Well, first, I’ll admit up front that I logged off and metaphorically hid for a day after posting this, so I would not be tempted to engage in a pointless argument in the comments. And yet, I was somehow still too optimistic about what I’d find when I looked.
First point of order, this isn’t about me. I’ve been on this site a while, it should be obvious by now that I have no qualms sharing gooey personal details about myself. So. Stop making it about me. If it was about me, you’d know.
Second point of order, the pronouns assigned to the characters do not matter and I think it says more about you than me that you fixated on that. So. Stop making it about sexism. Perhaps I could have chosen some other combination of genders, but I had hoped that commenters here of all places would be egalitarian enough to see those genders as the placeholders they are.
Third point of order, the parable was never meant to reflect reality. If it seems one-sided, that’s because it is. It is meant to reflect a generalized emotional journey that I think is valid for a lot of people, of all sexes and orientations, who are too scared to speak up because they, rightly, expect to get nothing but vitriol for doing so.
Fourthly, if the parable even has a moral, it is about prostitution and modern attitudes towards prostitution and not really anything else. If you think the parable is advocating anything else you don’t like, that, again, says more about you than me. I am astounded that I have to explicitly point this out, but there is a difference between not actively helping a person and actively interfering with help reaching a person. So. Stop putting words in my mouth. We should be above that, here.
Either you want your audience to use their ability to infer (which includes imputing motives), or you don’t. (And it doesn’t matter if you don’t, because readers will.) Watch for the illusion of transparency, and make it obvious by highlighting the part that you want people to focus on. If this is a policy argument about the legality of prostitution and not a commentary on anything else, 1) post it to Omnilibrium instead of here because policy arguments about the legality of prostitution are off topic and 2) make that explicit (and even then, consider whether or not the example will distract or focus your audience).
When you get a reaction this bad, doubling down is ill-advised. It’s typically best to just cut your losses.
I had hoped that commenters here of all places would be egalitarian enough to see those genders as the placeholders they are.
If you had a modicum of sense in you as you were considering this, you would have flipped the genders. I assume you have a modicum of sense, so I must conclude you just didn’t think about it; you defaulted as much as the people you’re complaining about, because you were, in fact, thinking of a specific situation.
Your comment about the real point of the story being the immorality of the opposition to prostitution is fair, and well-supported by your story.
Your complaint about people putting words in your mouth is not. You bludgeon the reader with the metaphor, you stretch it to insane and untenable places, and then complain when readers observe that the plaintext reading of the metaphor suggests attempted rape? I’m perfectly willing to ascribe that to bad writing, but it isn’t -unfair- for somebody to ascribe it to your intent, when your intent is so heavily dumped all over the rest of the story.
I also inferred rape from the story. It was the part about how in desperation, he reached out and grabbed at her ankle. And then he was imprisoned in response to that.
It’s just a bad metaphor no matter how you explain it. It’s very contrived, it elevates sexual choices to life-and-death, and it really doesn’t illuminate anything about any of the problems it might be targeted toward.
I suspect it’s a mind-killing topic that just can’t be discussed well here, but even if you want to try, don’t use long, obtuse, pointless stories. Use either personal truths or rational analysis, so there’s something to support or discuss.
Thank you for your reply. This is not at all what I expected.
I think there’s a rule for allegories that the symbols shouldn’t be too much like the thing symbolized (in this case an allegory about sex shouldn’t use real world genders). I also recommend updating about people’s ability to interpret (especially about a fraught subject like sex) rather than complaining that they didn’t understand things the way you hoped.
This being said, I agree with you about prostitution, though more from a libertarian /sympathy for the prostitutes who should be allowed to do their work in peace than sympathy for people who have trouble finding sexual partners.
I’m not sure what the emotional journey is supposed to be. Maybe going from thinking of something as a personal problem to realizing that there’s a systemic problem?
You were downvoted to −20. It’s utterly absurd of you to try to blame people for making the obvious interpretation of your parable and then crawl back and claim you are “astounded.” Either you wrote this very poorly, and should apologize, or you are lying to try to conceal your true intention after the fact.
...oh. I was about to PM you with a personal account from the other side of the story to defend the people I thought you were accusing of not saving you, personally, at a small cost or themselves. I still want to point out that had I read your story in the past, I would have taken it for an accusation of practically murdering someone like the author and tortured myself over it.
If you think the parable is advocating anything else you don’t like, that, again, says more about you than me.
No, it just says that you don’t understand the effect of your writing or a clueless about modern culture.
The news of last weeks are about how Rossy is pro-rape because of one article he pretends to have intentend to be satirical calling for the legislation of rape on private property.
Not denouncing writing like that has a high cost for a community like this because it affects people who come to this community and read the article.
I think the best action from your end if you really claim not to intend to communicate the message that readers of your article understood would be to simply delete the article.
You feel the need to reaffirm your loyalty by denouncing (!) writings which deviate from the Party line?
The problem isn’t about the writing, it about LW’s editoral decision to publish it or not to publish it. I have no problem with the author having a blog and publishing his writing on that blog.
Once the LW community publishes it, it however becomes responsible for dealing with it.
LW’s editoral decision to publish it or not to publish it.
Ain’t no such thing. Does not exist.
You seem to be very confused about the nature of LW. It is NOT a publication where editors select some submissions for publications and so provide curated content.
Hosting a website like this does come with both legal and social responsibility for it’s content. External parties do make LW responsible for the content it hosts to the extend that it’s not explictely made clear that LW denounces it.
Hosting a website like this does come with both legal and social responsibility for it’s content. External parties do make LW responsible for the content it hosts to the extend that it’s not explictely made clear that LW denounces it.
So, Kamerad, I notice you personally have been lax in denouncing writings you—hopefully—may not want to be associated with. I trust you understand the consequences of being in the presence of… wrong ideas and not denouncing them forcefully. It really would be for the best if you were to correct that oversight on your part and properly denounce what you want to stand apart from. Using proper legalese, too, so that the proper authorities do not make any mistakes. And speaking of proper authorities, I hope you have notified them? It is good that you understand you bear “legal and social responsibility” for what happens in your presence. Do not forget your responsibility to denounce all the enemies of the people. Denounce early and often!
Are you advancedatheist? (If you’re not, this changes some things.)
Both accounts have been here for a long time and seem to have different posting styles to me (but I’m no stylometrist). The only commonality I see is interest in cryonics and incel, which doesn’t seem likely to be a unique combination.
Well, first, I’ll admit up front that I logged off and metaphorically hid for a day after posting this, so I would not be tempted to engage in a pointless argument in the comments.
That’s your problem right there. If you want people to respect you, don’t hide, fight. Attempting to apologize or beg does not earn you respect from women or SJ-goons like gjm or Comrade ChristianKl, it earns you mockery and signals that you’re someone it’s safe to beat up on.
The boy’s mistake in the story was begging rather than being assertive. And your problem here is that your immediate reaction to extremely unfair criticism by people who can be extremely charitably described as mind-killed is to apologize and attempt to say “no really I didn’t mean it”.
Attempting to apologize or beg does not earn you respect from women or SJ
You seem to pressupose a quite peculiar definition of respect. Also, you’re generalizing too much about what’s inside women’s heads.
The boy’s mistake in the story was begging rather than being assertive.
The conditions in the story were rigged so that he had no other course of action open except begging. That’s one of the 5,429,236 reasons why it fails as a metaphor.
That’s your problem right there. If you want people to respect you, don’t hide, fight.
The whole reason he wrote a parable instead of a fact-based article was hidding. Hidding was part of my critcism from the start.
And your problem here is that your immediate reaction to extremely unfair criticism by people who can be extremely charitably described as mind-killed is to apologize and attempt to say “no really I didn’t mean it”.
I don’t think saying “no really I didn’t mean it” and appologizing are the same thing. Sincerely apologizing does earn respect. Falsely pretending that you didn’t actually wanted to say what you said doesn’t earn respect.
It’s again a symptom of not wanting to communicate openly and sincerely and that’s one of the core criticisms I had from the beginning.
As far as me being SJ In the days where I actually did run a forum where I had moderator power I took the side of the right of an African to speak of homosexuality as a crime that’s legalized in some countries. I don’t have a problem with people sincerely arguing for positions that aren’t PC.
More in a “how dare you try to hide from me” kind of sense.
As far as me being SJ In the days where I actually did run a forum where I had moderator power I took the side of the right of an African to speak of homosexuality as a crime that’s legalized in some countries.
Would you have done that for someone who didn’t belong to a “more protected” category?
I don’t have a problem with people sincerely arguing for positions that aren’t PC.
I find that incredibly hard to believe given your behavior elsewhere in the comments but especially in this thread.
More in a “how dare you try to hide from me” kind of sense.
No, you get that sense because you mislabel me as SJW when I’m not.
I find that incredibly hard to believe given your behavior elsewhere in the comments but especially in this thread.
I guess that says more about your model of the world than about me. Or that the topic is heavily mind-killing.
If you read through my LW history you will find my quite civilly discussing the issue of pedophila with a person who wants to legalize it.
On Omnilibrium he have been called right-wing because of how I see the perfomance of the post-apartheid government of South Africa.
My position is that everybody should be allowed to argue any position but not that everybody should be allowed to argue any position in any way they like. The more extreme a position the more important it is that the person focus on focusing on having a fact based discussion.
No, you get that sense because you mislabel me as SJW when I’m not.
An SJW is someone who engages in certain types of behavior, and your “nice forum you got here, would be a shame if someone called it sexist”-style blackmail here was definitely SJW-behavior. You don’t get to act like a SJW and then complain when someone calls you out on it.
If you read through my LW history you will find my quite civilly discussing the issue of pedophila with a person who wants to legalize it.
So you’re willing to discuss extreme positions to your left.
The more extreme a position the more important it is that the person focus on focusing on having a fact based discussion.
The more extreme position the more trouble one can get into for attempting fact based discussion. There is in fact a long tradition of dissidents writing stories set in the past or in sci-fi worlds when it’s not safe to object directly to what’s going on. Granted, EphemeralNight is overestimating the current danger and the amount of hiding required.
Also, what do you consider an “extreme” position for purposes of this rule? Can you cite any instance where you applied this to any position that was to “extreme” left-wing?
“nice forum you got here, would be a shame if someone called it sexist”
That’s mistakes my perspective. You are likely either Eugine trying to circumvent his ban or somone without a real stake in this forum. I do care about this forum and also regularly attend LW meetups.
I know that there are woman who don’t participate on the LW forum but who do participate on meetups. Reinventing LW2.0 means shifting LW into being more welcoming to those people.
Even before reading Richard posts I predicted the post to drive away people and my prediction was accurate. Far from being mind-killed I made an accurate prediction. Most people who leave LW also don’t post publically about the reasons why the leave.
I have little to gain by calling LW sexist.
An SJW is someone who engages in certain types of behavior, and your “nice forum you got here, would be a shame if someone called it sexist”-style blackmail here was definitely SJW-behavior. You don’t get to act like a SJW and then complain when someone calls you out on it.
As a result of mind-kill you confuse the issue of what’s true from the social level of complaining and winning arguments.
As far as truth goes it’s irrational to think that a the actions in a single case determine who someone happens to be.
The more extreme position the more trouble one can get into for attempting fact based discussion.
That’s basically if you don’t know how to setup the debate. Part of my upbringing as far as having political conversations was a debating seminar by people from the Cambridge debating society who considered it important that and position can be defended.
EphemeralNight and you hide behind anonymity, and can therefore speak without much personal consequences anyway. My own real world identity is linked to this account. Richard’s also is.
It’s not good for LW to move to a point where only people who want to hide their idenity want to participate.
Also, what do you consider an “extreme” position for purposes of this rule? Can you cite any instance where you applied this to any position that was to “extreme” left-wing?
Most of the time people don’t try to make points on LW by telling stories. Can you point to a single parable that someone posted on LW that you think I should have opposed based on my standards but didn’t?
I know that there are woman who don’t participate on the LW forum but who do participate on meetups. Reinventing LW2.0 means shifting LW into being more welcoming to those people.
Would they contribute anything besides starting witch hunts. If the very existence of a single post at −19 is enough to drive them away, things don’t look good in their favor.
As far as truth goes it’s irrational to think that a the actions in a single case determine who someone happens to be.
“I only murdered someone once, I’m not a murderer.”
Well, first, I’ll admit up front that I logged off and metaphorically hid for a day after posting this, so I would not be tempted to engage in a pointless argument in the comments. And yet, I was somehow still too optimistic about what I’d find when I looked.
First point of order, this isn’t about me. I’ve been on this site a while, it should be obvious by now that I have no qualms sharing gooey personal details about myself. So. Stop making it about me. If it was about me, you’d know.
Second point of order, the pronouns assigned to the characters do not matter and I think it says more about you than me that you fixated on that. So. Stop making it about sexism. Perhaps I could have chosen some other combination of genders, but I had hoped that commenters here of all places would be egalitarian enough to see those genders as the placeholders they are.
Third point of order, the parable was never meant to reflect reality. If it seems one-sided, that’s because it is. It is meant to reflect a generalized emotional journey that I think is valid for a lot of people, of all sexes and orientations, who are too scared to speak up because they, rightly, expect to get nothing but vitriol for doing so.
Fourthly, if the parable even has a moral, it is about prostitution and modern attitudes towards prostitution and not really anything else. If you think the parable is advocating anything else you don’t like, that, again, says more about you than me. I am astounded that I have to explicitly point this out, but there is a difference between not actively helping a person and actively interfering with help reaching a person. So. Stop putting words in my mouth. We should be above that, here.
Compare these two lines:
Either you want your audience to use their ability to infer (which includes imputing motives), or you don’t. (And it doesn’t matter if you don’t, because readers will.) Watch for the illusion of transparency, and make it obvious by highlighting the part that you want people to focus on. If this is a policy argument about the legality of prostitution and not a commentary on anything else, 1) post it to Omnilibrium instead of here because policy arguments about the legality of prostitution are off topic and 2) make that explicit (and even then, consider whether or not the example will distract or focus your audience).
When you get a reaction this bad, doubling down is ill-advised. It’s typically best to just cut your losses.
If you had a modicum of sense in you as you were considering this, you would have flipped the genders. I assume you have a modicum of sense, so I must conclude you just didn’t think about it; you defaulted as much as the people you’re complaining about, because you were, in fact, thinking of a specific situation.
Your comment about the real point of the story being the immorality of the opposition to prostitution is fair, and well-supported by your story.
Your complaint about people putting words in your mouth is not. You bludgeon the reader with the metaphor, you stretch it to insane and untenable places, and then complain when readers observe that the plaintext reading of the metaphor suggests attempted rape? I’m perfectly willing to ascribe that to bad writing, but it isn’t -unfair- for somebody to ascribe it to your intent, when your intent is so heavily dumped all over the rest of the story.
Plaintext reading of the metaphor suggests attempted rape? WTF?
I also inferred rape from the story. It was the part about how in desperation, he reached out and grabbed at her ankle. And then he was imprisoned in response to that.
It’s just a bad metaphor no matter how you explain it. It’s very contrived, it elevates sexual choices to life-and-death, and it really doesn’t illuminate anything about any of the problems it might be targeted toward.
I suspect it’s a mind-killing topic that just can’t be discussed well here, but even if you want to try, don’t use long, obtuse, pointless stories. Use either personal truths or rational analysis, so there’s something to support or discuss.
It only elevates sexual choices to life-and-death if you choose to interpret it that way. I did not. I chose to interpret it as about depression.
Thank you for your reply. This is not at all what I expected.
I think there’s a rule for allegories that the symbols shouldn’t be too much like the thing symbolized (in this case an allegory about sex shouldn’t use real world genders). I also recommend updating about people’s ability to interpret (especially about a fraught subject like sex) rather than complaining that they didn’t understand things the way you hoped.
This being said, I agree with you about prostitution, though more from a libertarian /sympathy for the prostitutes who should be allowed to do their work in peace than sympathy for people who have trouble finding sexual partners.
I’m not sure what the emotional journey is supposed to be. Maybe going from thinking of something as a personal problem to realizing that there’s a systemic problem?
You were downvoted to −20. It’s utterly absurd of you to try to blame people for making the obvious interpretation of your parable and then crawl back and claim you are “astounded.” Either you wrote this very poorly, and should apologize, or you are lying to try to conceal your true intention after the fact.
I don’t think I believe everything you said in this comment :-/
...oh. I was about to PM you with a personal account from the other side of the story to defend the people I thought you were accusing of not saving you, personally, at a small cost or themselves. I still want to point out that had I read your story in the past, I would have taken it for an accusation of practically murdering someone like the author and tortured myself over it.
No, it just says that you don’t understand the effect of your writing or a clueless about modern culture.
The news of last weeks are about how Rossy is pro-rape because of one article he pretends to have intentend to be satirical calling for the legislation of rape on private property.
Not denouncing writing like that has a high cost for a community like this because it affects people who come to this community and read the article.
I think the best action from your end if you really claim not to intend to communicate the message that readers of your article understood would be to simply delete the article.
First, it’s Roissy, not Rossy. Second, it’s not Roissy at all, it’s Roosh.
What are we, in Maoist China? You feel the need to reaffirm your loyalty by denouncing (!) writings which deviate from the Party line?
The problem isn’t about the writing, it about LW’s editoral decision to publish it or not to publish it. I have no problem with the author having a blog and publishing his writing on that blog.
Once the LW community publishes it, it however becomes responsible for dealing with it.
Ain’t no such thing. Does not exist.
You seem to be very confused about the nature of LW. It is NOT a publication where editors select some submissions for publications and so provide curated content.
Hosting a website like this does come with both legal and social responsibility for it’s content. External parties do make LW responsible for the content it hosts to the extend that it’s not explictely made clear that LW denounces it.
If only there was a way to quantify the LW community’s approval or disapproval of a post submitted to it.
So, Kamerad, I notice you personally have been lax in denouncing writings you—hopefully—may not want to be associated with. I trust you understand the consequences of being in the presence of… wrong ideas and not denouncing them forcefully. It really would be for the best if you were to correct that oversight on your part and properly denounce what you want to stand apart from. Using proper legalese, too, so that the proper authorities do not make any mistakes. And speaking of proper authorities, I hope you have notified them? It is good that you understand you bear “legal and social responsibility” for what happens in your presence. Do not forget your responsibility to denounce all the enemies of the people. Denounce early and often!
Are you advancedatheist? (If you’re not, this changes some things.)
Both accounts have been here for a long time and seem to have different posting styles to me (but I’m no stylometrist). The only commonality I see is interest in cryonics and incel, which doesn’t seem likely to be a unique combination.
That’s your problem right there. If you want people to respect you, don’t hide, fight. Attempting to apologize or beg does not earn you respect from women or SJ-goons like gjm or Comrade ChristianKl, it earns you mockery and signals that you’re someone it’s safe to beat up on.
The boy’s mistake in the story was begging rather than being assertive. And your problem here is that your immediate reaction to extremely unfair criticism by people who can be extremely charitably described as mind-killed is to apologize and attempt to say “no really I didn’t mean it”.
You seem to pressupose a quite peculiar definition of respect. Also, you’re generalizing too much about what’s inside women’s heads.
The conditions in the story were rigged so that he had no other course of action open except begging. That’s one of the 5,429,236 reasons why it fails as a metaphor.
The whole reason he wrote a parable instead of a fact-based article was hidding. Hidding was part of my critcism from the start.
I don’t think saying “no really I didn’t mean it” and appologizing are the same thing. Sincerely apologizing does earn respect. Falsely pretending that you didn’t actually wanted to say what you said doesn’t earn respect. It’s again a symptom of not wanting to communicate openly and sincerely and that’s one of the core criticisms I had from the beginning.
As far as me being SJ In the days where I actually did run a forum where I had moderator power I took the side of the right of an African to speak of homosexuality as a crime that’s legalized in some countries. I don’t have a problem with people sincerely arguing for positions that aren’t PC.
More in a “how dare you try to hide from me” kind of sense.
Would you have done that for someone who didn’t belong to a “more protected” category?
I find that incredibly hard to believe given your behavior elsewhere in the comments but especially in this thread.
No, you get that sense because you mislabel me as SJW when I’m not.
I guess that says more about your model of the world than about me. Or that the topic is heavily mind-killing.
If you read through my LW history you will find my quite civilly discussing the issue of pedophila with a person who wants to legalize it.
On Omnilibrium he have been called right-wing because of how I see the perfomance of the post-apartheid government of South Africa.
My position is that everybody should be allowed to argue any position but not that everybody should be allowed to argue any position in any way they like. The more extreme a position the more important it is that the person focus on focusing on having a fact based discussion.
An SJW is someone who engages in certain types of behavior, and your “nice forum you got here, would be a shame if someone called it sexist”-style blackmail here was definitely SJW-behavior. You don’t get to act like a SJW and then complain when someone calls you out on it.
So you’re willing to discuss extreme positions to your left.
The more extreme position the more trouble one can get into for attempting fact based discussion. There is in fact a long tradition of dissidents writing stories set in the past or in sci-fi worlds when it’s not safe to object directly to what’s going on. Granted, EphemeralNight is overestimating the current danger and the amount of hiding required.
Also, what do you consider an “extreme” position for purposes of this rule? Can you cite any instance where you applied this to any position that was to “extreme” left-wing?
That’s mistakes my perspective. You are likely either Eugine trying to circumvent his ban or somone without a real stake in this forum. I do care about this forum and also regularly attend LW meetups.
I know that there are woman who don’t participate on the LW forum but who do participate on meetups. Reinventing LW2.0 means shifting LW into being more welcoming to those people.
Even before reading Richard posts I predicted the post to drive away people and my prediction was accurate. Far from being mind-killed I made an accurate prediction. Most people who leave LW also don’t post publically about the reasons why the leave.
I have little to gain by calling LW sexist.
As a result of mind-kill you confuse the issue of what’s true from the social level of complaining and winning arguments.
As far as truth goes it’s irrational to think that a the actions in a single case determine who someone happens to be.
That’s basically if you don’t know how to setup the debate. Part of my upbringing as far as having political conversations was a debating seminar by people from the Cambridge debating society who considered it important that and position can be defended.
EphemeralNight and you hide behind anonymity, and can therefore speak without much personal consequences anyway. My own real world identity is linked to this account. Richard’s also is.
It’s not good for LW to move to a point where only people who want to hide their idenity want to participate.
Most of the time people don’t try to make points on LW by telling stories. Can you point to a single parable that someone posted on LW that you think I should have opposed based on my standards but didn’t?
Would they contribute anything besides starting witch hunts. If the very existence of a single post at −19 is enough to drive them away, things don’t look good in their favor.
“I only murdered someone once, I’m not a murderer.”