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As someone roughly nearer the same pole as Trace and also subject to that hostile background radiation, I'll agree Trace seemed more sensitive to it, but I do think you're being unfair. He's spoken up against cancellation of right wingers, and he was a long time Motter - I don't believe he was against the principals of extending charity to his ideological opponents all that time. You know everything you've said about him has also been said about (and to) me. At a certain point you become jaded to people telling you you're an evil liar and you should die (yes, I do sometimes get that too), or else you decide you've had enough and you leave.
And also to be fair, FCfromSSCs original posts went beyond "I don't want to live in the same country as you," but to me read more like a near declaration of war.
I realize I'm defending Trace a lot here when I also disagreed with a lot of his stunts (the Schism, the LOTT prank, etc.) But man am I tired of everyone left of center being accused of being a closet Stasi. Yes, I know everywhere else on the Internet everyone right of anything (even to the degree Trace and I are) gets accused of being a Nazi.
I aspire to better for the Motte, but if you saw our mod queue (and especially the "contributions" of people like Steve), it's clear a lot of people don't really object in principal to boots stomping on human faces, only to being the stompee and not the stomper.
Fwiw, I am anti-stomping, and I do believe Trace is too.
I believe you are anti-stomping. What's your assessment of the following hypothetical argument?
Taking this argument in complete isolation, I ask you: if I committed myself to this argument, would you say that I'm anti-stomping? What if I argued further that the proper solution for such a black man in the 1930s South would be to rely on his local police for protection? Would that be a good-faith anti-stomping position to take?
A major part of Trace's argument was that beatings are a lot less lethal than gunfire, so it's better for a mob to stomp on a person than for that person to defend themselves with gunfire. It is hard for me to agree that such a position can be fairly described as "anti-stomping". The reason I don't want to share a country with him is because he convinced me, through rigorous disputation, that should a mob come for my family he'll side with the mob.
I'm reluctant to speak for Trace, who is no longer here, and I'm also reluctant to read a four-year-old thread to get the full context, both because there were probably a lot of other concurrent threads at the time, and also because people change and refine their views (or at least what they are trying to express) and gods know I get weary of people throwing something I said years ago- often out of context- back at me. But if he was arguing that it's always wrong to use lethal force to defend yourself against a mob, I disagree with him. If you genuinely believe he'd rather see you and your family dragged into the street by a mob than allow you to defend yourselves, I can't blame you for your feelings about him, but I'd argue you don't just get to push everyone you consider untrustworthy and potentially dangerous to you across a border. The people here who've made it clear they'd Death Note me in a heartbeat are certainly not people I'd ever trust or want to have any power over me, but I still have to coexist with them.
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Anyone who says this is lying either to others, or to himself. Between two people one always stomps, or gets stomped, or dies before the balance could decisively tilt toward a side. For example, I expect you to stomp me with a ban for this comment.
(Proof by induction: Imagine there are only two people left. The stronger one gets rid of the weaker one and takes his resources, or they are evenly matched before one dies of other causes, and there is still one person left. Now add one more person. Either two ally against one and win, and then it's the beginning of the previous scenario, or they lose and it's the outcome of the previous scenario, or they don't and it's a three-way stalemate before one person dies for an unrelated reason, and it's again the previous scenario. Now add one more person...)
That proof is incomplete. What if “evenly matched” is a really wide band? What if there’s uncertainty? You could be stuck waiting for “other causes” indefinitely. Liberalism is about extracting the most value from those stalemates.
I think our world favors stalemates. “God made Men; Sam Colt made them equal.” That lets me honestly say that it doesn’t have to end in stomping. We can make it too expensive to purge the heretics just like we made it too expensive to invade Germany.
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There is such a thing as cooperation. And it's a little ridiculous to think that Amadan would ban you for this comment.
Cooperation is but a temporary alliance. As Blocked And Reported subreddit, pertinent to the topic, demonstrates, an enemy of my enemy is an enemy of my enemy, no more, no less.
And I think he will ban me for calling him a liar without sufficient evidence.
If anything, it's the "Bet you'll ban me for this post!" gimmick that I find most annoying. Oooh, reverse psychology, however shall I respond?
As for calling me a liar, maybe you really do believe I am lying to myself about wanting to coexist and cooperate with other people rather than stomp on them. In which case, either I am a fool or you are very sad.
What reverse psychology? Calling you a liar without proof is plainly against the rules, the prediction was a simple, though incorrect, statement. However sincerely I believe that only suckers don't seek to dominate other people, and you're clearly not a sucker.
So, were you trying to get me to ban you? Look, "you're lying to yourself" is a little uncharitable and if I really wanted to I probably could have banned you for being a jerk, but contrary to what some persistent pests insist, we don't go looking for reasons to ban people. If you really want to be a bitter cynic, it doesn't hurt my feelings.
Well, I doubt anyone can convince you otherwise, but no, I really don't have any particular desire to "dominate other people" except to the extent that I participate in a society that has to negotiate conflicts of interest and competing priorities, and therefore some people will be winners and some people will be losers, and obviously I'd prefer not to be the latter. But the kind of "dominating" that the brutalists espouse, where I wish to drive them before me and hear the lamentations of their women? No, I don't need that.
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Paranoia and Trust are opposites. Trust is required for cooperation. Paranoia prevents it. You are too paranoid.
You cycle alts through here because of your paranoia.
We don't trust you in turn because the small request we have of users which is to maintain a consistent face/username is something you won't do.
Society is an iterated prisoners dilemma. You have chosen to hit defect on the assumption that everyone else will do so as well. You'll never be proven wrong, because you have defected first and most people run a tit-for-tat strategy.
"When a fight is about to break out, make sure to strike first. How do you tell when a fight is about to break out? Easy, it will once you've struck first" - (c) Putin according to internet memes.
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Yeah, I know. I was assuming that's what was bothering him, but last we spoke "I don't want to live in the same country as you" was the bit that he brought up, and acted indignant that I don't see an issue with it.
As for the state of the Motte, while I don't have the insights into the mod queue, I believe you, I don't see it as the least bit surprising, and I also see it as an issue. It's just that I currently consider myself burned for giving Trace the benefit of the doubt and assuming that was his issue as well. I'm also currently uncertain about his anti-stomping principles, for the reasons already stated.
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