domain:nfinf.substack.com
On the Decline of Democratic Patriotism
Some of you probably saw the patriotism poll floating around recently, and though I won't specifically talk about the decline of the "extreme" and "very" categories among both Democrats and Independents as a general trend, I do want to talk a little bit about one example from, well, today, that illustrates one source of anti-patriotic feeling. But first:
Local action is more patriotic than fireworks
Let me preface this by saying my own piece on what the most truly patriotic display would be tomorrow: Google, right now, what kind of local elections are happening in November (emphasis on LOCAL) and volunteer for the person you find to be most worthy of support. Email them now. Politics is over-nationalized, and people are forgetting that they can make a difference. Laws are more powerful than people give them credit! There's almost literally nothing we can't actually change. Hell, we can change the freaking Constitution itself if we want to! The entire House gets re-elected fresh every two years! More locally, is there a parking ordinance you hate? A requirement or tax you dislike? Want to enable some houses to be built, or the roads to be changed? You can change those. It starts with electing someone trustworthy and receptive.
People are forgetting, too, that participation in democracy isn't actually so much a matter of a contract or trade (you give X, receive Y) but rather a duty innate to all. Put another way, even if your national vote makes no mathematical difference, you have a moral duty to vote. Furthermore, your attitude towards the vote (and civic participation more generally) rubs off on the people around you to an extent that's underappreciated. In that light, if you don't bother to do any self-reflection of any kind tomorrow, what a missed opportunity, but also, how unfortunate. Yes, the biggest difference would probably be volunteering, but introspection surely is a close second (in terms of opportunity).
Medicare cuts as anti-patriotism?
On a more culture war note, as July 4th approaches, recently I've seen a number of expressions like this tweet, emphasis mine:
Anyone who voted for this should be voted out. 17M lose health care. Kids lose lunch. Vets lose help. All so billionaires get tax breaks and ICE gets a raise.
You gutted Medicaid and blew a $3.5T hole in the debt, and want a medal?
This ain’t patriotism. It’s cruelty. Shame on you.
Thoughts like this are common, and are often accompanied by a declaration that they themselves don't want to celebrate. Or, that waving flags and being a loud USA-chanter is massive hypocrisy. We've all heard some variant of this from parts of the left or disaffected neutrals as well.
Increasingly a lot of people seem to feel that healthcare is a human right. I'm... almost there, but not quite? But even proponents can admit it's not traditionally something seen as something fundamental Americans should be entitled to, so to me it seems a little strange to bring a policy and values dispute over modern healthcare into the conversation about if it's good to wave a flag, or if it's patriotic. Healthcare isn't something so quintessentially American as all that. Maybe it's cruel, morally, but I fail to see the connection with patriotism at all.
Celebrating and promoting patriotism in general is, to me, focusing on, being grateful for, and continuing to promote a specific set of values and traits unique and special to America. I think that's a serviceable definition. Specific values and traits means especially some of the freedoms originally emphasized in the constitution and declaration of independence. Life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness, freedom from government oppression, voting rights, power proceeding from the people themselves, that people are created equal, things like that are the values patriotism celebrates.
"How many people do we cover with national healthcare subsidies" and if we raise or lower that number compared to what it recently happened to be is ultimately a policy dispute. A serious one! Don't get me wrong! Even so, the fact that it results in some harm to people doesn't change the scope of the dispute - it's something where reasonable people can disagree within the same democratic framework. Deciding what level of taxes are appropriate is likewise a policy dispute. Obviously "taking care of our citizens" is a more universal thing, but it's not like that's never in tension with other priorities. It's not, like, an existential threat to America. (Trump possibly being a threat like that, which I think he partially is, is a reason to be more vigorous and loud about promoting the freedom he threatens, not a reason to be quieter and give up at any rate).
To use an analogy: some parents have different opinions on how strict to be with their kids, or how interventionist to be with them. Obviously extremes are bad (being a helicopter parent inhibits agency or is even toxic, while being too hands-off is callous or even abuse) but I don't look at a parent who favors a hands-off approach and say "oh you must not WANT your kid to be healthy and educated and fed, or else you would do X Y Z things". That's unfair. And is somewhat cultural/historical/circumstantial too, rather than purely a matter of eternal unchanging principle (e.g. whether parents should be required to pay part or all of their kids' college tuition or not is a good example of being both cultural, and something that's changed over time).
Republicans, charitably and writ large, aren't evil boogeymen. Most all of them also want people to be healthy and educated and fed and sheltered. But they have differing ideas of how to do it, and how much of a burden to take upon themselves. Remember that taxation levels, famously, apply to everyone, so everyone should get a say in how we set them. That's like... literally and famously the MOST American thing ever?
So, what you do if you're a Democrat is you go: "all right, I think being a [hands-on parent/Democrat] is the better choice, and I will push fellow [parents/voters] to also be [hands-on/Democrat], but at the end of the day I recognize that this is just a different of opinion and/or values, and that's fine". The fact that some [parents/Republicans] are also [abusive/even evil] doesn't change the core paradigm!
I don't accuse parents who don't want to pay for their kids' college of hating their kids, because I realize they are likely coming from a place of highly valuing financial independence, or simply don't have the budget for it, etc. I can still disagree, and think withholding tuition harms their kids, but that's a different level of disagreement.
Similarly, I don't accuse voters who don't want to pay for massive Medicare programs as hating poor people and being unpatriotic, because I realize that they are likely coming from a place of highly valuing individual choice, or feeling we don't have the budget for it, etc. I can still disagree, and think more Medicare saves cost, is a moral duty, etc. but that's still a different level of disagreement.
Is anti-celebration really anti-patriotism?
Like all things in life, there are times for celebration and times for mourning and times for action. It's nonsensical to forbid or look down on all expressions of joy or pride just because some negative event happened, especially on a holiday, the literal definition of a time where you have an excuse to be joyful even if times are tough?
To make another analogy, it seems to me the proper approach to patriotism is similar to that of self-worth. Psychologically speaking, you need some degree of self-respect, acknowledging your talents, and gratitude to be a good and functional human. Obviously there's a such thing as too much pride, which can be caustic, but that doesn't mean being a total humble doormat is the ideal alternative. When viewing your own mistakes and errors, you can own them and move forward with desire to do better. That's healthy. Patriotism is the same. You look at the good, you take some pride in your individuality/uniqueness, you re-affirm your desire to be even better.
By strongly demonstrating patriotism - it could be waving a flag or loud chants but let's not trivialize it, there are other ways too - we are emphasizing the importance of those more fundamental traits and values in a civic ritual. These are not purely performative, but have actual power, much in the same way that taking time to display deliberate gratitude in your personal life is also healthy and empowering. If you yourself for example choose to display patriotism even in a time when things feel like they aren't going your way, you also empower yourself and encourage positive change. It's not that complicated, there's no need to Scrooge it up. We don't cancel Christmas because X bad event happens, whether self-inflicted or not, because the values of Christmas (secular or religious) are still positive and the celebration is often valuable. You know, 'true meaning of Christmas' basics.
Moreover on a practical level, shaming a Republican by telling them they have a moral duty to provide healthcare to poor people might be a great point (that I agree with personally at least in a broad sense, not the specifics), but even so the shame is not only ineffective (misunderstands why the disagreement exists) but counterproductive. As evidenced by the whole patriotism thing: a Republican is quite literally less likely to listen to you, because they will get the impression that you hate the country and hate their values. Maybe a liberal might even think that, but they'd be foolish to say it. Thus, even disillusioned people should be demonstrating patriotism, if for no other reason than naked self-interest (though as I write, it's empowering too). Not to encourage lying or bad faith, I guess, which I do usually hate, but maybe this is one case where I wouldn't mind so much?
Some people think being patriotic is some kind of duty, but I'm not one of those people. Your truest and highest duty as a citizen is to make a thoughtful vote at every given election opportunity. For patriotism, I merely think it's a great idea that everyone should adopt, and I think that opinion is factually supported. It also, I should add, has the nice side-effect of aligning the values of the population over time; failing to be patriotic weakens that alignment, and even the values within.
hydroacetylene
40m ago
I think 1) left wing posters should be given more leash but also 2) Turok’s seething 2005 leftist contempt has used it up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
40m ago
GDP is a number that correlates pretty directly with the ability of the state to purchase goods and services, such as military equipment
Someone should remind the North Koreans their 'GDP' is small, so they can't provide more shells to Russia than Europe (huge GDP!)
In any case, I'm not sure this is any more evidence of Israel controlling the US government than Ukraine does
Israel gets the most advanced US weapons to fight a few Arabs, while Ukraine gets second-rate equipment, F-16s rather than F-35s, in a war with Russia.
it’s no different to what the US would do if missiles were fired towards Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or any of their other middle eastern allies
The distinction is that all other US allies bring something to the table. Saudi Arabia brings oil and money. Turkey controls a key strait and sends troops to help the US occasionally, though they're not a great ally. Britain, Australia, Canada will send troops to help America too.
Israel only takes. They create enemies for America, they harm collaboration with the Islamic world, they sell military technology to China and frustrate US diplomatic efforts to pull out of the Middle East and focus on Asia. They never send troops to help America, they send shoddy intelligence and suck up aid like a leech. They even got the US to pay off their neighbours too, Egypt and to a lesser extent Jordan get billions in aid for being nice to Israel, the aid started as soon as they signed a peace treaty with Israel.
given how unlikely the claim that the US went into Iraq primarily for Israel’s sake, just a bailey and a slightly less rickety bailey
Go tell that to the neocons, generals, and officials who were there when decisions were made and describe their reasoning perfectly clearly. Did the US go into Iraq to seize the oil, which ended up mostly in the hands of Chinese companies? Or did they go in to fight the Islamist terrorists, mostly of Saudi background and who Saddam was suppressing anyway? Clearly not, instead there's silly discourse about aluminium tubes and other shoddy intelligence, much of which came from Mossad or was used to justify a pre-determined decision. If it weren't for Israeli influence, the war wouldn't have happened.
hasn’t deployed ground troops to take out any the modern threats facing Israel in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza or Iran
The US has bombed Yemen and Iran, given Israel munitions to bomb Gaza and Lebanon. US troops were infamously on the ground in Lebanon before getting blown up and departing. Just because the Israel lobby doesn't get everything they want all of the time, it doesn't mean their influence isn't excessive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
48m ago
You're the one who used Lena to illustrate your point. That story specifically centers around the conceit that there's profit to be made through mass reproduction and enslavement of mind uploads.
We disagree. I would say it centers around the conceit that the act of uploading surrenders the innate protections of existence within baseline reality. Why people treat the upload cruelly is irrelevant. They can, because he made himself into a thing to be used.
In a more general case? Bad things can always happen. It's a question of risks and benefits.
Worse things can happen to you as an upload that could ever happen to you as a human, and by a very wide margin. You seem to understand this, but on the one hand think that the better things that can happen are very good, and also that the bad things happening are unlikely. But your arguments as to why they are unlikely seem deeply unsound to me.
You claim that businesses will compete to offer security to uploads. You expect these uploads to produce zero economic value. You expect the business to secure them forever. You expect this to be financed by accrued value from "investments" generating compound interest. So this argument seems to depend on an eternally-stable investment market where you can put in value today and withdraw value in, say, five thousand years. No expropriation by government, no debasement of currency, no economic collapse, no massive fraud or theft, no pillage by hostile armies, every one of which we have numerous examples of throughout human history.
So you assume this God Market comes into being. And you assume that you somehow get a big enough nut in it that you can pay for your uploading and pay for your security and maintenance, forever.
This sequence of events seems quite unlikely.
Well, maybe law-enforcement now has the ability to enforce a quadrillion life sentences as punishment for such crimes. Seriously. We do have law enforcement, and I expect that in most future timelines, we'll have some equivalent.
I will as well. The Authorities potentially using a quadrillion years in super-hell as punishment for crimes was explicitly part of my argument why uploading is a bad idea.
Don't upload your mind to parties you don't trust.
It's not enough to only upload to parties you trust. The degree of trust needed is much higher than any peer-to-peer relationship any human has ever had with any other human, and also that trust needs to extend to every party the trusted party trusts, and every party those parties trust, and so on infinitely. You are making yourself into an ownable commodity, and giving ownership of you to a person. But you have no way of withdrawing ownership, and who owns you can change.
Given the stakes, my position is that there is no party you can trust.
There is such a thing as over-updating on a given amount of evidence.
The estimate I've heard recently is that the UK grooming gangs may have raped as many as a million girls. The cops looked the other way. The government looked the other way. My understanding is that the large majority of the perpetrators got away with it, and the few that got caught received minimal sentences for the amount of harm they caused. Those who allowed them to get away with it, the cops and social workers and government employees and elected officials who all steadfastly turned a blind eye, nothing of significance happened to them at all, to my understanding. And here, the downside isn't getting raped, beaten, drugged and pimped for a few years, but rather free access and complete control to everything you are for an indefinite and quite possibly prolonged future.
The grooming gangs are a relevant example, because they show that widespread horror is possible with no breakdown in law enforcement or civilization collapse, simply through ideological corruption of an otherwise reasonable, stable system. They are not remotely the worst that can happen when law does break down, as it did in Communist revolutions all over the world in the last century, or in the numerous examples of invasion, warfare, and systematic genocide over the same time period. There are no shortage of examples of failed states.
To sum up: you are counting on money to protect you, on the understanding that you will be economically useless, and the assumption that you will have meaningful investments and that nothing bad will ever happen to them. You are counting on people who own you to be trustworthy, and to only transfer possession of you to trustworthy people. And you are counting on the government to protect you, and never turn hostile toward you, nor be defeated by any other hostile government, forever.
And if any one of these assumptions goes wrong, you will find yourself an impotent object in the hands of an omnipotent god.
hydroacetylene
49m ago
This is even more complicated because ‘cruelty free’ sometimes gets used as a label for animal products produced in more humane conditions eg free range eggs. It’s just a bad term for expressing anything in particular.
Pigeon
coo coo
49m ago
*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750?
Didn’t kaczynsci think that we should return to pre-civilisation?
hydroacetylene
53m ago
I don’t think you’re quite understanding mandatory reporter laws. Everyone is technically required to report, absent specific circumstances(confessor/lawyer privilege, 5th amendment grounds, etc). Mandatory reporters are further subject to time and formatting requirements.
hydroacetylene
58m ago
No, resurrection is thé resurrection of the old body in glorified form. I could link pages upon pages of Catholic autistic esoterica about the exact properties of these bodies but they are the same bodies.
gattsuru
59m ago
The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.
Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.
Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Woke is all about Catharism. Thé Cathari can save you by association- at terrible cost to themselves. The queer black women grace us with their presence, bringing us enlightenment, despite their suffering. Any sexual practice is good, as long as it doesn’t make a baby. There are those who are enlightened by the cathari and those who are stuck in the false consciousness of prevailing religion. There are those who are awakened to the reality of structural oppression(this is the literal meaning of woke) and those who are stuck in the mainstream mode of society. Christianity is imperfect but a great vehicle for the true faith.
Corvos
1hr ago
I think you construct your sentence as, “Peter Dinkle, an actor who famously suffers from dwarfism, commented today…”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
I regret clicking that link. But I generally agree that the ideas are so entrenched that most people don’t even think about them. It’s in almost every scifi at some point that highly evolved aliens will transcend the need for physical-matter bodies and become pure spirit or mind. Or in speculation about aliens you find the same reports (in ufo stuff) or speculation in general— the aliens are so advanced they no longer have or need physical bodies. I don’t have personal strong feelings about cremation, as I think God can resurrect anything so it’s not like if I happen to be turned into powder that God cannot resurrect me. On the other hand, I think it’s a crime against human dignity to throw ashes around in any place. Just like bury the urn and respect that these are the remnants of your relative. Also, Disney people are just plain weird.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
Same here. Do you know why the reorgs happen so often? It's exhausting.
I think it's largely manueverings associated with the corporate game-of-thrones.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2hr ago
I mean, that's a bog-standard way to look like Important Things are being done. In my far too many years at $current_employer, I have seen it countless times and when my previous boss said that we were no longer playing musical offices reorganizing our workspaces my reaction was ROFLMFAO, GLWT and also to make sure to give him shit every time he brought up the next move we had to do after a several month grace period as well, which I know he appreciated. In fact, I have watched said employer literally move different offices to the other side of the building and then back again less than two years later and that has happened two separate times with different sets of offices even! And it's not just my employer. Behold, Azure has become Entra! Azure Purview and Compliance have merged into the new Purview! Use the new-and-improved Exchange Online Admin (except for all of these things that live in the old Exchange Online Admin that still lives several years later). It never ceases. SMDH.
TheDemonRazgriz
2hr ago
I think you might be right about this one, at least in a broad way. Interestingly I think “midget rights” is/was catching on more in Britain than in the U.S., although it may have died down. As a specific example I recall watching the last season of Derry Girls with my girlfriend a few years ago and there was a midget reporter (or news anchor, or something like that, I think) whose midget-ness went completely unremarked upon by the characters, to a really implausible extent that took us out of the episode in a sort of “are we really not going to address this?” kind of way. I’m certain there were at least one or two other British TV shows from that period that did a similar thing but I can’t recall them off my head. I don’t think this particular version of woke casting ever caught on at all in American media and I suspect it died down in Britain as well, although I’m not sufficiently keyed in to the British media scene to say that for sure. I hadn’t thought about this in some time so I’m curious if any Brits (or anglophiles) here can weigh in.
As an aside, did “we”, so to speak, ever settle on a politically correct word for “midget”? I’m positive midget is considered rude but it frankly feels like the least bad way to say it, and is what I would probably choose in most cases in real life. “Little person” is ridiculously patronizing… maybe “dwarf”? That still feels weird to me, but introspecting maybe it’s what I would choose in woke company.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Reminds me of Umberto Eco's Cult of the Imperfect. He applies the idea even to acknowledged masterpieces - one of the reasons why Hamlet, for instance, has been so compelling is because it is in some ways badly written. Lakes of ink have been spilled on trying to interpret Hamlet's motives because they are not clear in the play - because they are actually rather arbitrary and inconsistent, in a way that would probably strike us as bad writing, if Shakespeare did not have the reputation that he does. And while you could just conclude it's because Shakespeare was rushed or made some bad calls, it's so much more interesting to treat the text as whole, the arbitrariness as intentional, and dive into psychoanalysing the hero.
Star Wars is also in that golden zone of imperfection, I think. Even in the OT, the films are frequently disjointed, and characterisation changes wildly without explanation. It's pretty obvious that ANH is written for a universe in which Luke's father and Darth Vader were different people, and Luke and Leia are not related, for instance. In ESB, Luke hates and fears Vader and wants to kill him, and Vader disloyally seeks an ally to stage a coup against the Emperor; in RotJ, without any explanation, Luke now regards Vader with this self-sacrificial love, and Vader is so broken upon the Emperor's will as to consider revolt impossible. It's not inconceivable that something happened in between the films to cause both of them to change their minds (maybe Luke struggled long and hard with the revelation that Vader was his father and eventually came to the painful conclusion that he must love him the same way he thought he loved Anakin; maybe the Emperor discovered Vader's plot and tortured him into submission), but there is no hint of either of these processes in RotJ. The characters are just... different.
And yet I can't make himself dislike Star Wars because of this, or view the OT as lesser. I even like the PT. I still love those films, all six of them. (There are only six Star Wars films.) In many ways I love Star Wars because of its flaws, not only because of its strengths.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
2hr ago
Administrators and organizers need to generate bullet points for when the boss asks what they accomplished this quarter.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
Doesn't resurrection entail a new body being created? The old one seems pretty irrelevant.
DTulpa
2hr ago
I was reading a blog post on ACX some time in the last year - can't remember what about. Something contentious, I reckon. Probably election-related.
I'm scrolling through the comments, names not even registering as I skim through. I find myself reading a particular one and feel a tingle in my brain. "Boy, this guy sure does sound like Darwin" I thought to myself, assuming he was just a 'type', after all.
I scroll up to see who made the post, and Oh - I'll be damned.
We'll never have proof of anybody's identities even when self-admitted. But sometimes a poster is so singular in their style that you can smell the person behind the comment four sentences in. Darwin was such a poster. Too weird to live, too rare to die. God bless.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
3hr ago
What was the home video market like in the US? Because, for us, The Matrix was one of the first DVDs we got which gave it even more staying power but we were generally a bit behind the West (especially on TV)
In 1999? 2000? Absolutely huge. Things were gearing up for the DVD transition, Disney was getting ready to do their old hat trick where they "take the classics out of the vault," basically every American home had shelves and shelves of tapes or disks, probably in an entertainment center.
It's definitely true that people had to be more selective in movie watching than they do now. But if you didn't have a copy of a movie you wanted to see, you went to Blockbuster and you rented it. Going to Blockbuster on Friday evening to rent a movie was a big tradition.
I do feel like a movie release was a big deal in the late 90s/2000s. Movie tie-ins were everywhere, movies would get websites where you could see trailers or character profiles, children's movies often had websites with games and movie-tie in games were widespread. A movie felt like an event that had ripple effects. I still remember when I was fairly young and Monsters, Inc. came out -- they had a huge website and a hunt-and-seek game where you would walk through the whole scare factory. That was cool enough that it cemented Monsters Inc as one of my favorite Pixar movies even all these years later.
The only times in the past 10 years where movies have felt like that are when The Force Awakens came out, and when Avengers: Endgame came out. But neither have really lasted in the public consciousness the way movies seemed to in the past. It feels a lot like the "extras" that companies used to put in for lots of products have fallen by the wayside. And websites are way less cool than they used to be.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3hr ago
My company had a little mini-reorg recently. It also consisted of shuffling some matrix management, and it also gave lip service to new AI tools. I hope no one expects a defense contractor to lead the charge in adopting AI-driven requirements.
Same here. Do you know why the reorgs happen so often? It's exhausting.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
3hr ago
It’s hardly surprising that a movie playing on those themes is going to resonate with modern western people raised with the idea of a separation between the mind and the body
Sometimes you'll even find evangelicals who misunderstand Christian teaching on the dead -- it's really common among evangelicals to find people discussing how "I won't need my body when I'm gone," or speaking of "Jesus taking me out of this vessel of a body," in a way that reveals they misunderstand the ultimate Christian view of the human person as body and soul and the Christian agreement with the Pharisees on the resurrection of the dead.
Obviously this isn't an indictment of evangelicalism as a belief system -- informed evangelicals are firm believers in the resurrection -- but it just shows how widespread this view is. I also strongly agree with the Orthodox on the point that cremation is just a bad call, because the overall culture of cremation encourages the neglect of the bodies of the dead by making them scatterable and transportable. The proper resting place of human remains is the ground or the crypt, not an urn on a mantlepiece or the ocean or -- God help us -- Disney World.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3hr ago
A human. More or less, there are caveats involved. A brain-dead or severely cognitively impaired (without hope of improvement) human loses all/most of their moral worth as far as I'm concerned. Not all humans are made alike.
This doesn't mean that entities that are more "sophisticated", biologically or otherwise, but aren't human in terms of genetic or cognitive origin enter my circle of concern. An intelligent alien? I don't particularly care about its welfare? A superintelligent AI? What's it to me? A transhuman or posthuman descendant of Homo sapiens? I care about such a being's welfare. Call it selfish if you want, since I expect to become one or have my descendants become them.
This is simply a fact about my preferences, and I'm not open to debate on the criteria I use personally. I'm open to discussing it, but please don't go to the trouble if you expect to change my mind.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
I answered you already downthread, but since you've spun into multiple sub-arguments with different people about your grievances with various posters, how we handled Darwin (unfairly, disproportionately, and with great bias, according to you), and alleged personal attacks against you that we have refused to mod, I have a few points to make in addition to those I made here.
First, regarding Darwin aka @guesswho.
Have you noticed, perchance, that @guesswho is not banned? During his last pass, he earned a bunch of warnings, one tempban, and an AAQC. Hardly indicative of unfair treatment, for all that many of our users (and, being honest, half the mods) hated him.
I didn't hate him. I found him annoying and disingenuous, but I agree with you that to some degree, the hatred of Darwin was excessive and ideologically motivated (he was one of the most persistent and antagonistic leftist posters willing to argue a leftist position down to the ground).
But you know what? I also totally understand why he drove so many people absolutely bugfuck crazy. Because that was more or less his entire reason d'être. He had mastered the art of poking people in the eye until they'd rage back at him. I don't think he was a literal troll - i.e., someone engaging in a performance just to piss people off, without really believing the things he argued. I think he really believed the things he argued but I think he argued for the joy of it, the joy of "conquering" his enemies (i.e., driving them bugfuck crazy with his tactics) and he wasn't particularly interested in, you know, accuracy or sincerity or ingenuousness. "Owning the righties" was his game and he played it with prejudice.
You know who drove him away?
Me.
The thread you were already linked to, about J.K. fucking Rowling. Here you go again. The one where I finally lost it with him. But I "lost it," not by going bugfuck crazy, but by deciding I was going to nail his feet to the ground, pound on each and every one of his arguments, and drill him until he either stood and delivered or ran.
Been a year, and we're still waiting for him to get to it "in his queue."
But he's still not banned! He can starting posting again whenever he wants. And while I'm sure if he did, a lot of people (including me) might say "So, about that JK Rowling thread?" - most likely he'd waffle and dismiss it, and go back to his old ways forthwith.
Your thesis that "Darwin was ganged up on and mistreated just because he was a leftist" is mostly bullshit. Sorry.
(@Tree's claim that we bent and made up rules just to go after Darwin is thus 100% bullshit.)
Now about all these other threads you point to as examples of us "Letting righties be mean and not modding them."
@gattsuru has a ton of AAQCs. That gives him a very long leash. This is by design and it's not secret - people who generate a ton of quality comments get away with more. That said, every comment you've linked to as an example of personal attacks? Being aggressive in interrogating you is not a "personal attack." I say this as somone who has been the target of @gattsuru's interrogations more than once and who can hardly be considered a fan of him or his tactics. He's a dedicated hater and I'm on his hatelist. No bias here. Worth noting that at one point we pretty much did issue a "Stop using this particular tactic" rule regarding throwing walls of links to every single past conversation every time someone he hated posted something, because it was obnoxious and degrading to the discourse (and we got some flack and resentment over it). And I mention this, not to continue to persecute @gattsuru (hey buddy, at least I guess we can have civilized conversations about which SF authors suck) but because you think we make up or bend rules just to prosecute our ideological biases, when in fact, if we bend or make up rules at all, it's because someone is being particularly and uniquely obnoxious (a point I already made about @AlexanderTurok) and it's not ideological bias at all, we do it to people who are being particularly obnoxious.
You (and @Tree, and a couple of other people) hammer this argument that we are absolutely seeing for the very first time (that was sarcasm), that the Motte picks on leftists and they get unfairly dogpiled until they get banned, and meanwhile we let MAGAs get away with anything. We've been hearing it since the Motte began. You've all read my "if I had a nickel..." speech about a dozen times now. Because yes, kids, the righties, especially certain categories of righties (the ones who really like talking about Jews, bitches, and fucking children - that's a gerund, not an adjective) insist that we're all ZOG-converged tools or something. Or, from the saner but still angry right wing, that we let leftists in general get away with more. That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned even as the mod queue is being flooded with people demanding we ban them. We especially hear it when we ban a rightie for, you know, being particularly and especially obnoxious, whatever his particular hobby horse (even if it's just "hating leftists").
The point of this long screed (besides letting me get some mod frustration off my chest - man, does it get annoying hearing the same tired accusations over and over and fucking over again)? Make a new argument. But not really- you don't have one. None of this is new. Instead- accept that this is how moderation works here, it's by design, and you can nudge us incrementally towards being harsher or laxer with the general feedback that is the overall pattern of complaints and reports, but playing "Why did you mod Johnny and not Suzy?" for the hundredth time is not going to move us. Insisting "You take sides (against my side)" for the hundredth time is not going to move us.
You're wrong. You are observably, factually, and empirically wrong. I say this because I see the mod queue. I say this because I have a pretty good memory of the Motte and its moderation going all the way back to before I became a mod (I wonder if even @naraburns remembers that I was once on the "You're cruising for a banning" list). I say this because I am part of the mod discussions we have. I say this because I have a pretty good mental model of my fellow mods, and of our most prominent posters. Not flawless, I am not perfect and I can sometimes misunderstand people (and I am saying nothing here about the quality of my own arguments - there's a reason my handful of AAQCs are mostly for writing about hobbydrama-type posts), but I have a reputation for having the best spidey sense when it comes to alts and trolls. I could tell you stories, many more stories. A lot of the misapprehension people have about modding is because you really don't see... the stuff you never see. Not your fault.
But a lot of it is because you're just wrong.
@AlexanderTurok got banned because he has been regularly and intentionally obnoxious for weeks now and he's already been warned. Not because we hate his opinions. Not because he's a leftist. (Or a rightist or a whatever-he-calls-himself playing the part of a leftist who claims not to be one.) The one-week ban, specifically, was @netstack's call. I might have only warned him. Or I might have given him three days. Another mod might have actually let it go. We didn't actually discuss this one internally (we do not discuss every ban). But it didn't happen because of ideological biases or unfairness or the Motte hating lefty posters. (A particularly ironic accusation to throw at @netstack, who is the only mod arguably more lefty than me.) It happened because Turok likes to rattle cages and frame arguments in a maximally uncharitable and inflammatory way calculated to be ragebait. He thinks this is entertaining, and if he keeps it up, his next ban will be longer.
I'm writing a book where the main character wants to turn herself into a cannibalism-powered surveillance state, her best friend belongs to a tribe of matriarchal-eugenicist-fascists that can reasonably described as feminazis, the "good guys" are the IEEE if it was also simultaneously the illuminati, and the "bad guys" are a mix of UN blue helmets and the Knights Templar. I am balls deep in moral dissonance dissonance and nobody is going to stop me.
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