coal

lol explain

Youre the one who wont log on to facebook smh

Well, what do you teach then.... underwater basket weaving? 

Aren't you a math teacher now?

I would like to pick yours...

Here goes:

Pete B hired a bunch of Facebook people, who are coordinating him sucking away moderate lib support from warren to mayor butti. 

lol I sent you a message

Log into your old facebook.... 

Smh.... what am I going to do with you... 

Reply to me on facebook....

lol well I messaged you on facebook anyway... 

I'm on facebook and google hangouts.

Maybe one day I'll even share my snapchat lol

Oh stahp.... lol

I've also become far more intolerant of progressive types, as you can obviously tell... to the point that I hold them in almost outright contempt.  It's not only that they present as socially destructive forces; it is that they are morally vacuous, and often genuinely malevolent people who by and through their actions contribute to increasing the collective suffering of all, themselves included.  I have no patience for people like that. 

In the past I used to think, and I still do think to a large degree, that the identity politics insanity will run its course just like every other stupid idea that left wing populists have come up with in the past has done before.  But, what I'm seeing instead are corporate efforts to commoditize virtue and stake monetary claims on pseudo-moralistic capital.  Here's an example, to put this in perspective: Nike and Colin Kapernick.  Obviously the merits of what Kapernick did are something I don't really care about.  He's a free person and has free speech rights just like everyone else.  The NFL's handling of the affair was disgraceful, but that's no surprise.  The NFL's corruption and incompetence is perhaps exceeded only by the NCAA.  But, what matters here is Nike. 

Nike made a deal with Kapernick to advance the brand's perception as being "socially conscious."  At the outset, this doesn't seem any different than Coca-Cola supporting WWII by encouraging people to buy war bonds; but upon deeper reflection, there is something much, much more insidious going on.  By making its deal with Kapernick, Nike is trying to get people who oppose those who oppose Kapernick to buy their brand, and in so doing, make Nike a symbol of what Kapernick was trying to say.  What this means is that how you spend your money now had an added dimension of "moral" gravity beyond whatever it might have had from buying clothing that was manufactured in South Asian sweatshops by child labor. 

By wearing that "swoosh" you "stand" for... what, exactly?  Social justice?  BlackLivesMatter?  It's not clear, and that to me seems like it's something by design.  Pepsi tried this with Katlin Jenner and failed hideously.  The point is that Nike stands for whatever people are up in arms about at any given time.  Nike, therefore, stands for nothing because it -- like Hillary Clinton -- only has an opinion when the demographic information supports that Nike should stand in any particular way.  When the polls change, Nike's opinion changes.  Notice how they nixed the shoe with the colony flag?  Proof positive I'm right. 

And what, in response?  Charlottesville.  

I think we're just getting started... and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. 

One thing I would say that has profoundly changed about me since I've been getting older is that I don't recall the last time that I have ever felt threatened by someone else's opinions.  I think when I was younger, I did, because I still wasn't sure what I thought about things.  Now, I know what I think and why.  I know I can say what I think and say that in a way that I won't later go back on and think "oh, I should have said X or Y differently."

On the other hand, I am also probably a lot more closed minded now than I was before.  I'm more willing to listen to people, but the probability that they're going to change my mind on nearly anything is exceptionally low.  The only issues I really have changed my mind on is that I have become relatively more socially conservative than I was when I was younger.  I don't approve of the way that certain elements in the society are encouraging gender-nonconforming behavior among the youth.  I think that is dangerous and irresponsible, especially in consideration of the fact that now there are no shortage of so called "doctors" who will pump boys and girls full of hormones or androgen blockers because they happen to be less than stereotypically masculine or feminine, and are convinced by deviants and imbeciles that they're "trans." 

It's sickening to see.  Society has now come full circle; 40 years ago, they were electrocuting, castrating, and lobotomizing gay boys and men because of the delusion that homosexuality was a mental illness.  Now, they are pumping those same boys and young men full of estrogen because they're less than stereotypically masculine, while putting them on a medical conveyer belt to convince them that they were born in the wrong body.  Then, after the hacking and butchery that is sexual reassignment surgery (which in reality, is never only ONE surgery, but many) is it any wonder that gay boys who grow up after enduring that pseudoscientific insanity are almost thirty times more likely to kill themselves than similarly gay men who thought they might be "gender nonconforming" but never got on the conveyor belt?  

The stats on this are clear.  There is a cascade of so called "queer" types, and "gender non-conforming" misfits who are now more common than e-coli outbreaks on romaine lettuce.  Are people more "gender nonconforming" now than they were thirty years ago?  Yes, because it's a learned behavior and deliberate choice, rather than something that is innate.  Gender and sex do not vary independently, they are perfectly correlated, and there are exactly two genders/sexes: male and female.  None others. 

I enjoy some things less, like politics.  I enjoy other things more, like literature.  I'm confident that before I'm 30, I'll have read everything that Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Solzenitzen ever wrote.  I'm about 3/4ths of the way there right now.  I have also found that I care less about what people think about politics, and I'm less inclined to try to influence them one way or another.  At the end of the day, I'll discuss political issues as long as I think the conversation is interesting to me, but as soon as it isn't... I'm moving on to something else.  More than anything, I am more interested in the people I care about doing well for themselves and being ok in life. 

I also care way less about philosophy now than I did when I was in college and graduate school.  I think having read as much of it as I have, it's probably influenced my life and will continue to influence how I think for the rest of my life.  But, I don't read philosophy now.  I also certainly don't bother to write about it.  There is no point.  I can speak with a reasonable degree of fluency on nearly every major political philosopher in the West from Thucydides to present, because I once taught political theory.  Now, I am indifferent to the subject matter. 

The problem that has me thinking the most these days, though, is still politically related.  It's a problem that I've been thinking about since 2015, and I still don't think I have it worked out.  The basic set of issues within this problem is the relationship between ideas, worldviews, events, media, and culture; on societal, cultural, and individual levels.  I don't even know how to describe it less abstractly than that, because the only way I've been able to make any sense of it is to set out characters in a plot.  Jung was right.  People don't have ideas.  Ideas have people, and this has been chewing at me since I first started to see the early signs of MeToo, cancel culture, and the progressive insanity that has metastasized into an onslaught civil war in the democratic party in 2013 when I was teaching undergrads.  Then when I correctly called Trump's winning the Republican primary on the day he announced, and later around February 2016 called him winning the general (before I defaulted against my instincts and yielded to the collective "wisdom" of the polls) ... that was when I think it fully gripped me.  

I might come back to this later.  There is more to be said here. 

Not so far...

Bring back Gary McCarthy.

Oh stahp.

There are entirely too many stories of parents taking action with respect to the gender of their already-born children than I wish to discuss.  Though, for what it's worth, I'll say this:

I think that many, many parents for inexcusably incompetent or selfish reasons are doing untold damage to their kids by and through so called "gender clinics" and the butchery/chemical perversion they offer. 

There is no medical evidence at all to suggest that anyone can know that they are in fact trans before the age of, at least, 25.  

There is an incredibly high rate of post-op trans kids committing suicide.  

The so called doctors who are offering hormone "therapy" and gender reassignment anything to anyone under the age of 25 should be stripped of their medical license if not imprisoned. 

Around the world gay boys are being told they're girls by know-nothing imbecile parents and malevolent "doctors" who are out to profit over the latest politically driven pseudoscience that is the universe of all research supporting the idea that gender dysphoria is anything other than a mental illness.

Nearly all feminine gay boys are NOT trans, or victims of gender dysphoria.  They're just feminine, and it is beyond perverse to have some medicalized bullshit tell them that they're trans and need hormones or a sex change operation because of what is most likely nothing more than a passing phase.

This is once again another instance of psychiatry discrediting itself by and through its normative psudoscientific bullshit, that has and will continue to visit spectacular harm on great quantities of people.

This reminds me of how gay boys and young men used to be forcibly castrated as was the recommendation of the so called APA until 1979 as a "therapeutic" measure.  It is beneath contempt, and a repeat of the identical mistakes that were made decades ago.

Any parent that puts their kid on hormones or takes them to a gender clinic is a terrible, irresponsible, incompetent parent. 

Absolutely not.  Islam, generally, is intolerable as it is practiced in nearly all parts of the non-western world (with the possible exceptions of Oman, and Morocco).  Islam, specifically as it is practiced by Wahabists, is a cult of death that is unacceptable in any society.  

At the end of the day, every foreign policy question begins and ends with American self interest.  We do not act for the welfare of the world, as the so called indispensable nation or whatever.  We occupy that position because it is in our interest to do so, and the fact that the world happens to be better off because of that (which it obviously does) is a merely tangential benefit. 

The delusional progressive/pluralist notion that no one culture is better than any other and all cultures are equally "valid" or "valuable" or whatever bullshit language they want to use is, as my tone suggests, not something that anyone with neurons firing between their ears can reasonably suggest.  There are cultures that range from acceptable to intolerable in varying degrees.  That said, the issue with purportedly "traditional" cultures (by which I presume you mean Islamic fascists like the Saudis) is something that American foreign policy has failed almost without exception to change in any meaningful way.

This is the bottom line, though: the United States' interests are best served when all people have a reasonable chance to self actualize, as they perceive self actualization to be.  What that means is that we want people in shithole countries like Afghanistan to be in a position to make the choice to do something that is economically productive for themselves, so they don't fall beholden to terrorist groups like Al Quaeda or others.  The same applies in every other Muslim majority country on earth.  We also want members of Muslim majority countries to see themselves as individuals with rights who have a place in the world, rather than as nihilistic vessels for murdering infidels (which is what entirely too many especially Muslim boys and men in certain shithole countries tend to think).  

In an ideal world, the identitarian aspects of who they are (e.g., "I am a Muslim first, and an Afghani, second.") need to be ordered by each person in such a way that when their terror-prone cult-of-death theology conflicts with, say, Western standards of morality; they default to the Western standard of morality.

>How well done is the steak and any sides or sauce/toppings?

The steak is seared on the outside, to a sufficient degree; but cool on the inside, before the point whee any fat begins to render. 

No sauce if the meat is good.

If the meat is not good, then London Pub.

Great question.  The reason I'm on the left is because the kind of society that I want to live in measures its success, collectively, as a more perfect union; based on how well those at the bottom of any hierarchy fare, as opposed to how well those at the absolute top fare.  Said less abstractly, it is because I care more about people's lives and well being more than I care about corporate profits or any other return on capital. 

It is always too late to say sorry... lol

I hope you appreciate the irony of your question... lol

Started at the bottom now we here?

-Yes.  German and Russian (conversational)

Remember, I have an AMA.

Ask me stuff there. 

I am reinvigorating this thread.

Ask me more questions. 

148 - when tested as a child.

160+ on the online tests.

Everything I said is "subjective".

By saying "subjective" you mean "I am not sure I agree with that".

Be precise in your language. 

This is an obvious point, but one which seemingly is lost on many...

You do not need "perspectives" on debate judging.  You either win, or you lose.  If you're a Republican and you give the win to your guy because you agree with that side, you are a bad judge.  If you are a Democrat and you vote against a Republican because you disagree with him, you're a bad judge.

These things should be so obvious they need not even be stated, but with any discussion of voting based on political affiliation... it has to be said. 

This is sad and should not be the case... but here we are.    

I return to the point at issue:

If you want people to vote, you have to do three things....

1. Make voting easy.

2. Eliminate barriers that prevent voting from being easy (i.e., voting moderation, RFD requirements, etc.).

3. Write better debates (i.e., ones worth reading).  

This is nonsensical and needlessly complicated.

I don't have a problem with questions, generally.  I only have a problem with stupid questions, like whether anyone needs an AR-15.  

I am quite serious in my skepticism of the claim that the absence of voting standards would drive away quality members from both potentially voting or debating. 

We need to define who a quality member is.  This person is someone who would put a reasonable amount of effort into what they wrote, snd try to do the best they could under the circumstances.  Their motivations to contribute here are hard to meaningfully speculate on, but I think enjoyment would be at the top of their list. 

The thing about debating is that it's not really about winning or losing any specific debate, but about being invited to debate again.  So this would be like John McCain and Barack Obama.  Both were respectable people in their own rite who treated those with different opinions than them respectfully and fairly.  The same would be true of voters.  A quality voter treats both debaters fairly and respectfully.  More can't really reasonably be asked.

Is this person going to be turned away because of the absence of rules and regulations?  No.  He is going to assume that people are going to do the right thing and probably won't be disappointed unless he encounters someone truly hideous or trollish.  This does not generally seem to be, with few exceptions, a problem here.

What, then, would turn this person away from participating?  Being treated like a potential Mikal, and having a vote cast in good faith removed for some arbitrary reason from some meaningless policy that shouldn't exist.  That would turn them away fast. 

Your assumption that "anything goes" drives off quality members is belied by the OP I just wrote, and my response to your prior comment.  I said that a reason I don't vote is because RFD's take too long to write.  

The reasons I don't debate, however, is different... it's because I don't care.  Apathy isn't something I think you could overcome.  I think most other potentially quality members are in the same boat.  We've got other things to do.

The notion that a "policy" or "regulation" is needed to "prevent abuse" is misguided, bureaucratized nonsense.  Policies do not make people do the right thing, setting a cultural expectation that doing the right thing is what it takes to be a part of any community is what gets people to do the right thing.  

This is the big picture; at once, the forest and the trees.  

I have yet to see any evidence, at all, that voting moderation accomplishes anything good; here, on DDO, or anywhere else a similar concept has been tried. 

The bottom line is that before any group goes off to try to write policies and procedures, they never think to ask: "What is it we are really trying to do here, and why?"

On DDO, vote moderation was a reaction to obnoxious people like Mikal and others who did some immature things he probably would not repeat now.  But, the result of that was that every voter got treated like a potential Mikal.  Yet, some votes were removed and others weren't.  The community demanded answers, because of what many decried as "inconsistency."  Most of that bitching and moaning was just self serving, because Mikal and others wanted to keep vote bombing.  

To redress this, a discussion was had -- of which I was a part -- to come up with something resembling a policy on what counts for a sufficient vote.  Bluesteel tried to write something out, and implement it.  By all counts he did a fairly good job of that.  Then the problem stopped.  But, the new rules didn't stop.  They got worse, tighter, and their enforcement more intrusive.  As a result, the number of votes declined. 

It turns out that when otherwise fine votes cast in good faith get treated like Mikal's infamous bullshit vote bombs (some of which were funny, mind you, but I digress), people stop voting.  So, the new complaint became... why doesn't anyone vote?  Obviously because  voters don't like being harassed for voting.

Whiteflame -- though I still like him as a person -- was infamous for removing votes that shouldn't be.  Bsh1 was absolutely terrible for this as well.  Most everyone who got involved in any aspect of vote moderation, from reporting to enforcing, fucked it up.  

Why might that be?  Could it be that voting moderation just shouldn't exist? 

That's what it looks like to me. 

My suggestion would be to stop moderating votes.  Let anything go, and see what happens. 

If specific people abuse the process, deal with them appropriately; but do it outside the context of "voting moderation".  It's a user harassment issue at that point. 

I have no opinion on your writing style.  If you want my opinion, give me a 1000 word (or thereabout) writing sample.  I may read it, eventually.

Being the irrelevant member that I am, these are some of the reasons I continue to remain irrelevant... especially with respect to votes. 

The best way to incentivize voting would be to reduce the barrier to entry.  You have two choices: maybe potentially higher quality votes or more votes, but never both.  Pick one.

So far, the site picks the former.  

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Talking to Strangers" (which, for reasons beyond the scope of this thread I recommend to all).  There, he discusses how most people default to believing people are telling the truth.  The world gets along better when we assume others are cooperative and act in good faith until we see clear evidence otherwise.  

A short, three sentence RFD is NOT evidence of bad faith voting or vote bombing or whatever else.  There were problems on DDO that I think are unlikely to be problems here.  The obvious question is: when the reason for the rule no longer exists, should still the rule?  Most people would probably say no, because most people prefer maximal freedom to the alternative.

In my experience, the hardest graders are among the least competent.  They are "hard" to compensate for the fact that they are bad teachers, as a way to encourage students to teach themselves.

Also, maturity has little to do with writing skill.  You can be 14 and still be a good writer, if properly taught and practiced. 

Don't care.  Seems more worthless than Reddit karma.

Now, here's an example of a terrible debate topic:

"The Bible is internally inconsistent."

Of course it is.  No reasonable person could possibly disagree with that. But, to what end? Doesn't mean that Christianity is an invalid religion, or anything else.  It means that religion like everything else in life is complicated.  Ill considered low quality, unsophisticated debate topic.  You'd have to be biologically or emotionally a child to desire to debate such nonsense.

Here's a worse topic:

This is worse for the same reason that the above topic is stupid.

More stupid topics:

Most debates are poorly done, involve low effort, and look boring.  I think most of you just don't understand how to substantively engage in fact/reason based discourse.  There are presumably many reasons for this, tangential to the observation I make here, but reading bad writing is to me like listening to music out of tune.  I'm just not interested in it.

I think as well most of you just aren't very good writers.  Obviously maybe you could improve a bit here if you wrote a bit more, but it is really hard for me to be invested enough in any of you to be willing to spend the time to teach you how to do something.  Even if I did, I think there's an alarmingly high number of you who would resent my pointing out your lack of excellence. 

Too many of you have the idea that judges should just praise debaters for their effort, which I think is stupid.  Many of you struggle to form coherent sentences.  Your writing is bad.  Your arguments are contradictory.  You do not know how to use evidence to support arguments.  You do not know how to structure arguments in support of conclusions.  You do not know how to even engage in thesis-driven writing.

I blame your lack of education.  Teaching people to write clearly and effectively takes time and skill, which I am confident nearly all of your school teachers lack.  I think in twelve years of public education, I had not more than three teachers who could write coherently themselves, and one who knew how to teach others to do it.

Despite this, if I pointed this out to you, would you not resent me for it?  Do you not already resent me now for pointing out this fact?  Of course you do, because when you hear criticism you don't take it as "this person cared enough to tell me how not to continue to be stupid."  You interpret it as a personal attack, which you respond to inappropriately.  So, why should I bother? 

I used to write long RFDs, and I had lots of reasons for that.  I wrote the gold standard for what counts for a sufficient RFD, back on DDO.  Some of you may still have that thread.  Now, my time costs money, and the rare chance I have to do something leisurely I'm going to do something I enjoy.  I do not enjoy writing RFDs for low quality debates. 

If I could just give a three sentence RFD evaluating the major points and weighting them, I'd vote more.  Surely most people couldn't and shouldn't do that, but that's all I have time to do.  However, there are likely so called voting mods (lol) who would think that wasn't enough, and I'm not going to deal with that bullshit.  

Most of you chose stupid topics for debates.  Either you're biting off more than you can chew, the resolution is vague or unclear, or you've done some other weird shit that fucks it up for everyone -- debaters and judges alike.  This is uninteresting to involve myself in.  If you want my attention, pick a topic that's interesting.  

Here are some interesting topics:

Alan Moore at DC was better than Marvel anything.

The United States should make substantial efforts to curb China's expansion in Africa.

China's ascendence places the United States at a geopolitical disadvantage.

Vladimir Putin has been bad for Russia.

Tarkovsky was a better film director than Kubrick.

Dostoevsky was a better author than Dickens.

Canada should substantially increase military expansion in the arctic.

More than anyone else, American media are to blame for Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016. 

The United States should pull out of Syria.

Bashir Al Assad should remain in power in Syria.

Bibi Netanyahu's indictment is justified.

The United States has a moral obligation to support pro-democracy efforts in Hong Kong.

The list goes on...

I can think of dozens, but you get the point.  Topics that have been beaten to death, where the political fault lines are so firmly cemented that no one is going to move on them, are not interesting.  Figure out what you think, and then be gracious enough not to inflict it on the rest of us. 

This is the one you all should be focusing on.  What does it benefit me to judge what you write?  Am I more likely to be subject to your emotional reactions, or am I more likely to be thanked?  Even if thanked, why should I bother?  Really, sell me on it.  Maybe there's something I'm missing here beyond the so called reward of simply "giving back" or whatever other bullshit you can come up with.  If so, tell me why I'm wrong.  But from where I'm standing, voting is electing to draw the short end of the stick while knowing that's what you're doing.  No thank you. 

Writing low-quality nonsense that misstates numerous facts and confuses issues is a good way to discuss misleading headlines?  No.  It's bullshit on stilts. 

It's not a good post at all.  It's an astonishingly low-quality rant of nonsense that barely rises to a level of C- work at a community college.