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You asked if racial discrimination was a priori a bad thing. I responded that from a Western/Culturally Christian perspective, yes it is a bad thing and provided a rationale. Specifically that the emphasis on individual merit is a key component of what sets "the West" apart, and that racial discrimination goes against that. You responded by pointing out that judging people individually is often difficult/inconvenient and urging me to cosider the possible benefits of embracing racial discrimination but none of that has anything to do with why I maintain that it is a priori a bad thing.
And when he provided numerous uncontroversial examples of other situations in which a person makes assumptions based on observable traits, you shamelessly ducked having to explain why those are different.
Guessing that an elderly person is likely to be weaker than a young person, or that a bearded man in a keffiyeh might not want any bacon, is just common sense. But you apparently don't have an arrow in your quiver that explains why some assumptions "go against individual merit" while others don't, so instead you just muttered something about not being gish galloped even though that's blatantly not what was happening.
Big fat L.
"Uncontroversial" my ass
This adds nothing. Make an actual point, don't just sputter angrily.
He's trying to "build consensus" by claiming that a position is uncontroversial when it is very clearly not
Comments like this but you're giving him a pass because he's on your side.
Wait, are you having this big dumb embarrassing meltdown because you genuinely think positions like "the elderly are typically feebler than the young" are controversial, or did you just suffer a critical failure of reading comprehension at some point and now you mistakenly think we meant that racial stereotypes are uncontroversial?
You are not in any way improving the discourse.
The purpose of this forum is not to see how deeply you can stick a knife in, it is not to wittily express how stupid you think someone is, it is not to "score wins" by poking as hard as you think you can get away with because you think someone is a dum-dum or wrong and bad and you really want to make sure they know you think this. This is not a place where the goal is to flex and demonstrate your verbal agility in the field of battle. (Your ideas are supposed to do the fighting, not your sizzling zingers.) If that is what you believe and that's what you want to do, you should not be here.
In your short time here, you've already been warned a couple of times, and looking at your post history, it's full of snideness, sarcasm, and low effort dunk shots that I'm sure you think "really told him."
If you keep posting like this, first you will get a temporary ban to let you decide if that's what you want to keep doing and whether you want to stay here, and if you don't adjust your style of engagement, we will remove that choice from you.
tldr: this isn't Twitter, shape up.
But we're supposed to be on the same side. Just you wait until they hear about this at the next gay trans furry meeting, bucko.
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You realize literally in the last 24 hours I've been accused of giving passes to "my side" by both leftists and rightists?
Do tell me, what is "my side"?
People are allowed to make arguments you dislike, even poor arguments.
My understanding is that the mod team has a lot of overlap with folks from rDrama. The Motte's underlying code is a fork of rDrama's.
Which "side" the mod team is on is whatever side that rDrama is on, which is less about left or right and more about a cultural aesthetic. Gay/Trans/Furry PC-Gamer Master-Race rise up. A metastasization of whatever was going on with Hot Topic in the late 00s.
A key feature of this culture is antipathy towards "normies" and anyone else who isn’t in on the joke. Both the extant left and right have factions within them that are at war with the "default" culturally christian, 2.5 kids and a dog view of middle America and it is with those factions that the culture of rDrama (and by extension theMotte) sides. The side that thinks that TracingWoodgrains trolling LibsOfTikTok was just chef's kiss is the side that the moderators of theMotte are on.
Hey, you know what would really stick it to the gay trans furry PC master Hot Topic race? You completing your argument.
Hoff said something to the effect of "here are some assumptions based on observed characteristics that regular people make all the time, explain why racial ones are uniquely different" like three days ago and you've done everything in the world except answer him ever since.
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I am certainly not an /r/drama type. I am an actual Christian, not merely a cultural one, and I match the rest of your description on middle America pretty well. I do not think that Trace trolling LibsofTikTok was peak comedy; I think the prank itself was fair enough, but all the conclusions I've seen drawn from it were bogus, and I continue to believe that LibsofTikTok serves a necessary function.
We actually have rules for commenting here. We actually do attempt to enforce these rules, and to do so fairly. @Amadan is in fact routinely accused of unfair moderation to advance his preferred side, and these accusations do in fact come from all sides. I have seen the behind-the-scenes deliberation, and there was no attempt underway to shape the discourse here in favor of any particular faction.
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Your understanding is comically misinformed.
If "misinformation" leads to accurate predictions is it really "mis" information?
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How does one follow from the other? How do people come up with these ideas about the mods?
They are not intended to follow from eachother, they are two independent statements of fact intended to corroborate the claim made in the subsequent paragraph.
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I'm pretty sure there are no dramanauts on the mod team. There's no insane word replacing filters and nobody gets called sweetie in ban notices
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What is controversial about the claim that, on average, a person is less physically vigorous at age 80 than at age 30? I’m not aware of anyone who would say that this is controversial. Similarly, what person who has even a cursory knowledge of world cultures would consider it controversial that an Arab Muslim is less likely to consume pork and alcohol than a white German Protestant?
I would ask “what is controversial about the claim that a woman is more likely to have the ability to become pregnant than a man is”, but this is one issue about which there is, inexplicably, a controversy, and I’m very confident that you come down on the side of “Why would anyone dispute this very obvious claim? The entire point of our species having two sexes is that one of them gets pregnant and the other does the impregnating.” If you met an individual woman who is infertile — due to health issues, age, a hysterectomy, or any other reason — you would have no trouble understanding that this doesn’t in any way invalidate the general principle.
Yet you have no answer, nor have you even attempted to offer an answer, for why that’s different, and why every other category of individual must be treated as a total blank slate, whose observable characteristics provide no valuable predictive information whatsoever until you’ve had the chance to personally get to know the person and observe his or her behavior. This is an absurd standard and I don’t think you’d actually defend it, except for you feel morally obligated to do so when it comes to race and are too obstinate to admit that the principle holds in regards to the many other observable characteristics that people can have.
As a result, you’ve backed yourself into the corner of having to adopt the same stance as a stereotypical blue-haired college progressive: “Um, excuse me, did you just assume that person’s age? Did you just assume that person’s religion?” And so on. Apparently you’re an unexpected ally of the progs! Literally all you have to do, in order to dig yourself out of that hole, is to admit, “Yes, okay, obviously we can make assumptions about people, even if we don’t know them as individuals” and then explain why race is different from those other characteristics.
It’s not even hard to do so! There are plenty of strong arguments for why race, unlike age, doesn’t provide valuable predictive data. I could even make some of those arguments for your although I have no interest in bailing you out. It seems like you can’t make that argument, though, because, truth be told, you haven’t thought that deeply about it.
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