[QuickTidal]

Slow Ben, on 22 October 2019 - 02:42 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 22 October 2019 - 02:30 PM, said:

Perspective:

I can see that I disagree with, say, BK from a political leanings angle...but still think decent things about him as a human, be acquainted with him on a personal level and interact about the stuff we like and enjoy chatting about...and let any political divide stay as solely THAT. A political divide, and nothing further. And I would still shake his hand and have a beer with him if I ever met him. And I would never call him a nazi, or a racist...because he isn't one...no matter his politics.

Just like I am not in the habit of disowning my family for voting against all our interests (and good sense) when they vote Conservative in Canadian elections. We can exist, love each other, be family and have WILDLY different political opinions. And one day all of this will pass.

And I think we can all just ignore Nico can't we?

TL;DR: I side with Apt, TRB, and Silencer here. In case it wasn't apparent.

I’m at work and don’t have time to read through everything. I just want to make it clear I’m referring to one member only.

And I was actually enjoying Brujahs and Worry’s discussion.

Oh for sure, I was not calling anyone out specifically. I was just stating a more broad comment on the whole idea behind political opinions and the humans behind them being things we could keep separate and be nuanced about.

Or in nico's case. Ignore. Cause I mean I feel no compunction to "discuss" anything with him. He's not operating on the same field so there's no point.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 22 October 2019 - 02:46 PM

[Abyss]

Groove is messed because i can't be bovvered sorting the above to move the political posts elsethread
JUST GO POST OVER THERE OK FFS I'M TRYING
TO EAT A BURRITO HERE CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BUSY?!?!?!?!/\|||

[Vengeance]

There is a serious disconnect between those of us who are dealing with the flood of alt right view points being accepted as main steam while we see and try to fight against the rampant abuses that are going on in this country, and those who see it far away. To a lot of the American members, especially ones who have cut off communication with families who have been lost to the fox news and the alt right box, if you don't respond to correct a false fact or blatant lie then it will pick up steam and become the new narrative. The flood that you see here is nothing to what people have to combat on the gutter mess that is FB.


The commentary on the thread was starting to be personal in nature and not discussion related it was picking up in heated context. The decision to close it was not Silencer alone. .


When you give the alt right and hate a place to say their view point and don't counter it then that legitimizes it and allows for children to be caged. That being said this forum is supposed to be a place of thought where thoughtful people post. Not rampart attacks. If the US politics thread is reopened personal attacks will not be tolerated.

[Aptorian]

**** original starting point of the current thread, posts prior to this were all moved from the Groove thread - Silencer ****

I feel like the discussion in the groove thread had almost run its course but here's a dedicated thread.

This post has been edited by Silencer: 23 October 2019 - 11:10 AM
Reason for edit: Added note reflecting posts moved to this thread in *'s

[Aptorian]

Abyss, on 22 October 2019 - 03:12 PM, said:

Groove is messed because i can't be bovvered sorting the above to move the political posts elsethread
JUST GO POST OVER THERE OK FFS I'M TRYING
TO EAT A BURRITO HERE CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BUSY?!?!?!?!/\|||

I made a dedicated thread.

https://forum.malaza...ussion-threads/

[amphibian]

I think there's not a common frame of reference between people like me and Nicodimas. He will gladly donate to Trump despite the near Nuremberg level lists of crimes, corrupt acts, and morally repugnant statements/actions that Trump and his pack of liars and con artists have done over the years because people are protesting peacefully what they say and do.

He is never going to stop being a gun rights activist - despite the school shootings, police brutality, escalated acts of domestic violence, and the spree murders. Guns = power for him. Not "instruments of death that we shouldn't really have as a whole society and no 1000 people with shotguns can stand up to cruise missiles capabilities and tanks and soldiers anyways - even if what they mostly want is to be those soldiers and point those past-individual-people weapons at brown skinned people and take their stuff and liberty".

Someone like BK, I may be able to reach a common frame. He goes to Trump rallies and voted for him, but he's also disgusted by the thievery of children from families at the border, the sexism, and seems to vaguely get that things are worsening for everyone, even if he's mostly continuing on as before in his personal world.

People are dying. Right now a lotta Kurds are dying. Immigration numbers have been dropped by two thirds across the board. SSA benefits are going to be either cut or held artificially low with increased penalties for fucking up (which is so easy to do for SSA benefits, something I helped people navigate for almost two years as an attorney). In ten years, hundreds of thousands of people will die from lack of healthcare access when we should be expanding Medicaid and Medicare to as many people as we can.

The slow starving of resources and the acts of venial corruption that this government is doing is killing enormous amounts of people years from now. It's killing people now, too. However, there's just not buy in happening from BK or D'rek that these people are bad and people who enable them like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or whoever are also doing bad things.

It's maddening. Almost everything is being done in the open and because it's not personally affecting them (bc they're white and in positions that aren't being massively affected now), they aren't buying into what I'm seeing and fighting against.

I'm half Asian and a huge chunk of my family is scared about this immigration stuff. An overlapping segment has no idea if SSA benefits will be there when they retire. Nobody goes to the doctor enough because it costs stupid amounts of money. I work in a legal job that helps people fight against some of the injustice and harm and general shitheadness, but we're drowning and our federal funding is probably going to be cut because we're "superfluous" (really, we're getting in the way of what the GOP wants - a crop of billionaires and everyone else a subservient population).

[worry]

Tbh, I'm still a little flummoxed. I thought Brujah and I were getting along well enough and both being honest, if a little frictiony about the topic at hand, and then it was already back to 'normal' in tone when the thread was locked (I was busy Saturday Pacific Standard Time but looked at some of Brujah's subsequent posts, which all seemed heartfelt and less about meta frustrations with me [which I never read as personal attacks, even if I disagreed with him], and I have to apologize to Brujah that I didn't get to respond to his points). I don't wanna speak for him, but I thought it was way less abrasive than mods are reading it and would have gone somewhere productive -- obviously gonna respect mods' decision to cut it off where it ended though, so no worries there.

Final thoughts: I guess from my POV it was a mountain out of a molehill, but if mods are plugging our interaction into a bird's eye view of broader tensions I'm not privy to, that's their call, so I'm not arguing. I can live with being perpetually flummoxed (I have so far, am I rite folks?). Anyway, that's my Official Response to what happened (in years to come, we can call it The Brujahjah) and I won't be taking any questions. Donations, however, I would split evenly with Brujah.

[amphibian]

I'm really frustrated and it's not enough to go "well you should be polite to Nicodimas and he to you". He's superficially polite to me, but the stuff he's actively supporting is killing people and breaking the planet to a point where only the rich will survive. He doesn't engage substantively with what I say.

There's not a battle to be had here, but the shit he's actively stumping for is abhorrent. At some point, the mods have to move past a platonic ideal of objectivity to "this is wrong, stop saying it or we won't let you in here".

I get that personal attacks are truly scary in terms of forums because all this is is a bunch of texts people drop to each other. But there are extremely real stakes here and "keep it civil" is very difficult to do when one side is telling me that my grievances and perceived problems do not exist or that I'm simply not big brained enough to realize the 8 dimensional chess being played by shitty people in power. That's not respecting me as a person or listening to me.

[Tiste Simeon]

Nico found me on Facebook and messaged me saying he's gone now cos he doesn't want to be around here any more. Not sure what to respond tbh.

[Slow Ben]

I don’t know what I’d say either.

Nicos cool everywhere but the Politics thread. I hate for anyone to leave the forum, but I don’t want to read alt-right propaganda either.

[Whisperzzzzzzz]

Maybe a forum about SpecFic isn't the best place for political discussion — UNLESS every political comment is required to reference an event/quote from a SpecFic book.

EDIT: more seriously, I wonder what would happen if the Discussions sub-forum was made fully anonymous. You'd still be logged in to your regular account, but posts on that forum wouldn't show usernames.

This post has been edited by Whisperzzzzzzz: 23 October 2019 - 01:06 AM

[LinearPhilosopher]

So this is why I am permanently disqualified from being a moderator but, i think having heated conversations is part of being in a democracy.

If you cannot have a civil discourse over the internet, on a forum dedicated to a fantasy book series (which as far as im aware is a neutral ground of no great significance,) how on earth can one be expected to express oneself in a level headed manner outside of the internet. I for one do not mind a little spice in my debates, and good zingers (even if ad hominem) make for great argumentative flourishes (and entertaining). I think that is important we have spaces like these so we can be open and frank about topics and what we think about people so we can get it out of the way, into the open and have honest engagement on it.

I read the last two pages while it was locked and i think the spice level was white person spicy.

This post has been edited by LinearPhilosopher: 23 October 2019 - 01:11 AM

[amphibian]

I don't like seeing people be driven off the board, but this guy put several dozen hours into not quite telling everyone they were morons for not having a ton of guns and doomsday prepping, hyping up Trump's agenda, and a very odd thread saying that people protesting or acting against extreme right white supremacist or neo-Nazi groups were super dangerous and going to hurt lots of people with quick drying cement (which was something that was a talking point of actual white supremacists and neo-Nazis).

This kind of thing unchecked means that anyone that's threatened by what he was saying knows that this isn't a place friendly to them. But it is. The series and author that provided the nucleus for this site and community is one of welcoming people of all kinds and actively fighting back against hate and bigotry in the support of empathy and stopping children from dying.

Nicodimas can exit with all the private messages he wants (I got a snarky one too). I would like to better prepare this place for current and future Malazan fans, especially those who need the support and empathy that he wasn't ever going to give.

[Andorion]

As someone who has argued with Nico in the Guns thread several times, I think the problem here is that the level of political polarization that is now manifest is something we are not really used to. Its gotten to the point that opposing political factions see each other as delusional and the facts they pull up to support their arguments are seen by the other as "fake news"
I have not closely followed the US Politics arguments but I have seen bits of it. I think for this forum at least its gotten so bad because we can no longer find any points of commonality with those we disagree with. It was not like this all the time. In the Guns thread BK once explained to me why a rifle like the AR 15 is important for those who live in rural areas where the wild pig problem is rampant. I could see where he was coming from.

But, after the events of the Ukraine scandal, the Kurdish scandal, and the ever widening flood of leaks about how Trump actually functions, I am afraid that I cannot even begin to find any points of commonality with someone who supports him. And that is because it is perfectly clear to me and has been for some time, that every single action Trump takes in office is because that action benefits him. People can talk about the evangelical Christians, the white supremacists - but I don't think Trump cares even a little bit for them. He courts their support because it benefits him to do so. If tomorrow he found that rejecting them would make him money, he would do so in a second. In Trump's universe, he is the only actual thing. Everything else exists to applaud him or to be vilified by him.

[amphibian]

You don't need an AR-15 for hog hunting. A Marlin or Remington (the classic rifles that people have used since the 1960s for deer and hog hunting) work just fine in conjunction with a pistol for anything super close.

Lots of people just like AR-15s because it's super convenient to shoot that many that fast - especially if you stick a silencer on it. But... it's not necessary. Or even cheap. The other options I talked about are usually cheaper.

If you kill more than a couple hogs at a time, how are you going to transport that to a butcher? It's killing just to kill, which isn't a great thing to do. The property destruction is a weak argument because it's entirely possible to kill one or two, scare the rest away, and eat the ones you kill. People are almost never threatened by them unless they're right on top of the hogs.

This post has been edited by amphibian: 23 October 2019 - 02:42 AM

[worry]

I can see why anyone would conclude that DJT's solipsism is paramount, above and beyond any particular ideology. And that's probably true, at the root of things. But I personally don't think his pathologies and his prejudices, in the end, are that separable. His father Fred was in the KKK and was a notoriously bigoted housing magnate. DJT came into his business and fortune through the tutelage of his father, and even took part in his racist housing practices. He is also a germaphobe, and I suppose you might conclude his racial prejudices marry deep-rooted fears with the nasty stereotypes ingrained in his family and social heritage. I'm sure his decades-long associations with organized crime has reinforced anti-black and brown tendencies. Whatever the case may be, he has given important roles in his admin to Steve Bannon, Kris Kobach, and Stephen Miller, among others, who are each not remotely covert or closeted white nationalists. His campaign promised these policy positions, and his administration has carried them out to harrowing, and as amph has put it, life-threatening effect. It's not hypothetical and we shouldn't treat it as such. That doesn't mean everyone on the board, around the globe, has to be equally invested in it of course, and I don't mean this as a counterargument to your point. Only that his narcissism/greed/self-serving nature isn't mutually exclusive with his other base attitudes.

[Morgoth]

I am not entirely sure this can all be put down to a general political polarization. Nico for instance, just a few years ago he was a doomdsday prepper conspiracy theorist whom distrusted all politicians equally and would rather be left alone to live his life in the outskirts of America. He argued and engaged in discussion and was perfectly willing to debate his worldview. In the last couple of years that all changed, gradually to some extent, and he no longer wanted to discuss his position. Instead he would post the standard fox new talking points, ridicule other posters and then leave. At no point did he engage in debate. I think it had more to do with Trumps cult of personality than the general polarization of the US.


In my view, the forum hasn't turned to the left in recent years. I have drifted somewhat to the right politically of where I was when I joined this forum as a teenager, and to me there's been little change in the overall political leanings of the DB. The majority of our active members are not american after all, we've a high concentration of Scandinavians and Brits here. There's been maybe somewhat of a rightwards drift in the European political landscape over the last ten years. Though that's arguable too. The US, on the other hand, have seen a major political shift to the right in the last decade. They were always much further to the right on the political spectrum than any European country, Bernie Sanders is the only federal politician that would even remotely fit into the Norwegian political spectrum, though he would be far to the right here. Now though, there is hardly any common ground between a mainstream American politician and the rest of the west. It is not surprising that those American members whom have followed that general rightward drift now find themselves utterly unable to find common ground with the rest of us.

[Silencer]

Posts merged from the Groove thread that kicked off this discussion.

Removed off-topic posts (sidebar about the hogs can be found in the Groove thread) and deleted comments that were not appropriate for the discussion board.

[Maark Abbott]

Morgoth, on 23 October 2019 - 08:46 AM, said:

I am not entirely sure this can all be put down to a general political polarization. Nico for instance, just a few years ago he was a doomdsday prepper conspiracy theorist whom distrusted all politicians equally and would rather be left alone to live his life in the outskirts of America. He argued and engaged in discussion and was perfectly willing to debate his worldview. In the last couple of years that all changed, gradually to some extent, and he no longer wanted to discuss his position. Instead he would post the standard fox new talking points, ridicule other posters and then leave. At no point did he engage in debate. I think it had more to do with Trumps cult of personality than the general polarization of the US.

In my view, the forum hasn't turned to the left in recent years. I have drifted somewhat to the right politically of where I was when I joined this forum as a teenager, and to me there's been little change in the overall political leanings of the DB. The majority of our active members are not american after all, we've a high concentration of Scandinavians and Brits here. There's been maybe somewhat of a rightwards drift in the European political landscape over the last ten years. Though that's arguable too. The US, on the other hand, have seen a major political shift to the right in the last decade. They were always much further to the right on the political spectrum than any European country, Bernie Sanders is the only federal politician that would even remotely fit into the Norwegian political spectrum, though he would be far to the right here. Now though, there is hardly any common ground between a mainstream American politician and the rest of the west. It is not surprising that those American members whom have followed that general rightward drift now find themselves utterly unable to find common ground with the rest of us.

I'd actually suggest that politics as a whole has lurched to the right, and that it's not perhaps unique to America. Look at the UK - centrists are derided as far left lunatics and popular opinion (for what that term is worth) has taken a swerve into right wing nationalist bents, at least over here.

[Andorion]

worry, on 23 October 2019 - 03:13 AM, said:

I can see why anyone would conclude that DJT's solipsism is paramount, above and beyond any particular ideology. And that's probably true, at the root of things. But I personally don't think his pathologies and his prejudices, in the end, are that separable. His father Fred was in the KKK and was a notoriously bigoted housing magnate. DJT came into his business and fortune through the tutelage of his father, and even took part in his racist housing practices. He is also a germaphobe, and I suppose you might conclude his racial prejudices marry deep-rooted fears with the nasty stereotypes ingrained in his family and social heritage. I'm sure his decades-long associations with organized crime has reinforced anti-black and brown tendencies. Whatever the case may be, he has given important roles in his admin to Steve Bannon, Kris Kobach, and Stephen Miller, among others, who are each not remotely covert or closeted white nationalists. His campaign promised these policy positions, and his administration has carried them out to harrowing, and as amph has put it, life-threatening effect. It's not hypothetical and we shouldn't treat it as such. That doesn't mean everyone on the board, around the globe, has to be equally invested in it of course, and I don't mean this as a counterargument to your point. Only that his narcissism/greed/self-serving nature isn't mutually exclusive with his other base attitudes.

I agree with your point about the wider implications of policies and personnel of the Trump administration and I would go on to argue that Mitch McConnell's actions prove that these are part of a broader Republican agenda that was waiting for someone to put them into effect. Also I think we can't and shouldn't rule out how utterly mentally incoherent he is, and how this makes it possible for the Republican political machine to get certain things rubber stamped.
However I maintain, that if tomorrow Trump decided that dumping the Evangelical group would benefit him personally, he would do soTrump himself cares only about himself. And if it suited him, he would dump David Duke and Mike Pence tomorrow. He is racist, but before that, he is Trumpist.