US Politics Feedback Thread - Page 233

On May 25 2019 04:27 farvacola wrote:
For what my perspective is worth, you are not a part of the problem, NewSunshine.

On May 25 2019 07:26 Sermokala wrote:
You think sunshine isn't a problem when you say the problem is about posters frustrating others and refusing to elaborate on their points?

Hes literally the poster child in the thread for cherry picking and cheerleading. He contributes less to the thread then the dutch posters and I don't think I've seen a non negative post from them.

I mean just follow JimmiC's post next time he talks to GH. Thats how sunshine talks to all people he disagrees with.

On May 25 2019 07:46 Excludos wrote:


Ok, to not seem like a massive hypocrite, I'll go the other way: I think GHs post quality has improved massively since he got unbanned. His stances are as ridiculous as ever, and I disagree with 90% of the things he says, but his attitude towards others is much better.

On May 25 2019 07:32 Plansix wrote:
True, he is far from perfect. Nor am I. But he isn’t an asshole about it. The problem with the thread is that people are being assholes, refusing to reign in their bullshit.

Edit: the complaining in this thread is what it has always been, people trying to get the posters they disagree with banned. Conservatives, liberals and leftist alike, everyone wants to see the the posters they dislike banned. Just own up to it and drop the faux concern about quality posting and logical errors.

On May 25 2019 07:46 Excludos wrote:


Ok, to not seem like a massive hypocrite, I'll go the other way: I think GHs post quality has improved massively since he got unbanned. His stances are as ridiculous as ever, and I disagree with 90% of the things he says, but his attitude towards others is much better.

On May 25 2019 07:46 Excludos wrote:


Ok, to not seem like a massive hypocrite, I'll go the other way: I think GHs post quality has improved massively since he got unbanned. His stances are as ridiculous as ever, and I disagree with 90% of the things he says, but his attitude towards others is much better.

On May 25 2019 07:32 Plansix wrote:
True, he is far from perfect. Nor am I. But he isn’t an asshole about it. The problem with the thread is that people are being assholes, refusing to reign in their bullshit.

Edit: the complaining in this thread is what it has always been, people trying to get the posters they disagree with banned. Conservatives, liberals and leftist alike, everyone wants to see the the posters they dislike banned. Just own up to it and drop the faux concern about quality posting and logical errors.

On May 25 2019 08:58 Nebuchad wrote:
DMCD: that was here: https://tl.net/forum/website-feedback/542042-so-why-was-gh-banned?page=8#156

For once I get to say this so I'm going to: the truth is somewhere in the middle x)

There is no question that political preference plays a role in who is perceived as an annoying presence and who isn't. I'm not saying this as this objective presence that is judging you all: for example until today I thought NewSunshine was perfectly fine as a poster, and apparently some people on the right view him just as I view DMCD. Probably I don't have that perception because NS is more aligned with me politically than DMCD is. This is quite normal, and it's a bit ridiculous that we're going to pretend that some people are disruptive because of their attitude alone, and it just happens that all the disruptive people are the people who agree the less with liberal values, and there are people who agree with liberal values who are just as disruptive but aren't considered so.

So that's one side of the coin. The other: a lot of you guys are definitely asking for it. Danglars has admitted himself that he's there to work on his arguments against liberals. There is no hope of ever getting him to agree that you're right on anything, that literally goes against his project here. Pretending that he gets dismissed because of the liberal bias of this forum is comical.

xDaunt is, in my opinion, more honest. But he's also lawyering a whole lot. He is almost never presenting a full picture of his argument, he's focusing on what works well and ignoring what doesn't. I'm not even sure that's a criticism, he's a good propagandist. But there's an element of annoyance that necessarily goes with talking to people like that.

More generally (and more polemically) I think there's something inherent with conservatism that almost necessitates a strategy when engaging other ideologies. Conservatives will very often present as capital L Liberals, supportive of "classical liberalism". But conservatism was distinct from classical liberalism at the time (tradition descending from Burke vs tradition descending from Smith if you're interested). Simplifying a little (but not grossly imo), liberalism was an effort to give legitimacy to a new system of governance. We have overturned the authoritarian rule that was before us, however we still plan to govern the shit out of you, so how are we different? Well, we deserve it and they didn't. So here's some increase in meritocracy and social mobility, you might think it's awesome. Also I'm a white male so this applies to white males only hey (is that too caricatural? Can you tell I'm not a fan of liberalism? xD).

Meanwhile, people like Burke were saying: okay, this new thing is not ideal, but we can use what they're putting forward to maintain the hierarchies that we have and continue to have the upper hand on society.

In my view this is a large part of why conservatives often appear hypocritical and difficult to engage from another ideology. A lot of their justifications for what they believe are rooted in liberal values, but they... just don't really mean it. And so you get stuff like: "It's not that I don't want gay people to be treated equally, I'm just very concerned about freedom of religion (a liberal principle)". And in the next conversation when talking about muslims, I will immediately drop this liberal principle and instead talk about, say, women's rights, have you seen how the most backward muslim countries treat women? (another liberal principle) And then there will be this other conversation about abortions and... You get the drift.

So when liberals say that conservatives are often hypocritical, I can't say that it's wrong, neither today nor historically. To me an honest conservative would drop this whole liberal value stuff and just say that he wants to be treated better than people who are different from him. Similarly I understand how a liberal can appear hypocritical to a conservative, because traditionally liberals have wanted to maintain a hierarchy in society, and the meritocracy has never worked. So when considering this history, it's not unreasonable to perceive this attack on a privileged position as an attempt to replace the people on this privileged position. That's how liberalism was born, and that's coherent with capitalism.

Tl;dr be democratic socialists, we're cool

On May 25 2019 09:13 Introvert wrote:


Actually I've never called for anyone to be banned and think we should try a period of zero moderation. Maybe because I don't get the dogpile Danglars and xDaunt do it seems like a fine experiment to me.



I think I've told you this before, but one should not confuse conservatism's moderation, tension, and careful movement between competing principles as hypocrisy. Seeing it that way is, I think, one of the main reasons you so often fail to understand it. I might as well say that a generic leftism (pick your brand) is hard to argue with it as it arrogantly presupposes it has all the knowledge necessary to bring about utopia while ignoring the world as it exists. Therefore, it always presents an answer to a seemingly intractable and inherently ambiguous problem as clearly solvable.

On May 25 2019 09:22 Nebuchad wrote:


I think you're referring to when we talked about Chesterton's fence?

I honestly don't think that this is very convincing, because the principles aren't really competing under liberalism. Freedom of religion stops when you're treating other people badly because of your religion, that makes intuitive sense under an individualist outlook (which is something that Liberalism has), we don't need to draw this whole elaborate map to figure this out. If you really care about freedom of religion in one conversation, and in the next you don't care about it at all, this isn't an exemple of being "careful" with your liberal principles, this is just a contradiction.

I don't think that you'll find as many contradictions in non-authoritarian forms of leftism. I think our theories are rather straightforward. For the record I don't think that liberalism has a lot of contradictions either; I just think that it doesn't work, at all.

On May 25 2019 09:31 Introvert wrote:



This was kind of my point. I'm not accusing you dropping your principles when needed (although I view that as a natural, human reaction). I'm not imparting it onto your worldview. I think your viewpoint on your opposites is widely held, however, and it's one reason the thread is the way it is. You've already decided what your opponents are up to.

There are plenty of lefties of many stripes in the thread, if people are convinced that the conservatives are acting in bad faith just ignore them, there are few enough that you could pretend they don't exist. xDaunt isn't going to hound you to answer his questions like some posters do to him.

On May 25 2019 09:13 Introvert wrote:


Actually I've never called for anyone to be banned and think we should try a period of zero moderation. Maybe because I don't get the dogpile Danglars and xDaunt do it seems like a fine experiment to me.



I think I've told you this before, but one should not confuse conservatism's moderation, tension, and careful movement between competing principles as hypocrisy. Seeing it that way is, I think, one of the main reasons you so often fail to understand it. I might as well say that a generic leftism (pick your brand) is hard to argue with it as it arrogantly presupposes it has all the knowledge necessary to bring about utopia while ignoring the world as it exists. Therefore, it always presents an answer to a seemingly intractable and inherently ambiguous problem as clearly solvable.

So that's one side of the coin. The other: a lot of you guys are definitely asking for it. Danglars has admitted himself that he's there to work on his arguments against liberals. There is no hope of ever getting him to agree that you're right on anything, that literally goes against his project here. Pretending that he gets dismissed because of the liberal bias of this forum is comical.

On May 25 2019 09:13 Introvert wrote:


Actually I've never called for anyone to be banned and think we should try a period of zero moderation. Maybe because I don't get the dogpile Danglars and xDaunt do it seems like a fine experiment to me.

On May 10 2019 01:03 Plansix wrote:
I’m going to joke about shooting conservatives because they want to sentence to death for having a suspicious miscarriage. It will be extra funny because the only part that is untrue is me wanting to shoot conservatives.

User was temp banned for this post.

On May 10 2019 01:33 Danglars wrote:

Trump makes a joke some people take seriously, claiming the president shouldn't joke about the topic, and forumgoerr quickly responds with joke about wanting to shoot/not wanting to shoot conservatives. Hmm, what was that again about justifying jokes about violence towards conservatives that's so funny?

On May 25 2019 09:52 Danglars wrote:
Maybe you think the best-run nation is one with a somewhat intrusive government empowered to make many choices for its citizen's lives that increase health and safety. Do you think arguments you have on the internet will convince you that it's an unacceptable tradeoff with individual freedoms, whose preservation should be given very high weighting in balancing choices?