banned
desolation
Eat At JR's Donut Castle!
1mo ago
Europe fails to assimilate, yes, but there's also major selection effect due to the Atlantic. Most American Muslims (ie, non-refugees) are heavily selected for wealth, education, and other liberal tendencies.
That said, the first and possibly only Muslim-majority city in the US rather famously banned pride flags on government property. The liberalism of American Muslims may be overstated and contingent.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
It's such a weird thing to say. Doing that for real absolutely has big incel energy. And the movie's pretty neckbeardy even as a movie.
Trolling is bad enough, but this one isn't even an artful troll. If you're going to spend time contributing nothing of value to the conversation, you could at least aim for a little originality.
Banned for a week.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
What they wrote was
Call an online rightoid weird and he responds with thousands of anti-trans memes that he has saved on his phone for some reason, starts talking about drinking horse semen...
As a repeat offender they got escalated to a week ban. It's been a long time, I think, since we had someone break the "accept bans as a time out" rule and get perma-banned for it, though.
gattsuru
1mo ago
... from the dissent in the linked decision:
That is why Heller could say that laws banning weapons like short-barreled shotguns and machine guns are constitutional. These weapons have long been linked to criminal activity, as the majority notes. And they also are “not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes,” and thus “highly unusual in society at large.” Heller confirmed what history and tradition already established: A weapon must be both dangerous and unusual in order to be banned.
Wow, what Gordian Knot, such unsolvable. I won't pretend this closes every edge case -- there's a handful of super-rare and dumb guns that could be banned and probably shouldn't be, and even for Title II 'firearms' there are some things like silencers that are starting to creep up in popularity despite their onerous restrictions -- but it absolutely clears the question of machine guns versus assault weapons ban under any sane reading.
((The majority tries to glue the knot together by claiming there are 740,000 machine guns are registered with the ATF... which is a fascinating claim, and also absolutely useless trivia; less than 180k are pre-1986 guns that can possibly be owned by rando civilians, and of those not all are civie-owned or even functional.))
There are fair arguments whether this distinction is good as a matter of policy, whether it acts as an (undeserved) free pass for 1920-1990 bad laws, or where the exact line distinguishes between common and uncommon use, but it has historical support in both Founding- and 14th-Amendment-eras, and prohibits some of the most directly abusive and useless regulations.
The only time the court usually wades into these dilemmas is when a circuit split forces its hand, but that's unlikely here since any circuit that would strike down the restrictions doesn't contain any state that would enact them.
This would be a more credible argument were the court not ready and quick to jump into quite a lot of other circumstances that fit all these criteria.
urquan
1mo ago
EDIT: User permabanned and comment removed for post-ban comment editing.
I understand the policy of removing comments for post-ban editing, but for the sake of moderation transparency can you share what they wrote and were banned for?
This is all "boo outgroup," which you've been warned and banned over before.
Stop, or the next ban will be longer than the week I'm giving you this time.
EDIT: User permabanned and comment removed for post-ban comment editing.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I've complained before that @naraburns is also pretty bad at rounding off recklessly in this way.
You were wrong then, you're still wrong, and now you've brought a third moderator into this conversation.
Your complaint, every time we have these conversations, boils down to "other people did bad stuff and got away with it." That is certainly true! We do not moderate every bad post. We do not moderate all of your bad posts. Why? Well, as I've explained to you before, we have to weigh the costs and benefits of every second we spend moderating. The rules ultimately function only in service of the foundation. Sometimes a not-great post just isn't worth the hassle, and isn't doing sufficient harm. Sometimes a not-that-bad post is worth the hassle, or is doing sufficient harm. Sometimes we just miss it because no one reports it. Sometimes we're busy with other things. "Consistency" is not the goal; the goal is to serve the foundation to the best of our abilities.
But since you seem to at least want more consistency, here you go: I've consistently told you that the bad behavior of others is irrelevant to your own. Arguing with us about what other people have or have not "gotten away with" is meaningless. We've banned leftists, we've banned rightists, we've banned more flavors of political perspective than most people know even exist. But always in service of the foundation. We've never yet banned someone "based on rounding discussions off to preconceived notions from your previous experience on the internet." As long as you believe otherwise, you will continue to believe something that is false.
FiveHourMarathon
c’è aria di frociaggine
1mo ago
If you think he's worth keeping around, do you think you can actually defend his argument?
I could steelman it, but I don't particularly agree with it so I'm not sure I particularly want to at length. It's a meaner variant of the Great Sort hypothesis offered by a Murray or a Lee Kuan Yew in the past. That first worlders have been "sorted" successfully into the smart and the dumb by various mechanisms, such that those "still" poor are the absolute worst, the hard cases, the genetic dregs. LKY talks about this when discussing the professionalization of union organizers in Singapore: in the early days there were many smart workers in the union, but today any intelligent Singaporeans end up in white collar jobs, so if you continued to draw union chiefs from the shop floor you would get people too dumb to function as good union chiefs.
My problem with banning him has less to do with people I like vs people I dislike as with wanting to avoid calcifying the userbase of the motte. Near as I can tell, this is being banned for jimmy-rustling, rather than for any content problems. Certainly we see similar posts about groups that are primarily out-groups to mottizens, the "bioleninists." A similarly structured argument about Palestinians, negroes, women, gays, illegal immigrants, etc would be skated by. ((Though I will note again that those posters who get obsessed with that kind of posting do tend to eventually catch bans anyway)) I'm positing that if we label it banworthy to offend the userbase of the motte, then at that moment we set the userbase in stone and preclude any changes in the future, because anyone who wants to join will find offensive material targeted at them to be common, and that turnabout is not fair play. That is akin to announcing official forum positions: one can, but is not required, to believe that blacks or arabs are inferior; one cannot believe that working class whites are inferior.
Those whose jimmies have been rustled can simply choose not to participate.
I should note that I recently complained about the Count in another comment, for his use of a minced oath, which I find to be annoying behavior.
- REDACTED: I got banned for saying this in fewer words
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: boo-outgroup
- REDACTED: antagonistic
- REDACTED: Violates the rule of speaking plainly
- REDACTED: antagonistic
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: boo-outgroup
- REDACTED: boo-outgroup
- REDACTED: Boo-outgroup bait post dressed up with lots of words and feigned indignation/concern.
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: antagonistic
- REDACTED: A level and a half of irony, maximized flamebait, more exhausting to read than honest racism
- REDACTED: boo-outgroup
- REDACTED: High effort and well made slop skirting 'teehee ain't I a troll' and 'I am stating my belief openly'
- REDACTED: Incredibly based consensus bashing
- REDACTED: quality-contribution
- REDACTED: antagonistic
This is.. impressive. Hats off for a scissor statement with atomically sharp edges. I've had real life get in the way for the past few weeks, and I certainly don't envy the other mods when they saw this glowing a bright shade of green in the report queues.
I suppose your viewpoint is common enough among the elite, especially upper class immigrants, but considered too uncouth to state quite so baldly. Are they/you almost certainly richer and smarter than the average native denizen of a nation? Yes, but I'm filled with perplexity that it can give anyone such a superiority complex.
As far as I'm concerned, my presence in the UK is a privilege. For me.
It's a mutually positive sum exchange, where my talent and hard work is rewarded with a ticket to a country that treats me better, in exchange for which said country gets a law-abiding citizen providing a valuable service. I certainly don't feel any sense of entitlement, or that the average person or the underclass here needs further stomping of boots on faces.
Any attempt to talk sense to these people about how a welfare state with sub replacement birth rates and no migration is unsustainable was (and is) met with fingers in ears and "na-na-na can't hear you". Is it any surprise that with such a badly behaved lower class the elites decided to do away with them like you do with a bad employee and get someone new?
Let's grant the premise. Even then, the way the UK has gone about accepting migrants has been rather farcical. As far as I'm concerned, the only migrants a country should allow in are those who will be a net-positive. Asylum seekers are an altruistic luxury, and no country should feel beholden or forced to take in people who won't contribute.
And the UK has chosen poorly. There are no end of migrants who are of questionable or even negative value. Indolent, criminal, unable to assimilate and then further demanding that the rest of the country bend over backwards to accommodate them. Do native Britons have a large underclass about which the exact same things can be said, barring the assimilation? Yes, but the problem is only worsened by accepting terrible immigrants.
Propping up a welfare state with people who are likely to end up consuming more of that welfare than they pay back in taxes, is, to put it simply, a wretched idea.
Further, I fail to see how the blame can be dumped on the shoulders of the British working class. Declining birth rates seem to be nigh universal in any nation with a modicum of wealth, and even poorer nations like India and Nigeria have seen birth rates plummet even if they're still above replacement. It's very far from fair to decry them for it, and worthy of being replaced wholesale by immigrants, who inevitably fall to the same issues.
The biggest downfall of your ideology is that it's toxic. It's one thing for an average native to see skilled immigrants come in and compete for jobs, or at least hardworking immigrants who do jobs that the natives can't be arsed to. It's another for said immigrants to immediately clamor for more of their compatriots, who clearly don't pull their weight, with the implicit undertone that this is their punishment for being ill-behaved proles. Well, in your case, it's rather explicit. And eventually, the locals cotton on, and we end up with the events at hand.
So yes, the elite class in the Western world has taken Bertold Brecht's words to heart. When confronted with unruly and disruptive lower classes it really is simpler for them to dissolve the people and elect another.
If that's the case, then they're voting for a questionable voter base. The kind of people doing the counter-protesting strike me as worse than the protesters, and the latter only exist because the former have been doing their darnedest to turn the country into something it wasn't.
I'm lucky to have been let into the UK. Is it a perfect place, or even where I'd love to live in a perfect world? No. But it's a step up from the subcontinent we hail from, and I think it's incredibly poor form to go about clamoring to get rid of the locals or dilute them into insignificance. Terrible taste at the least, and you say you pride yourself on yours. And your proposed cure, which seems to be bringing in even more MENA migrants, is a cure worse than the disease as far as I'm concerned. There's only so much you can change the demographics of a country in short order before it becomes unrecognizable as the same.
mildly_benis
1mo ago
Well said. Hope he does not get banned.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
It's a cogent and civil argument that doesn't come close to violating any rules.
I think that calling your political opponents "low human capital people" and "human parasites" could reasonably be interpreted as a violation of the boo outgroup/waging the culture war rules.
I certainly don't think that Count should be permabanned over this post. But even on a less inflammatory topic, I would expect a post like this to catch a tempban.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1mo ago
I vote minor janny spanking
I vote "make him smoke the whole pack". If he makes one of those "at least he started an interesting conversation" threads, he has to answer to every comment addressed to him, or get banned.
cjet79
1mo ago
He won't be banned for the comment I responded to
Disagree
nor should he be
Disagree
my response to that comment was still less banworthy.
Agree
Failing a ban, social censure is the next best response.
Agree, which is why I'm saying it was bad.
Tenaz
1mo ago
He won't be banned for the comment I responded to nor should he be, and my response to that comment was still less banworthy. Failing a ban, social censure is the next best response.
cjet79
1mo ago
Yah well he might be banned for his sneering, so do you want the same treatment that he gets?
orbital
1mo ago
Kind of a shame that us Americans have taken a word which is pretty fun and lighthearted form of obscenity in the rest of the Anglosphere and made it like the be all end all of the worst things a person can say.
I’m still salty that I once was banned from /r/askanAmerican for using the word cunt with an Australian who came to ask a question.
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
1mo ago
Several people have rolled this out lately, yet cannot articulate the alleged bias. Someone who clearly violates the rules but says things you agree with does not mean they are being modded for reasons of political bias. Both the people I banned had very long and bad track records (and had earned warnings and bans from multiple mods).
What exactly do you hope to gain with this ankle-biting? I will feel bad that you don't like my modding and it will spoil my evening? I will be convinced by your fact-free expressions of indignation that I should stop banning people if their political views align with yours?
MartianNight
1mo ago
A woman, born female
How did you arrive at these facts? The IOC never tested her sex, they only checked her passport, but you don't fight with your passport. Similarly, she might have ambiguous/female-looking genitalia, but that is not enough, because boxers don't fight with their genitalia.
Given the circumstances, I think it's quite likely that Khelif is biologically male with a DSD like 5-ARD, just like Caster Semenya before her. In fact, I'd be willing to bet on it. Are you?
Carini may have been outmatched, but she easily could have fought the round out defensively, run away, survived to the bell, and thrown in the towel between rounds.
That would not have called attention to the inherent unfairness of being paired up against a male opponent.
It makes a mockery of boxing.
You know what makes an even greater mockery of female boxing? Allowing males to compete. If you want to avoid a situation like this, you should be calling for Khelif to be sex tested and (if male) banned, not for Carini to take a beating from a (likely) male.
The fact that you think the woman should just suck it up and let the man demolish her shows that you don't care about the integrity of the sport at all. You just want to watch men beat up women, and have a grudge against women who won't put up with that.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Even within that, I don't think I've ever met anyone who wants coffee, tea, coca cola, aspirin, or cough syrup banned. And that's before we get to prescription drugs.
Actually, most people seem to be fine with most drugs being legal. Like you I've come to the conclusion that the problem is opiates and meth, and maybe to a smaller degree a couple others, but... really, it's opiates and meth that are the problems. And if there's a third member of that set it's alcohol, which I don't want banned either.
On the back of revelations that the IBA banned Khelif mid tournament some time ago and that Carini has now issued an apology, the IBA is gifting Carini a US$50k payout as if she had won a gold medal..
This is after the IOC recently discredited the IBA for banning Khelif 'without due process mid tournament':
These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA. Towards the end of the IBA World Championships in 2023, they were suddenly disqualified without any due process.
“According to the IBA minutes available on their website, this decision was initially taken solely by the IBA Secretary General and CEO. The IBA Board only ratified it afterwards and only subsequently requested that a procedure to follow in similar cases in the future be established and reflected in the IBA Regulations. The minutes also say that the IBA should ‘establish a clear procedure on gender testing’.
“The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.
Nothing about whether Khelif has XY chromosones. Entire statement is 'the IOC developed guidelines and followed those guidelines therefore it's irrelevant what genetics Khelif has as all people have the right to compete'.
Who is running the IOC's media account? It's worth going through all the statements by IOC against the IBA recently.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
My problem with the drug war is not just rooted in my libertarian-esque attitudes about the proper bounds of government. It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.
it's not 2005 anymore. we've scaled back waging of the drug war considerably and the problem has worsened. clearly, policing drug use was doing something useful
imagine it's your child living in a tent in the park. they refuse to speak to you because you have told them they need help for their fentanyl addiction. they've overdosed already and the police have administered narcan and left them with a card with a hotline number to call to get help. they refuse. they just want more fentanyl.
IMO, the most merciful thing you could do is arrest them and put them in jail for a few weeks so they can detox and remember they like things besides fentanyl
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
1mo ago
You've been doing this thing for a while where you try to cloak your contempt and disgust for Current Thing and other users with a sort of dry observational tone that requires one to be familiar with you and read between the lines. You've mostly been getting away with this because Not Speaking Clearly is against the rules but often slides because it's somewhat subjective. But being directly antagonistic and insulting to other posters is much less ambiguous.
Your record is terrible and your most recent ban was not very long ago. You are banned for two weeks, and given that multiple moderators are leaving notes like "Escalate if he keeps this up," you are looking at a permaban in your future if you can't control yourself.
gattsuru
1mo ago
For those who haven't seen it, "When I See An Elephant Fly" and, while not as well-remembered or about the African-American men in it, "Song of the Roustabouts". The original released in 1941, and while I don't remember if it explicitly writes out the time of the setting, it's clearly post-1920 (there are prominent electrical lights in a non-urban area, airplane are drawn with metal, not cloth).
The dumb critique (eg, the version you get if you try to watch the show in Disney+) is that the crows are minstrel show references. And while they're not Sambo-level stereotypes, even giving the worst interpretation of their beaks, minstrel shows did have African-American characters with spats and pronounced AVEE, giving Life Lessons in with overstated emotion. I don't think that is my problem with minstrel shows, but for some people the cooties are enough (when they want them to be; the same people will carefully ignore much more overt connection when it's costly).
The steelman is that the work as a whole tried to say something, but to do so in 1941 meant compromises with evil that are no longer necessary in 2024. The African-American characters in "Roustabouts" are explicitly compared (and arguably drawn like, though Dumbo's animation in general was a little rough) to apes, are gleefully happy in their work, can't read or write, blow all their pay the day they get paid -- because their cash pay is so little that sending their kids to the circus they work at consumes it all, their room and board is a windowless carriage car, and do I need to spell out Segregation-era education? While I'll admit it's neither the only possible interpretation or intent, I think it's a very plausible read they are dehumanized in the sense that this is showing that they are treated like animals, in-setting, but they're more human and dedicated than the (implicitly and paintedly white) actors who make up the clown posse.
The treatment of the Crows in "When I See an Elephant Fly" is a continuation of that theme: they're not especially smart or formal, but they're clever, reasonably skeptical, and extremely sympathetic. They are, along with Timothy the Mouse (and Dumbo's mother), the only people to care about Dumbo, and they have less cause to do so. This is a more subtle critique, but I think it was still a critique; at a time where segregationists thought whites and African-Americans were the same species only as a fault (Loving v. Virginia wasn't until 1967!), this was to say even if African-Americans were different species, even if all the stereotypes of behavior and mannerism were true, that wouldn't be what mattered compared to what sort of people they were.
But in doing so, it had to play along with those stereotypes. That probably made it a lot more internalized at the time! (And a lot less likely to be protested or banned, though see Song of the South for where playing too far into the stereotypes got a protest movement in turn.) Aaand it meant today, there's not much there but the stereotypes. "Judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their feathers skin" was a meaningful slogan when Martin Luther King said it, and now it comes on ice cream wrappers; it's room temperature to say an African-American (-coded) character could be a hard worker or insightful. All that's left is the compromise.
I think it's still worth recognizing that, but I'm an outlier.
((That said, the crows were highlighted as a Good Example that should be brought forward into new pieces as recently as 2017, in no small part highlighting this perspective... and then infamously weren't, and by 2020 were taboo to mention.))
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
We got some pretty good tomatoes last year, but the whole garden seems to be floundering this year (except cucumbers which are doing great) and I'm not sure why. It's in the exact same spot with approximately the same weather, though maybe we haven't paid as much attention to watering it on hot days as last year.
I've never heard that about black currants. I just googled it, and it looks like it used to be illegal but they lifted the ban in the early 2000s since better anti-fungal stuff has come out and they're less of a threat to trees now. But they're still really rare due to having been banned for so long. I didn't even know black currants existed until I started looking to buy berry bushes last year.
I don't get that impression from Elon's tweet. There's nothing deep or novel there, you're right -- he's regurgitating standard economic dogma. But stating something that is both true and obvious is not, at least in my worldview, somehow a knock against the person saying it -- particularly when it actually is a controversial statement among laymen: something like half the country supports rent control (varies from poll to poll). Maybe if he was phrasing it as if he was some kind of gigabrain genius and these were wholly original thoughts, I'd have a more negative reaction, but I didn't parse it that way.
I think I'm probably more pro-Elon than most people here, though I'm quite bearish on Tesla in particular wrt. their ability to deliver on their self-driving promises, SpaceX is just so impressive it kind of washes away those sins. Rocket companies are hard, Carmack couldn't build one, Bezos' Blue Origin is far from competitive, ULA is basically a joke, etc. I mean just look at this graph: https://x.com/FutureJurvetson/status/1792672666316665198/photo/1
Now, how much of SpaceX's success is due to Musk is a totally reasonable discussion to have, but even in the most cynical case, he at least hired the best people and set strategic objectives that led directly to capturing the overwhelming majority of the launch market and drove costs down an order of magnitude. And this is before Starship.
X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability) but some of my favorite poasters have been unbanned and I think you could argue his acquisition dragged the Overton window to the right, so I'm giving him a pass there as well. And there's something ironic about the legacy media claiming it's dead/dying when Biden announced his resignation on X/Twitter first.
With regards to Altman, he comes across as basically a grifter and technically unsophisticated, no disagreements there. I am not at all impressed by his leadership.
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