on one of the biggest boards for their fandom, when there had (... and continued to be, cfe Duck Call Lass) a bunch of really bad history on a number of places they cared about. A few of the moderators got kicked out for other unrelated reasons, but a lot of them did get eaten by their own for Culture War reasons; no small number of 2010-era moderators-and-clique were believably stating they specifically didn't want to do the sort of further steps that 2015-era people implemented.

Is “colonizer” a slur? It targets a specific culture, and regardless of any attempts at reclamation, is usually pretty damn derogatory. Users regularly using this word are strong signs that a certain group isn’t wanted. It’s obviously usable as a slur.

Now, is it as offensive as the usual suspects? I don’t think so. Whether rational or not, the average, politically-neutral American has a stronger response to “n-----“. That’s partly historical context and partly suspicion of trolls, who rally towards the most visible source of offense.

I think the same goes for most of the left-aligned slurs. They fit the criteria but lack the same emotional valence or history, even to a hypothetical neutral observer. All the “strongest” slurs are more taboo on the left than the right.

Fair enough. I certainly can’t endorse a particular acceptable/unacceptable split, nor can I claim that the proverbial normie is making a reasoned decision.

My contention boils down to a lack of strategy. I think certain slurs would end up right-coded even if no one involved was acting strategically. This is due to the existing coalitions and their stated differences on factors like personal responsibility, free speech, and the concept of taking offense.

The idea that leftist generate/treadmill more low-grade slurs is interesting. It strikes me as intuitively correct, and I’d read it as downstream of those same coalitions. A norm that taking offense is valid would be expected to do so?

Maybe my wording wasn’t clear.

Given that leftists tend to consider “taking offense” a valid response, not to be strictly scrutinized, I’d expect more offense to be taken. That seems like it might generate new reasons on its own.

The converse is that right-wingers are more likely to disparage such reactions, self-limiting the number they actually generate.

the multimc fork is https://github.com/PrismLauncher/PrismLauncher i think

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over whether reverting to the Technic launcher was worthwhile.

Battle of the Sexes

Should be rephrased to something along the lines of "Confusion about the sexes". Battle of the sexes implies the RedPill vs BluePill Culture/Gender war.

I found a reference in FC's comment to one of my old comments in the Reddit version this post, and it motivated me to respond for whatever reason. I don't know who remembers me but I recognize a lot of names.

That said, I probably won't stay, as FC is completely lying about what I said. I forget the details, but the deleted comment in question was someone's on-site reporting of the Minneapolis riots, discussing how most people in the community were pitching in to help, and the media wasn't reporting on that. So either FC remembers that and is lying about what happened, or he forgot but just filled in the blanks on his own based on what felt right. Either way, in no way did I say that the riots were "necessary". He's lying, in that unmistakably sanctimonious way of his, about how he's just a harmless, peace-loving family man being forced into conflict against his will.

If this is what the intellectual culture has come to, I'm glad I left and have no interest in coming back. Against shady thinking indeed.

Edit: Naraburns' response was fair. I have been very emotionally unstable lately, and seeing my old comments being referenced can be a bit of a panic moment.

That said, I probably won't stay, as FC is completely lying about what I said. I forget the details, but the deleted comment in question was someone's on-site reporting of the Minneapolis riots, discussing how most people in the community were pitching in to help, and the media wasn't reporting on that. So either FC remembers that and is lying about what happened, or he forgot but just filled in the blanks on his own based on what felt right.

FCFromSSC contemporaneously quoted the part of post here, but it's also available on camas.unddit, and as far as I can tell the only time /u/front_porcher used the word "ethos" on theMotte. The full text of that post was :

Thanks. I just got back from the protests. The sense of collective relief and joy when the police left and we took the precinct was something totally new. Years and years of protest and rage came out when they broke through and started the building up.

The total lack of empathy for the protesters here, complete and under failure to grok the mindset of the people here in my city and the grief that's been building shooting after shooting after unpunished shooting leads me to have to say this sub has lost its ethos the second theory crosses into praxis.

Emphasis added.

Memory is hard.

That said, I probably won't stay, as FC is completely lying about what I said.

You're welcome to stay, indeed I would encourage it. But I don't read FC as characterizing anything you said, beyond it being a response to a different comment.

in no way did I say that the riots were "necessary"

FC does not say that you said that. FC says the deleted comment you responded to says that.

the deleted comment in question was someone's on-site reporting of the Minneapolis riots, discussing how most people in the community were pitching in to help, and the media wasn't reporting on that

I admit that I have a hard time believing that the comment as you describe it got to a score of -14. I also have a hard time understanding why you would reply to a comment as you describe it with a criticism of the subreddit as lacking empathy. And /u/ridip's response to you suggests that the deleted comment was "openly admitting to criminal activity," which is a long way from the description you've offered.

I don't know what the deleted comment said, but the context cues I see suggest that either you are lying about what happened, or you forgot but just filled in the blanks on your own based on what felt right.

If this is what the intellectual culture has come to, I'm glad I left and have no interest in coming back. Against shady thinking indeed.

I'll invite you, as I have invited so many others, to be the change you wish to see in the world. Maybe FC is remembering wrong. Maybe you are. I have no way to check. But FC did not criticize you or attribute to you any of the things you are complaining were attributed to you. My inclination is to believe that FC's account of the comment is basically accurate, and that your response here is based on you misreading FC's comment as attributing claims to you rather than to the deleted comment.

How's that for "against shady thinking?"

This doesn't need to be a mystery, pinging @Thirteenvalleys,

what was once gone can return

Thanks. I just got back from the protests. The sense of collective relief and joy when the police left and we took the precinct was something totally new. Years and years of protest and rage came out when they broke through and started the building up.

The total lack of empathy for the protesters here, complete and under failure to grok the mindset of the people here in my city and the grief that's been building shooting after shooting after unpunished shooting leads me to have to say this sub has lost its ethos the second theory crosses into praxis.

Alright, well, the comment I was thinking of did exist, but it wasn't the one in this conversation. What (I think) I meant was, 1) on-the-ground primary-source reporting is always valuable for its own sake, and 2) if you model your enemies as being inhuman and monstrous in their desires will always fail as a model of reality, and if your model of reality isn't accurate how can you hope to solve the problem? And yes, this qualifies as empathy, the ability to understand viewpoints that are not one's own. Being symapthetic to those viewpoints is, well, sympathy.

if you model your enemies as being inhuman and monstrous in their desires will always fail as a model of reality, and if your model of reality isn't accurate how can you hope to solve the problem?

Just so.

Likewise though I felt very little empathy from the left as someone who watched from the roof of my building as rioters rammed a uhaul through several storefronts on my block. I heard cheering when the bike police turned the corner and washed the chaos away.

I think I do understand the perspective of the people who cheer as police are pushed from the city, and I don't mean in the cynical because they can then do mischief way, there is a narrative that the police's main function is oppressing the weak for the benefit of the strong. Bulstered by horrific videos amplified to the greatest ability of the media. It's the kind of narrative that would have appealed to me in my rebellious teen phase. But it's nonsense. They're tilting at windmills and illusions drummed up by a class of people in their revolutionary word games. Not only will exiling the police not solve the problems, real or imagined, that they want solved but it will impose real costs on everyone else. How many life's works in the form of small businesses were burned on the pyre to not solve police violence?

My most substantial disagreement with broadly "the left" is the existence of what seems like an assumption that all the good that society does is somehow separate from all the bad things that society does not prevent. That without the imposed order of society there would be a warm bed for everyone and no one would go without. But the absence of order is no utopia, it is chaos. It is rammed storefronts, beaten proprietors, private security and prices raised so that even more go hungry. And that's the best case.

Nothing makes me see red like people lying about this shit. It's the most scummy, insulting, manipulative, and (given that the internet never forgets) stupid things someone can do in a discussion.

And it makes me wonder what the point of any of this is if it all comes down to who's more willing and able to gaslight everyone.

They aren't lying. they read the reference wrong, which is understandable because it was somewhat awkwardly written.

Asynchronous communication is fraught. Everyone screws it up now and again.

In defense of all parties it really is a pretty forgettable comment that is probably easy to impregnate with your own narrative in a false memory. Both seemed to have mentally added some stuff that doesn't seem to be there, FC with the "necessary" and 13Vs with "the media wasn't reporting on that".

When military law does become a thing, the first written prohibition of torturing POWs appears to be included in the 1863 Lieber Code (issued by Abraham Lincoln to govern Union troops in the Civil War - again the Lieber code states that it is formalising a rule that has existed for a long time. The Lieber Code formed the basis of the 1907 Hague Convention which was the first international treaty prohibiting torture in wartime. The Hague Convention was agreed by military leaders who all agreed that aggressive war was legal and sometimes ethical, and from the records of the debates leading up to the Convention we know that they would not have banned torture if they thought it had military utility.

The First Hague Convention (II) of 1899, in article 4, specifies that:

They must be humanely treated.

But "humanely treating" PoWs is more expensive than starvibg and enslaving them. So pure short term profit motive can't be the reason. What is more the cause behind this clause is reciprocity: if we agree to treat the PoWs we capture with dignity, so will the enemy. Thus our soldiers will be better off.

There are other article which follow the logic, of prohibiting tactics known to effective, on the grounds that each state will also thus not be victim of them:

(II) Article 7:

The Government into whose hands prisoners of war have fallen is bound to maintain them.

Failing a special agreement between the belligerents, prisoners of war shall be treated as regards food, quarters, and clothing, on the same footing as the troops of the Government which has captured them.

(II) Article 23:

To kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion;

See above.

(II) Article 22:

The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.

If one accepts that the military leaders of 1907 were driven by pure pragmatism, and disregarded any morality, one is hard pressed to consider Allied leaders of 1945 to disregard it further. In fact, in 1941 many other prohibitions, such as the previously mentioned one on Aggressive War (Briand Kellogg pact of 1928), came into existence.

Yet by WW2 the logic of "total war", of "shortening the war by any means" was accept by Churchill, Truman, FDR.

(II) Article 23:

To employ poison or poisoned arms;

To employ arms, projectiles, or material of a nature to cause superfluous injury;

Nuclear arms cause radiation sickness, yet even our more civilized time few would declare them useless because of this.

(II) Article 28:

The pillage of a town or place, even when taken by assault, is prohibited.

Valuable materiel could be procured from a captured settlement and foot soldiers are, if nothing else, more capable if they stave of starvation, even by means of food and drink stolen from hostile civilian population.

(IV,2)

The Contracting Powers agree to abstain from the use of projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.

As late as december 1943 the Americans under FDR, a man who is commonly considered to be at least as humanitarian as any original signatory of 1899 convention and thus not prone to cruelty-for-cruelties-sake, still thought it necessary to manufacture and prepare mustard gas.

The self-praising post about a guy who spent hundreds of dollars on strippers and then a couple of bucks on candy for a homeless person, by @PmMeClassicMemes is deleted.

Go fuck yourself.

  • -16

That will be a week this time. Either decide you're actually going to stay away, or stop coming back to post low-quality shit and then whine about how you're treated.

EDIT: Ignore this, @Chrisprattalpharaptor is right. There are month-old comments implying the post was deleted at the time. The deletion has no bearing on recent drama.

The account is still active along with comments. I imagine PMCM specifically waited for this to delete their AAQC? It's a bit catty but certainly within their rights.

I think they deleted it the morning after. I seem to remember some people mentioning it was deleted when they were replying.

Wow, that was a trip. In a good way, I think?

What’s going on with PMCM? Is he currently banned? I understand (and sympathize with) his squabbles with nara, but I hope he sticks around.

No, he is not currently banned.

Well, now he is. Sigh.

Here is the text:

Epistemic Status : It is 3:16 am and I have returned from the strippers. Auspicious time to begin a post, to be sure. For god so loved the world that he gave his only son... however that one ends. I'm a heeb, idk.

I.

When I was 18 years old, I worked at an inner city liquor store. I became the acquaintance of a man named Smokey. Smokey was homeless. Smokey had his real name tattooed on the inside of his arm "in case he ever forgot it". Smokey was a crack addict. Smokey sometimes beat up his retarded homeless friend, Sean. One time, Smokey and Sean had been invited to Sean's brother's wedding. They kept wearing the tuxes for the next week. Smokey got harrassed by the cops for panhandling. Smokey took the ticket in stride, walked away from the cop, and then from a distance of 50 metres, nailed the cop square in his forehead with an orange. The cop covered in orange juice arrested a Tuxedo'd Smokey. I laugh to this day.

Smokey didn't have a good life. When Smokey was eight years old, his mother was driving him home from school wasted. She hit and killed another child. She went to prison. Smokey went to live with relatives, also drunks.

We don't have a good solution for people like Smokey. Best we do is toss 'em in the drunk tank, or the unpaid fines tank for a week or two, and then let 'em out. Smokey goes back to doing what he does.

When Smokey died of an overdose in a crack house, the church he went to held a service and two hundred people showed up. I lost my shit, man. Here was the first evidence I ever saw of Christians acting like Christ. They mourned a useless fuckup. They sang his favourite hymns and talked about their favourite memories of the wastoid degenerate that was Smokey. What the fuck did Smokey ever do for anyone? Nothing. But they loved him just the same. Most importantly, even though he slept in the alley - he was a Neighbour, worthy of that commandment - "Love Thy Neighbour".

When I was younger, I imagined "if I ever won the lottery..." I would give Smokey a house or some bullshit. Hero complex. Maybe I can save the world.

II.

Cab just dropped me off at the convenience store near my house. I dropped $1200 on private dances with strippers tonight. It was OK. I bought a gatorade to aide in hangover prevention, and I bought a pack of cigarettes.

As I walked home, I walked past a Starbucks. There was a man sat alone at 2:45am, with a colouring book. Colouring a colouring book at 2:45am in a quiet suburb. I asked his name and I sat with him. Matt was obviously homeless. Matt cried because I asked his name. Nobody has ever asked Matt's name. To the world, Matt is a problem. Matt is a burden. Matt used to be addicted to opiates. That, and fertility issues, caused the end of his marriage. He likes 'em big. Her sister was big too, and dropped some weight, and got pregnant, so why can't she? She blamed his drugs, he blamed her weight, and the marriage dissolved.

I took Matt back to the convenience store, and I bought him a coffee, and a pack of cigarettes, and a shitload of candy. I told him to go nuts with a $30 budget. What a prick I am, I spend $1200 on fucking peelers and I give a homeless man $30. He's a meth-head now, no more opiates, so he wanted candy! I bought him some candy. I didn't do it because I felt guilty about spending money on strippers. I didn't do it because the homeless have a desperate lack of sugar. I didn't do it because it maximized efficiency. I did it because it made a human being happy. Matt cried a lot during this. Partially because nobody ever calls Matt by his name, and partially because nobody's ever been so kind to him.

A lot of people have been much more kind to me. They've extended me credit. They've purchased me hundreds of dollars of shit with no expectation of ROI. They've given me gifts they've made.

As I parted, Matt asked me why I bought him food and coffee and cigarettes. I told him it's because there is no government, there are no cops, there are no social workers, there is no God, and there is no Jesus, there are only other people, and I told him to pay it forward. He will likely never have any fucking means to pay anything I did for him tonight forward. If he does achieve the means, he will probably spend it on meth. But goddamnit, he is a fucking sentient being, not a fucking P-Zombie, and he deserves ten times over what I gave him simply by virtue of feeling pleasure and pain and being alive. His birthright is the stars, the same as yours is.

III.

You will never be satisfied that THE AGENCY TASKED WITH PROBLEM SOLVING will solve the problem. You will never be satiated by THE JUSTICE DOLED OUT BY THE TASK FORCE. Hit the fucking ground and fix your backyard one day at a time.

Some part of me hates those fucking Christians who displayed Christian values more than I ever saw anyone do so before, because they fucking did that for a guy they knew and then didn't do it for anyone else. As do most people. People hate welfare because it GIVES MONEY TO THE UNDESERVING OFF THE TAXPAYER TEET. Here's the paradox - nobody is deserving, yet everyone is. You believe in the basic human dignity of everyone, no matter how drug addicted or retarded or crippled they are, or you're my enemy. End of story. I don't care how efficient it is, we're debating a world that recognizes the freedom and frailty of human beings, or Huxley's Brave New World with extra steps.

IV.

And Jesus said:

"Do not give bread unto the poor, as life is a repeated game, and the poor will learn that optimal strategy is not to source their own bread"

It was deleted for a reason - it was unfocused, came across as self-aggrandizing to some despite the reflection on my own acts in it, and the message was generally lost on the audience.

I enjoyed it.

Welp, I give up.

What do you give up?

Trying to figure out what makes something an aaqc.

I swear pm had a post that I thought was really good last week or the week before (a meta post but I am completely blanking on any of the details - I just remember the tone was a bit off but the core message was great) and I nominated it but instead of that this drunk post made it in? I just can't pick them, so I am going to stop trying.

Yeah, @netstack has the right of it. The QCs are community driven, so the less you, personally, nominate, the less the QCs will reflect your judgment on what makes a QC. This month there were well over 200 nominations. The aim is to highlight about ten per week. Some of those nominations are always just people using QC as "I agree," and some appear to be trolling, but the great majority are genuinely good posts. And it used to be that anything with multiple nominations was a shoe-in, but this month had far more multi-nominated posts than ever before, too (possibly as a result of me mentioning that multiple-nominated posts tend to get approved first, which naturally changes everyone's nominating strategies...)

If I had to guess, I think what made the "drunk post" resonate was just that it was honest. It wasn't as self-effacing as FC's concession post, but it was in a similar vein on a different subject. Recognizing and articulating the weaknesses of our own positions is among the prime values that breathed life into this space.

Recognizing and articulating the weaknesses of our own positions is among the prime values that breathed life into this space.

That's what drew me to this place, I think it's a good way to be a better person. Anyway I am not really bothered, I just thought I'd figured it out (and I thought that other post was really good). I didn't mean to give the impression I thought something was wrong with the system.

I didn't mean to give the impression I thought something was wrong with the system.

Well, I mean--maybe there is! In particular, if regular users like yourself feel discouraged from making QC nominations in the first place, that's something I think we should be aware of and try to account for. So I appreciate the feedback! And hope that you will continue to nominate posts you regard as quality contributions.

Shrug. I wouldn't worry too hard over it.

Some people are here for aesthetics, some for core messages, and some for owning the [outgroup]. They're all going to nominate different stuff. Apparently this was a pretty busy month, too, so there's likely to be more stuff out on the fringes.

I believe the expression is "there's no accounting for taste."

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