Lazy bait is lazy :(

How dare I draw reasonable conclusions about your personality from the way you comport yourself. God, what a jerk I must be. It’s not like I could possibly interpret what you say as a reflection of the values you hold, god forbid anyone think that the opinions of the author bleed through to the written work. Man, you’re just a poor misunderstood lil’ bean, aren’t you? How could the internet be so mean to you, when clearly you didn’t mean the… er… things that you said. (obvious /s)

To quote TachyonTele’s excellent rebuttal, a comment I notice you didn’t reply to:

Nothing Ive said isnt anything I’d also say to someones face. You’re upset no one likes what youve said, so now you’re blaming “the internet”.

I qouted an article, and you came in here making bad assumptions about bandwagons that doesn’t have anything to do with watching a man give the nazi salute during the US presidential inauguration.

There’s nothing to debate. You’re the bad faith in this post.

Dude, if you’re not actually opposed to nazis, or are defending the nazis under the veil of reasoned debate or whatever you use to justify your actions, you’re a nazi. Centrists that make excuses for nazi behavior, or preach for tolerance in front of fucking obvious nazi salutes, or who fundamentally do not understand what bandwagoning is and act like a smug tool while being wrong about it, are just as much to blame as the nazis themselves. The backlash you’ve received should be more than enough evidence that your opinion of your actions is not how those actions represent themselves. And for future reference, the rules of informal logic do not apply to informal discussion. Right now you are, no matter how much you might try and deny the fact, aligned with the nazis.

Please think about that.

Sigh. Yeah, my recent comments have been fairly zero-tolerance (I wonder what has prompted that) for some of the fashier positions you find on here. It’s something I’m working on, but if you check the context for most of those it’s usually some pretty heinous shit that I’m replying to. (tho like, several of my most recent comments are an exchange with a user just a few comments up that I was a dick to initially, and whom I do intend to apologize to as soon as I can find the right words to express it. What they said was quite profound, and even if I do think it’s misguided it does give me some hope that people can still hold to those ideals in the face of gestures broadly at everything)

Listen, I checked through your post history yesterday and took another dive just now, and a bunch stood out. Partly there’s the fact that you’ve got just as many aggro comments calling out centrists and other bullshit political positions as I’ve got (so maybe don’t throw too many stones here because we’re both living in the same big glass house and it’s really cold outside right now). Mainly though, there’s a whole lot more in there to like.

For example:

You play tombstone, a game I love. Your line, “You can’t change where or how you’re born, but you can change what instance you’re on with almost no impact to yourself.” made me genuinely laugh out loud when I read it two months ago, and I’ve gone on to paraphrase it at people since then. You’re comfortable with neo-pronouns, something that is extremely important to me (even if I do have one hell of a time remembering them). You’re passionate about the topics you champion, and do not shy away from negative backlash for presenting correct but unpopular opinions, especially when you feel you’re morally correct. With complete sincerity, I’m quite sure we’d get along very well under just about any other circumstance, and it’s a shame you’re not more active because you add a great deal to the community already.

And with all that said, and with my complete understanding of why you feel this way, you should really let go of the drive to hold casual comments to high logical standards. This is not the Forum Magnum, I am not wearing a toga (and I’m willing to bet you aren’t either, but I fully accept I could be wrong and no judgement if you are), and appeals to pathos or ethos rarely hold to the standards of reasoned debate. It will add very little to a venting comment to point these things out, and if the context in which you present a point like that isn’t the same for all participants, you’ll just be getting frustrated as other people point out they don’t really care, or that you’re assuming the context to be something other than it is (like happened here).

(Also, it’s really just not a good look to attack someone with an appeal to accomplishment, especially as more and more educators pivot to presenting material via youtube. Most of my students agree that they wouldn’t be able pass my program if it weren’t for Indian CS instructors on youtube, for example. Interestingly, an informal internal survey we did found that CS students had the least difficulty parsing thick accents of any student grouping. I can’t prove the two things are related, but man is it a juicy correlation…)

I only just now realize I’ve misread Outer Wilds as Outer Worlds. Both amazing games, but very different in scope and tone.

Nobody here wants nazi upvotes except you. Just go away.

Okay, so… you’re a nazi centrist. The masses appear to have spoken, and your opinions apparently aren’t welcome or worth respecting in this venue. So why should your particular spin on “just asking questions” or “dae civil debate” be tolerated? You’re clearly comfortable with Musk doing this, and you consider it very important to whiteknight for our favorite scrappy underdog (er… musk) by preaching about how we can’t be incivil in the face of a man with more power and influence than any other human being alive pulling an obvious fucking nazi salute at the inauguration.

Seriously, we get it, you’re comfortable with nazis being in power. You don’t have to keep poisoning the discussion by going on about it.

I think that’s just a mean rumor the Gentoo devs started to get back at the Debian devs for that incident with the penguin fursuit…

Oh I’m very much aware of the good he did - part of my job was managing the data for his family reunification efforts, to correct the damage trump did last time. He’s fucking wrong about Palestine and that’s horrifying, and he also did a whole fuckload of positive things for the US. But, critically, nobody actually cares. Nothing he did was glamorous enough to outshine that one debate performance where he had a cold, and the republicans have been so effective in poisoning fucking everything they touch that even the people who know about the positive things he did don’t care enough to turn up and vote.

It’s depressing as fuck, really. If you’re a good, but not flashy, president, it doesn’t matter. You have to be a fucking showman, otherwise you’re a milquetoast failure in the eyes of the nation.

This assumes a progressive candidate would win, though. Given this last election, I don’t think that’s a particularly safe bet to make. Honestly, I don’t think that anyone on the left could have won, following Biden. People were so disgusted with his performance they elected trump again, for fucks sake.

(Apologies, that was poorly worded on my part - I just meant that this is the view you hold, and people don’t (okay, rarely) hold opinions that they don’t think are the correct opinions to hold.)

It’s sadly all too easy to present someone being excluded because of said odious opinions as the exclude-er only being comfortable in a friendly echo chamber. And unfortunately I don’t know that I have a solution to that! But to further further the discussion: I so intensely do not understand how a person who can look past the tens of millions of deaths that Mao is directly responsible for, that I don’t actually know why there are any people that can forgive him. I suppose claiming they just believe the propaganda would be the easy answer, or maybe it’s that they were on the winning side so the innate human tendency towards tribalism is to blame. Anyone who can look past the atrocities he was responsible for isn’t someone I want to understand better.

Nnno, I think the ‘screaming’ part was far more relevant than the ‘it was all nonsense’ bit

How many people go looking up mod logs?

Apparently at least one…?

I understand you think this is the clearly the correct view to hold, and I do (sincerely) understand why you’d hold this opinion. On the surface, treating everyone with uniform fairness until you’ve heard out their argument is clearly the magnanimous way to do things. But this is the fundamental issue of the Paradox of Tolerance - shutting down a conversation with a partner who espouses views like the above Hypothetical Stramandian isn’t “retreating to a bubble of like-minded opinions”, it’s refusing to treat with someone who’s opinions are so fundamentally offensive to a peaceful ethos, so personally disgusting, that they absolutely should face social consequences for the opinions they hold.

“Always be polite” as a policy doesn’t work in the face of so very many political views or odious personal opinions because the lack of negative reaction can easily be recontextualized as positive reinforcement.

Dude the modlog is public, we can just go look and see that they were screaming nonsense about Trump being ‘unfairly’ blamed for everything. It ain’t exactly mods powertripping.

Not all discourse is intended to be (or even should be) civil, though. A hypothetical citizen of Strawmanslund who venerates Mao Zedong as a hero and visionary, who holds the position that his successes more than make up for his failures, is not a person I want to be laboring under the misapprehension that I could ever respect them.

Right on, buddy! Logic nerds forever! Screw those “pathos” and “ethos” thingies, what possible use could they be? We, the high and mighty logicians, know that Logos is the only one that matters! Appeal to logos or appeal to death, amirite??

(Just to be clear here, this is a pretty nerdy website. If you’re going to pose an argument like this, you should make sure it’s sound before throwing down the “bruh do u even see how educated I am” gauntlet…)

This is a ridiculous position to hold. Can you name me a single appellation that isn’t used to summarize those thus described? That’s kind of the point of using labels, to categorize things together by their common attribute(s). If we spent all of our time engaging with every single person to the point that we fully understood their perspective and worldview, not only would we never get anything done, we’d be utterly at the mercy of anyone who engages in bad faith.

“Tankies are biased towards China and against the US” isn’t a strawman, it’s part of the core definition of what makes someone a tankie. This is pretty valid criticism of a group with really inconsistently applied values (though it is, perhaps understandably, a little bit smug)

This is such deluded patriotism it should be coming from an american.

Russia wouldn’t invade “Europe”, they would invade, say, Moldova (which is their actual plan). Is Germany going to commit troops to defend Moldovian soil? They aren’t for Ukraine. What about the UK? France? Will they send their vaunted jets and soldiers? There’s material being given to Ukraine, and intelligence, and all kinds of backroom advice, and how much of it will stop once Trump takes us out of NATO? Can europe pick up the slack? Are you going to rally together and strike Russia to stop them building up, or will the russian backed neofascist parties that are on the rise in every country seize power before you have the chance?

You should be really, really worried, because the odds are that your country spends less than 2% of it’s GDP on it’s military. How long do you think that you’re going to be able to hold out against Russia, alone, with that?

Yeah, it’s amazing the things you can do with UX when your platform takes in enough money that you can support a UI/UX team.

don’t ask where that money came from or why kthx

Removed by mod

You know what, I shouldn’t comment before I eat breakfast. You’re fine, I hope you have a very nice day.